One week after leaving his village in neighboring Mali for the first time, Yacouba Diarra, then 14, fell into the hands of a trafficker of children and was smuggled across the border into Ivory Coast's cocoa-producing heartland.
He was with another boy of the same age, both drawn by the promise of US$135 each for a year's labor. "I did not know what kind of work I would do," Yacouba said. "I did not even know we were coming to Ivory Coast."
Once here, Yacouba was taken to a village of mud houses, miles from the nearest paved road, where he worked every day on a cocoa plantation, hacking brush with a machete and slicing ripe cocoa pods from trees. But after a year in the village, Petit Tieme, the owner paid him only US$13 -- or about US$0.04 a day, he recalled.
He walked away from his employer at Petit Tieme in late spring, he said, and settled nearby here in Logbogba, where he had chanced upon a friend from the same village back home. His only concern was to get paid his back wages.
Yacouba's story is like that of many boys and girls in west and central Africa, who leave their homes to work in foreign places, sometimes separated from their families for years. Some fall into the hands of rings of smugglers and end up exploited. Others are reputed to end up in outright slavery. But most often parents send their children away to earn money or learn a trade, in keeping with an age-old tradition.
Child labor does retain deep roots but it is hard to measure, and the line between slave trading and the bondage of poverty is sometimes unclear.
No widespread abuse
A recent weeklong journey through Ivory Coast's remotest cocoa plantations, reachable only by driving on flooded and crater-filled dirt roads and hiking for miles though dense forests, revealed only a handful of children brought here this way -- not hundreds. Almost all hired hands were adults from Mali and Burkina Faso.
Only a visit to the hundreds of cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast would be comprehensive. But the discovery of just a few foreign children during visits to dozens of plantations suggests that children who are smuggled by a stranger for profit do not make up a significant share of the cocoa work force here.
But reports of widespread abuse in Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa exporter, have generated accusations and anger, all the way to Europe and the US. In Britain, groups have tried to organize a consumer boycott of chocolate. And in Washington, the House passed a bill that proposed a voluntary labeling system identifying the origin of the cocoa in chocolate. The label would read "No child slave labor."
The use of children forced to work this way was more common just a few years ago, according to interviews with workers, plantation owners, cocoa industry officials and traffickers themselves.
Since 1998, they say, a drop in cocoa prices and political instability here have made it extremely difficult for foreigners to live in Ivory Coast. The government also pointed to the effects of a bilateral agreement, signed last September, that allows Ivory Coast to repatriate Malian children found working here.
Few hard statistics
According to a 1998 report by UNICEF's Ivory Coast office, children from Mali and Burkina Faso were systematically brought by traffickers to work here; the report contained no estimates of the number involved, effectively acknowledging that it was impossible to determine.
RSS