Chocolate

Overview

While chocolate is consumed across the globe, its production is highly concentrated. Production infrastructure combined with the biological needs of the cacao plant lead to favorable economic and environmental conditions on the eastern coast of Africa. The Ivory Coast produces 42% of the world supply. In aggregate, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon produce two thirds of the world supply. Not only is their supply important to the world, it makes up 40% of the Ivory Coast economy. Together, Cote D’ivoire and Ghana had a GDP of 73 billion dollars. However, this pales in comparison to the 100 billion dollars in annual sales that Nestle collects and the multinational is just one of the four main buyers of chocolate.

Global supply chains bifurcate the production and consumption of chocolate, distancing consumers from the origin of their chocolate. Increased attention to labor practices spur policy makers and companies to change the production practices. While western children scarf colorful chocolate candy bought for dollars, most chocolate farmers live below the poverty line, which is under two dollars a day. The increasing leisure dollar of China and India are increasing the pressure on the chocolate industry, forcing farmers to scramble and use ever-more desperate tactics to keep up with demand. Smallholder farmers are the dominant group of producers and their laborers are often children, some from the market economy, other are trafficked slaves. Investigative journalism from western countries drives this effort, as documentaries and articles illustrate the plight of these children. When BBC asked one boy about chocolate consumers, he said, “They are enjoying something that I suffered to make […] They are eating my flesh.” Multinational chocolate companies and American policy works to end the practice of child slave labor, dedicating tens of millions of dollars to ending the practice, yet child slave labor persists.  

 

Spotlight Issue: Child Slave Labor

Child slavery is rampant in the chocolate industry and rural children are trafficked to the ivory coast and sold to farmers. About 110,000 children work on cocoa farms, of which 10,000 are trafficked annually. It increased 21% in the 2013-14 growing season, while the price of a child slave—for transport and indefinite use—rests around 230 Euros. Their work is arduous and relies on the use of machetes to cut the pods off trees. 71% of kids were exposed to sharp tools and 37% incurred injury in these dangerous work conditions. Though the country’s Department of Labor has laws against this practice, its inability to effectively regulate cacao plantations and lack of acknowledgement of the problem render their stance ineffective. When confronted with the issue by an investigative journalist, the Chief Secretary of the Department of Labor argued the transport of children was likely for vacation. The persistent presence of kids of farms says otherwise and the multitude of groups involved in sourcing, trafficking, and buying child slaves makes it difficult to target a certain party for change or for blame. One trafficker noted that it is the plantation owners who pay them for children, so the responsibility is on the owners who drive the process rather than the participants facilitating the child slavery. It is easy to point fingers at other players in the system and hard to pin down responsibility.

Child slavery is distinct from child labor and the latter must not be misconstrued. Generally, western perspectives condone child labor of any circumstance because of the stark contrast to the culture of child rearing in developed countries. However, it is critical to value the perspectives of families who may elect to have their children work. Financial circumstance may prompt families to enter their children in the labor market in order to support their families and boost the families’ ability to pay for essentials like food. Developing world microeconomic models illuminates how households make decisions to optimize and balance consumer and producer tendencies, so they must allocate the time and labor of each family member accordingly. It is interesting to note that the chocolate industry does not align with common trends in child time allocation where female children are disproportionately taken out of school when economic conditions force families to allocate their children’s time towards labor, rather, two thirds of the child laborers in the chocolate industry are boys. Additionally the average age of male laborers is couple years older than that of female laborers. Yet, whether the children are there of their own will, the work is dangerous and the International Labor Organization, the umbrella organization for the International Progamme on the Elimination of Child Labour, condemns both slavery of children and harsh labor conditions for children. This encompasses the work of all children on cacao farms–raising questions about greater societal issues of poverty that delineate child time allocation. Not only tackling child slave labor but also the underlying conditions of poverty is critical to ending this practice.

 

Labor Policies

Stirred by learning about the issue of child labor, Senator Harkin and House Representative Engel sought to eradicate the “worst forms of child labor.” Despite their efforts, their bill to create a label for slave-free chocolate died in the senate. They redirected their efforts to the Harkin-Engel to establish “voluntary, credible, mutually accepted definitions” of slave labor for chocolate companies, dedicate resources to solving the problem, and have companies publicly announce their determination to end slave labor. The Harkin-Engel Protocol, signed in 2001, to be completed by 2005. However, the deadline was recurrently pushed pack as progress stalled and momentum on the issue dissipated. Their efforts on the consumer side made limited progress with the multinational companies driving the market, while the government in Ghana worked on the issue on a microeconomic level.

Ghana implemented a policy that compensation families to keep their kids in school rather than putting them in the labor market. Government groceries grants subsidize household income in order to relieve pressure that encouraged household to make their children work for a wage. This program aligns with cash transfer programs implemented by other countries working to increase child time allocated to school over work. Though this strategy has been very successful in other countries, it has not been as impactful in Ghana, and 2.1 million children in West Africa are still involved in the chocolate industry.

Class Resources

Fair Labor Association. 2012. Sustainable Management of Nestlé’s Cocoa Supply Chain in the Ivory Coast—Focus on Labor Standards.

 

International Labor Organization. Convention 182.

 

International Labor Organization: IPEC. 2018. Africa: Child Labor in Cocoa Fields/ Harkin-Engel Protocol. http://www.ilo.org/washington/areas/elimination-of-the-worst-forms-of-child-labor/WCMS_159486/lang–en/index.htm

Lebaron Ayers. 2013. The Rise of a ‘New Slavery’? Understanding African unfree labour through neoliberalism. Third World Quarterly. 34(5): 873–892

 

Mistrati, Miki, & Romano, Roberta. 2010. The Dark Side of Chocolate. Documentary. Denmark.

 

O’Keefe, Brian. 2016. Inside Big Chocolate Child Labor. Fortune.

The World Bank. Sept 30 2015. Global Poverty Line Update. http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/brief/global-poverty-line-faq