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Blood Chocolate, Bloody Valentine
Pacific Free Press
February 7, 2008
By Christian Parenti
If you buy chocolate this Valentine's Day, chances are much of it was made with child labor. West Africa produces 70% of the world's cocoa supply -- the raw ingredient of chocolate.
Fully 40% of the world's cocoa comes from one country, Cote D’Ivoire.
And in Cote D’Ivoire, grinding poverty, violence and child labor are epidemic.
This isn't supposed to be the case. For seven years there has been a much ballyhooed industrial agreement in place, designed to stop the exploitation of children in the chocolate industry.
Buying chocolate for your lover on Valentine's Day or just your own chocolate "fix" is likely a purchase of human misery. Just like "blood diamonds" and illegal timber, the cocoa trade of Africa is mired in exploitation -- of children -- war, and corrupt profits by big business.
Almost ten years ago, a series of journalistic exposés revealed that cocoa from war-torn West Africa was being made by impoverished children. Cocoa had become another “conflict resource” like “blood diamonds” and illegal timber.
The crop's wealth fueled local gangsters, warring militias, and transnational corporations like Cargill, Archers Daniel Midland, and Barry Callebaut.
The “blood chocolate” controversy led to the Harkin-Engel protocol, a voluntary, self-policing pact designed by the chocolate industry with the help of two American politicians -- Senator Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa and Congressman Eliot Engel (D) of New York.
The protocol was supposed to eliminate child labor in the cocoa industry by 2008. Some NGO players -- like the unseemly media-hound Kevin Bales of “Free The Slaves” -- hail the protocol as the model for addressing poverty and exploitation in developing economies. Bales would like to see similar protocols in other industries. Alas that is a ridiculous idea -- it would do nothing to improve workers' standard of living.
In autumn of 2007, I traveled through Cote D’Ivoire’s cocoa belt for two weeks with a photographer. What we found suggests that the high-minded rhetoric of the Harkin-Engle protocol has not been matched by real efforts on the ground. The protocol is at best a failure, at worst a pile of sordid lies.
We found numerous examples of child labor: Working kids are everywhere. We found them literally walking down main roads carrying pesticides and toiling in cocoa groves with machetes during the middle of school days. Some children were scarred from work-related injuries; one child had a bandaged shin from a recent machete blow. Most were totally illiterate, living in mud-floored shacks with no access to medicine.
But the cheap cocoa they produce helps make the owners of Cargill and other foreign firms very rich: Last year, Cargill made profits of $2.34 billion -- up 36 percent from the year before.
One child we interviewed was only seven. His name is Sami. He doesn’t go to school. “I cannot afford the fees,” explained his father Otou Sery as we lingered on a dirt road near the village of Le Ssiri. To eat, Sami must work.
We also discovered examples of large foreign corporations, including Minnesota-based Cargill, violating Ivorian law in several ways, including illegally jailing cocoa farmers who had fallen into debt. One of the people jailed on orders of Cargill was a young man, Lucien Adje, who had been the accountant for a co-op called CEVACO.
"They took me to San Pedro, and put me in a small cell," says Adje.
"You had to do everything in one place -- you know, urinate, defecate. I couldn’t eat much. It was so filthy." Adje’s arrest was illegal -- in Ivory Coast debtors can’t be jailed, only their collateral can be taken. But as one farmer explained, "In Cote D’Ivoire, the illegal is normal."
We also found that Cargill and other foreign exporters were operating illegal warehouses and cocoa buying stations deep in the interior. This is considered unfair competition against the small Ivorian firms. Cargill does it anyway and the government looks the other way.
The Harkin-Engels protocol works through the International Cocoa Initiative, a Geneva-based NGO. The ICI in turn works on the ground in Côte d'Ivoire through an NGO called MESAD (Movement for Education, Health and Development) which provides accommodation and education to homeless street children. But when we visited MESAD, the director explained that no children from the cocoa sector stay at the shelter, and that the ICI has in the past supported only eight underage former cocoa workers who lived at the shelter for periods of between one and four months. MESAD’s facilities are a squalid mess, smelling of urine. A few filthy children slept on the concrete floors.
The real solution here would involve robust government action -- both in the United States and in Cote d'Ivoire. But the government of Ivory Coast is considered one of the most corrupt in the world. Much of the taxes collected from the cocoa industry is simply stolen. It is unrealistic to think the government of Côte d'Ivoire will take on the gigantic agricultural companies.
What needs to happen is for governments in rich countries to start imposing standards on the lawless chocolate industry. It is the responsibility of politicians in Europe and America to stand up to their candy industries -- which is to say their campaign contributors.
Christian Parenti is an investigative journalist and scholar. His most recent book is The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004), an account of the US occupation in Iraq. Parenti reports from Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
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