Date of publication: February 11, 2007

Source: Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

By Jennifer O'Leary

When we think of St Valentine’s Day, many of us think of chocolate. No other food brings such sensory delight and its iconic status is unsurpassed.

When we think of St Valentine’s Day, many of us think of chocolate. No other food brings such sensory delight and its iconic status is unsurpassed. It swirls sensually around the tongue, activating our taste memory and sliding down the back of the throat.

We want to bathe in it, spread it on other food, drink it, devour it on our own, or share it with someone special. Romances are sparked from it and lovers’ arguments assuaged by it.

Roald Dahl ignited children’s fancies in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, a chocolate utopia where everything is edible. Every child dreams of it. So how was it, one little boy had never heard of chocolate? And how did one little boy, who had never heard of chocolate, come to work on a cocoa farm?

‘‘I tried to run away, but I was caught . . . as punishment, they cut my feet, and I had to work for weeks while my wounds healed. I stayed in a large room with other Malian children from a neighbouring plantation.”

This was how a young boy from Mali, said he was lured to a cocoa farm in the Ivory Coast.

This was how he described his plight on videotape to a US court. He was one of the plaintiffs in a 2005 case brought by a US advocacy organisation, the International Labour Rights Fund.

They brought a district court action against chocolate-makers Nestle, Archer Daniels Midland and another chocolate producer on behalf of children from Mali, who said they were taken from their homes and brought to the Ivory Coast as slaves.

The action was brought under two federal statutes, the Torture Victim Protection Act and the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allow victims of human rights abuses who live outside America to sue US companies for violations of international law.

‘‘Nestle, in particular, boasts in some of its public materials that it is working with farmers to eradicate child labour, yet it also says there is no child labour, and/or that it can’t possibly know. This cannot all be true,’’ asserts Terry Collingsworth, executive director of the International Labour Rights Fund. ‘‘They can’t have it both ways.”

‘‘The court has the issue under advisement,” says Collingsworth. ‘‘We have been discussing, negotiating and threatening the industry for about seven years, and finally concluded they were not going to act in good faith unless we sued them.”

Oil, gold and diamonds may be the most valuable commodities on global markets, with their production the focus of much media attention, but the lowly cocoa bean is beginning to make its mark. In December, the price of cocoa reached over $900 per tonne on the Commodities Research Bureau index - the highest point for five months. And with emerging economies such as China and India waking up to its delectable taste, the demand for cocoa is set to increase.

The pressure on the cocoa farmers to keep a hedonist world savouring the aroma and the melting smoothness of their produce is intense.

The pressure is highest in the Ivory Coast, which supplies almost half of the world’s demand for cocoa beans. The west African country was singled out for criticism in a 2002 report by the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO), which estimates there are 284,000 child labourers working on cocoa farms there.

Indeed, Nestle’s US subsidiary is currently being sued for making false claims to the public that the problem of child slave labour on its cocoa farms was being resolved.

So, before we break off our next square of chocolate, what should the hand that unwraps the gold foil know about the hand that picks the cocoa bean?

The origins of chocolate can be traced back to the ancient Maya and Aztec civilisations in Central America, who first enjoyed ‘chocolatl’, a drink made from roasted cocoa beans. The Aztecs regarded chocolate as an aphrodisiac and prized cocoa beans well above gold or silver. When the Spanish conquistadors brought the cocoa bean and the secret of chocolate-making back to Europe in the 16th century, little did they know it would mark the beginning of a long-lasting love affair between the continent and the cocoa bean.

Five centuries later and Ireland is officially a nation of chocoholics. According to a report last year by Food From Britain, Ireland has the highest per capita consumption of chocolate in the world. We manage to eat our way through 11.2kg of chocolate confectionery each, every year. This is followed by the Swiss at 10.7kg; the British are the third largest per capita consumers of chocolate at 9.8kg each, a year.

Consumption figures confirm that chocolate is a lucrative business. The all-Ireland chocolate confectionery market was worth an estimated €651.5 million in 2004, according to Mintel, increasing by 30 per cent between 1999 and 2004.

But how much do we really know about chocolate’s secret ingredient, and of those who are paying the price for our pleasure?

Cocoa trees need high temperatures, a humid climate, loose soil and just the right amount of sun and shade.

These restrictive climate conditions mean that the number of areas where the cocoa tree can flourish is small.

The region where the trees grow is called the ‘cocoa belt’ - an area of land around the equator between 20 degrees latitude north and south, which includes the Caribbean, Central America, Indonesia, Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

Estimates from the producers’ association, the International Cocoa Organisation, show that 90 per cent of all cocoa is produced by smallholders on farms less than five hectares in size.

A high percentage of the farms at the forefront of the world’s cocoa production are concentrated in the Ivory Coast. The country became an independent nation in 1960, under the leadership of Felix Houphouet-Boigny. He encouraged cocoa production and invited workers from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea to come to the Ivory Coast. By 1965, half the workforce was made up of foreigners, and cocoa production had become a major activity.

In the late 1980s, however, the Ivory Coast’s economy suffered due to cocoa prices falling, which resulted in a surge in unemployment and high inflation.

Ivorians began to resent the large foreign presence, which accounted for up to a third of the population. Houphouet-Boigny eventually lost power and the country continued to descend into chaos after his death in 1993.

Since September 2002, the Ivory Coast has been divided into northern and southern halves, with the rebels, the New Forces, fighting the national army for overall control.

The rebels accuse successive governments of discriminating against northern Muslims and those of foreign origin. Yet, despite more than half a decade of fighting and failed peace deals, the Ivory Coast continues to supply 40 per cent of the world’s cocoa bean needs.

The industry’s success depends on the hundreds of thousands of child labourers at work on cocoa farms - children whom the ILP found to be ‘‘either involved in hazardous work, unprotected or unfree, or have been trafficked’’.

In 2004, French-Canadian journalist, Guy-Andre Kieffer, disappeared in the Ivory Coast while investigating allegations of child trafficking in the cocoa trade. According to the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, Kieffer was threatened at least twice by people close to the government before he disappeared. Local media reported that he was bundled into a car by uniformed men from a supermarket parking lot in Abidjan. He was never seen again.

‘‘Guy-Andre Kieffer was murdered because he knew too much about cocoa,” says Canadian journalist Carol Off, who travelled to the Ivory Coast to pick up Kieffer’s trail.

‘‘I was shocked at the indifference of Ivorians to the plight of these children,” says Off, speaking from her home in Toronto.

‘‘They have used this immigrant labour force for so long and profited so much from them, but are indifferent to the use of children in these numbers and in this way.”

The ILO reported that many child labourers in the Ivory Coast came from impoverished neighbouring countries such as Mali and Togo. ‘‘Parents often sell their children in the belief that they will find work and send earnings home,” according to the ILO.

‘‘In the Ivory Coast alone, nearly 12,000 of the child labourers had no relatives in the area, suggesting they were trafficked.”

Off questioned police in Mali as to what happened to the child labourers once they had grown up and served their use on the farms. ‘‘Quite often, they would discover that many of the criminals they arrest would have been child labourers in the Ivory Coast.

Their sense of family and connection had been destroyed from years of living apart from anyone that cared for them,” she says.

Off was told by the Canadian embassy in the Ivory Coast not to mention Kieffer’s name during her investigations.

She says she also received threats from officials there. ‘‘It came in the form of: ‘Why are you asking these questions, don’t you know what happened to the last person?’” she says.

Off describes one chilling moment when she was speaking with a senior cocoa boss.

‘‘During the interview, the person pulled up the tablecloth and said: ‘Is he under here? Is he over there? Don’t forget what happens to people who ask these questions.’

‘‘The threat level in an official environment in the Ivory Coast is so much more menacing than what you encounter in the hinterland, where you are dealing with drugged soldiers with guns.”

For Off, the irony of her investigation was all too apparent.

‘‘To western consumers, chocolate is the stuff of childhood delights, but here I was in the Ivory Coast investigating crime, corruption and a mafia structure in the administration of cocoa.”

At the turn of the century, US senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Elliott Engel spearheaded talks with the Chocolate Manufacturers Association and the World Cocoa Foundation that resulted in an agreement being signed, in 2001, to better identify and address abusive child labour practices in the cocoa-growing areas of West Africa. The system, called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, was supposed to be put in place by July of 2005.

Two years on, the implementation date has not been met.

However, ‘Big Chocolate’ claims it is on the offensive.

The British chocolate manufacturing trade association - the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Association (BCCCA),whose members include Nestle, Cadbury Schweppes and Masterfoods - says it has been tackling accusations of child labour and poor working conditions in places like the Ivory Coast and Ghana.

‘‘Cocoa thrives on small plots, and small family farms are the basis of the cocoa industry.

“[This] is a challenge when monitoring and tracking labour practices,” says Alison Ward of the BCCCA. ‘‘Children do help out on the family farm, but we would obviously define ‘helping out on the family farm’ as different to the worst forms of child labour as described by the ILO Convention 182.”

The convention sets an international legal standard to protect children from extreme forms of exploitation, such as slavery, prostitution and pornography, and to halt the use of children for illicit activities and hazardous work which are likely to harm their health, safety or morals.

‘‘We want to ensure children are not working on the family farm at the expense of their schooling or if they are helping out, they are not exposed to danger. We believe every child has a right to a childhood,” says Ward.

The BCCCA has drawn up a certification system that will measure labour conditions on cocoa farms and drive improvement in labour practices and related areas. ‘‘The aim is to cover 50 per cent of the cocoa-growing areas of Cote d’Ivoire [Ivory Coast] and Ghana by 2008,” says Ward.

Until either system is implemented, there is scant protection out there for the child labourers of the Ivory Coast.

In the meantime, a 2002 International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) established by trade unions, NGOs and confectionery associations is working with governments of cocoa-producing nations to ‘‘oversee and sustain efforts to eliminate the worst forms of child labour and forced labour, in the growing and processing of cocoa beans and their derivative products’’, according to the ICI.

Meanwhile, the global cocoa and chocolate industry states it has long-term commitment to the social and economic development of cocoa farming communities and is implementing a number of programmes that focus on improving labour standards and the sustainability of the cocoa sector in west Africa. But for some, it’s too little, too late.

Rights organisations have to be doubly careful that anything they do to address the problem of child labour will not, in turn, create more problems for African farmers.

According to Off, child trafficking is a result of the meagre price cocoa farmers are paid for their crops. ‘‘They are using child labour because what they get for their beans is not enough to pay [adult workers],” she says.

A 2002 study by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), found that the average yearly wage for cocoa growers in West Africa ranged fromUS$30 to $110.

Farmers in west Africa suffered a drop in wages following deregulation of agriculture there, which led to the abolition of commodity boards. The cooperatives had given farmers access to bean price information so they could negotiate collective crop prices for themselves.

Without regulation, small farmers were free to cut costs when cocoa prices dropped.

According to Off: ‘‘What’s missing now since it has all been dismantled is a structure that would give them the collective ability to negotiate better prices. If they could get a reasonable price for their beans, a lot of the problems we are seeing would not exist.”

With the issue of blood diamonds currently prominent on the agenda, and an increasing focus on the consequences of western consumers’ purchasing power, is ethical fatigue beginning to supersede our consumption decisions?

According to Off, our purchasing choices should be made at a political level and not in the supermarket.

‘‘I can’t tell you what the right consumer choice is, but I can tell you what the right citizen choice is: no country should be allowing the import of goods made with labour that is being abused, children or anyone,” she says. ‘‘What spooks big chocolate companies more than anything is that there might be legislation that says you cannot import cocoa unless you can prove that children were not abused in the course of making it.”

Off’s damning findings on the cocoa trade in the Ivory Coast have provoked no response from any chocolate companies. ‘‘The silence is deafening,” she says. ‘‘I can never forget the faces of the children I met in the Ivory Coast. As they were picking, I asked them: what do we do with these beans? They had no idea, they had never heard of chocolate, never tasted it and they never will. They are paying the price, not me.”

Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet, by Carol Off, is published by Random House Canada at US$30 (around €23).