Tuesday, July 30, 2002


usaid report on chocolate labor in ivory coast released

long-time readers know that i have spent waay too much time discussing the use of child slave labor on cocoa plantations in west africa. many people around the world were concerned about this problem, and this concern led this year to the chocolate industry creating a foundation for the rescue of child slaves. also the chocolate industry has signed an agreement with several west african governments in a bid to end all forms of abusive child labor by 2005.

it's a complex problem. for example, who's a child slave? if your impoverished parents feel forced to sell you to feed the rest of the family, are you a slave? i would say so, but others, citing an african culture of indentured child labor, did not! if a child-trafficker abducts you away from home without you or your family's consent and sells you to the plantation owner, are you then slave? (everyone seems to agree on this one! )

not only was there wrangling on who is a child slave, there was also doubt on just how many there were. the bbc visited the african cocoa fields and discovered many children in forced servitude. yet others said child slaves were rare. the government development agency, usaid, undertook a formal study to understand the scope of the problem. and this study has now been released.

usaid finds that there are some 284,000 child workers on african cocoa farms, of which 2,500 fit the "kidnapped and trafficked" definition of slave. this is much lower than the estimates of many activists, who had often used numbers around 15,000.

while having better numbers may bring us a sigh of relief, they leave the biggest question: if regional poverty and children's rights are not addressed on a high level by african governments and unicef when 2005 rolls around, isn't there the danger that former child chocolate slaves/indentured laborers will just be sent out to the factories by the parents who sold them in the first place? does this agreement between the chocolate industry and the african governments actually solve the problem, or just move it around to someplace slightly less visible?

posted by fortune | 6:47 PM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments