Child slavery and chocolate: All too easy to find across the Ivory Coast of Africa
33 replies, posted
[QUOTE]
[I]In "Chocolate's Child Slaves," CNN's David McKenzie travels into the heart of the Ivory Coast to investigate children working in the cocoa fields. [/I]
Daloa, Ivory Coast (CNN) - Chocolate’s billion-dollar industry starts with workers like Abdul. He squats with a gang of a dozen harvesters on an Ivory Coast farm.
Abdul holds the yellow cocoa pod lengthwise and gives it two quick cracks, snapping it open to reveal milky white cocoa beans. He dumps the beans on a growing pile.
[B]Abdul is 10 years old, a three-year veteran of the job.
He has never tasted chocolate.[/B]
During the course of an investigation for CNN’s Freedom Project initiative - an investigation that went deep into the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast - a team of CNN journalists found that child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife in an industry that produces some of the world’s best-known brands.
It was not supposed to be this way.
After a series of news reports surfaced in 2001 about gross violations in the cocoa industry, lawmakers in the United States put immense pressure on the industry to change.
“We felt like the public ought to know about it, and we ought to take some action to try to stop it,” said Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who, together with Rep.
Eliot Engel of New York, spearheaded the response.[B] “How many people in America know that all this chocolate they are eating - candies and all of those wonderful chocolates - is being produced by terrible child labor?”[/B]
But after intense lobbying by the cocoa industry, lawmakers weren’t able to push through a law. What they got was a voluntary protocol, signed by the
heads of the chocolate industry, to stop the worst forms of child labor “as a matter of urgency.” One of the key goals was to certify the cocoa trade as child-labor free.
[B]“It was meant to achieve the end of child slave labor in cocoa fields,” Engel said.
It didn’t.[/B]
UNICEF estimates that nearly a half-million children work on farms across Ivory Coast, which produces nearly 40% of the world’s supply of cocoa. The agency says hundreds of thousands of children, many of them trafficked across borders, are engaged in the worst forms of child labor.
A recent study by Tulane University says the industry’s efforts to stop child labor are “uneven” and “incomplete” and that 97% of Ivory Coast’s farmers had not been reached. But the industry’s main representative in the country disagrees with the assessment.
“I think the situation has improved exponentially,” said Rabola Kagohi, country director for the International Cocoa Initiative, the chocolate industry’s answer to fighting child labor and trafficking. “Today, the message is physically getting through.”
Kagohi works out of a basement office with one other permanent employee.
“There are some results,” he said. “I wish that you had spoken to some planters.”
None of the farmers CNN spoke to in the heart of the cocoa production region said they had ever been reached by the International Cocoa Initiative, the
government or chocolate companies about child trafficking.Children such as Abdul don’t know anything about protocols or certification. All they know is work.
When Abdul’s mother died, a stranger brought him across the border to the farm. Abdul says all he’s given is a little food, the torn clothes on his back, and an occasional tip from the farmer. [B]Abdul is a modern child slave.[/B]
And he is not the only youngster working in his group.
[B]Yacou insisted he is 16, but his face looks far younger.[/B]
“My mother brought me from Burkina Faso when my father died,” he said.
Scars crisscross Yacou’s legs from a machete. He can’t clear grass in the cocoa fields without cutting himself. During harvest season, he works day after day hacking the cocoa pods.
The emotional scars run much deeper.
[B]“I wish I could go to school. I want to read and write,” he said. But Yacou hasn’t spent a single day in school, and he has no idea how to leave the farm.[/B]
“It makes me angry,” Engel said. As far as he’s concerned, the chocolate companies haven't done enough.
“They are working with us, and we are glad that they are working with us. But they could do better.”
One of the major players in the Ivory Coast cocoa trade is, not surprisingly, the Ivorian government. Although the country has cornered a vast chunk of a lucrative market, it is considered one of the world’s poorest by any measure.
But the government leadership blames politics and war for the problems in the cocoa industry.
[B]“Thirty years of political instability caused a lot of damage to our economy generally, and to the agricultural sector particularly, and more specifically to the cocoa industry,” said Ivory Coast’s minister of agriculture, Sangafowa Coulibaly. “Unfortunately, these years have been lost.”[/B]
After an attempted coup in 2002, the country was split in half and kept from all-out civil war by the United Nations. There was protracted violence after the last disputed presidential elections, when then-President Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede.
With the new government of Alassane Ouattara in charge, the government says it can now put much-needed reforms in place.
[B]“Things can only get better,” Coulibaly said. “The main reason is that today, the political crisis is behind us, the armed conflict is behind us.”
But many observers believe that a new government won’t make it a priority to stop slavery in the cocoa fields.[/B]
And with peace, traffickers are free to do their work again. U.N. officials told CNN that the Ivory Coast conflict actually helped slow down trafficking because people were too afraid to move across borders.
[B]Contrary to the promises of action, CNN’s investigation could only find promises. And those promises are empty to children like Abdul and Yacou.[/B]
[/QUOTE]
Source: [url]http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/19/child-slavery-and-chocolate-all-too-easy-to-find/?hpt=hp_bn2[/url]
In the US, the clothes you wear were from child labor in China while the junk food you eat was made by child slaves in Africa.
I wonder what had happend if he didn't get to the farm, food and some tip sounds like a good deal even when your parents has died.
I'm pretty sure the countries won't give a fuck since cacao is one of few major export. Western big businesses don't care either money is money.
I will already have forgotten this next time i eat chocolate & so will you. :suicide: We are horrible people.
[QUOTE=Sexy Eskimo;34335068]I wonder what had happend if he didn't get to the farm, food and some tip sounds like a good deal even when your parents has died.
I'm pretty sure the countries won't give a fuck since cacao is one of few major export. Western big businesses don't care either money is money.
I will already have forgotten this next time i eat chocolate & so will you. :suicide: We are horrible people.[/QUOTE]
I know I'm not going to forget. My conscious still kicks in when I eat steak or pork because of all the stories vegetarians have told to me at school.
And this is worse.
[quote]“I wish I could go to school. I want to read and write,” he said. But Yacou hasn’t spent a single day in school, and he has no idea how to leave the farm.[/quote]
oh god...i think i'm gonna go lay down for a while
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;34334913]In the US, the clothes you wear were from child labor in China [/QUOTE]
What I'm about to say, is not a popular stance on this issue, and I completely understand why it isn't, but:
Mainly, in areas where clothing-related child labor happens, children do have to work so the family manages to eat.
For children, there's only 2 things they can do at such a place: Work at a sweatshop, or prostitution.
On the big picture, the sweatshop pays more, and you don't lose your anal virginity when you're 7-years old while getting STDs from foreigners that are over 50-years old.
Sure, it's terrible, and it'd be great if we had skilled adult workers to do the work instead, but it's not going to happen due to capitalism and greed.
Fuck forcing the kids to harvest cocoa beans though, they usually fucking die before they reach adulthood due to that shit.
[QUOTE=Lazor;34335207]oh god...i think i'm gonna go lay down for a while[/QUOTE]
you should eat some chocolate to forget about it
Jesus fucking christ
If it wasn't official before: Africa: the fucked up continent.
Hopefully we can find a way to modify cocoa beans so they can be less labor intensive.
Obviously I hope we can fix Africa itself as well, but recreating the cocoa bean would be easier.
[I]That's[/I] how fucked up Africa is.
I always wanted to taste human suffering. Now I realize I've been tasting it for a while, [i]and it's delicious[/i].
[QUOTE=ExplodingGuy;34335312]I always wanted to taste human suffering. Now I realize I've been tasting it for a while, [i]and it's delicious[/i].[/QUOTE]
the chocolate is even more delicious when the cocoa is mixed with the sorrowful tears of malnourished african children and then baked into small squares
The rich and healthy prosper off the poor and weak. Such a sad cycle.
What a heartwarming tale of the the positive effects of hands-off government... Wait, sorry, thought I was Pepin there for a second.
[QUOTE=Mingebox;34335457]What a heartwarming tale of the the positive effects of hands-off government... Wait, sorry, thought I was Pepin there for a second.[/QUOTE]
Ron Paul 2012
:v:
Kidding.
I watched a wonderful short documentary about this issue, [b]The Dark Side of Chocolate[/b]
[url]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1773722/[/url]
Narrated by Agent 47 (David Bateson)!
Good thing here in the US we don't eat chocolate, we eat Hersheys.
You can get chocolate that is fair trade though
[QUOTE=cecilbdemodded;34335834]Good thing here in the US we don't eat chocolate, we eat Hersheys.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, kind of like how we don't eat meat, we eat McDonald's.
While it's sad that this happens, those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world look over these sorts of things on an everyday basis, some of us take these things as a given, I believe we all do at some point or another and will continue to do so. We like things cheap, we like things easily available and to make it so a poorer less fortunate country simply becomes the developed worlds 'bitch'.
[QUOTE=Moose;34335392]the chocolate is even more delicious when the cocoa is mixed with the sorrowful tears of malnourished african children and then baked into small squares[/QUOTE]
or when the chocolate is imbued with their dying breath! Hershey's Air Delights!
Meat always taste better since i know something died to feed me.
Not sure about chocolate and slaving though... that's just horrible.
[QUOTE=Sexy Eskimo;34336552]Meat always taste better since i know something died to feed me.
Not sure about chocolate and slaving though... that's just horrible.[/QUOTE]
The tears make it even more delicious.
The question is why can I buy chocolate but not a child slave?
Their tears add a nice hint of salt.
[QUOTE=cecilbdemodded;34335834]Good thing here in the US we don't eat chocolate, we eat Hersheys.[/QUOTE]
Hersheys is horrible, I remember it tasting of sick.
[QUOTE=ExplodingGuy;34335312]I always wanted to taste human suffering. Now I realize I've been tasting it for a while, [i]and it's delicious[/i].[/QUOTE]
So now you realize that.
[QUOTE=carcarcargo;34339380]Hersheys is horrible, I remember it tasting of sick.[/QUOTE]
They literally sour the milk they put in their chocolate before they add it, you know.
How weird I am eating chocolate right now.
Tastes quite good. What am I supposed to do? If I don't eat the chocolate, someone else will. It changes nothing.
Atleast I can respect the children for their hard work by eating the product.
[QUOTE=Lambeth;34335893]You can get chocolate that is fair trade though[/QUOTE]
Most of the chocolate here has a fair trade label on it. Though a lot of it's kinda expensive if you want the good-tasting stuff like Lindt and Green & Black's.
[QUOTE=Cone;34339845]Though a lot of it's kinda expensive if you want the good-tasting stuff like Lindt and Green & Black's.[/QUOTE]
Good stuff? Green & Blacks tastes like eating particle board.
[QUOTE=Xenocidebot;34340918]Good stuff? Green & Blacks tastes like eating particle board.[/QUOTE]
Don't know if G&B sell different stuff over in the US but over here their chocolate is delicous.
Oompa Loompas
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.