Chocolate manufacturers in Europe and the US have come together to produce a strategy to tackle child slave labour in the West African cocoa industry.
The strategy revolves around an independent social audit of cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana that began last month and will finish by the end of 2001.
The audit will be followed by action to cut out supplies from farms found to be using child labour or child slave labour, plus long-term work to set up a cocoa monitoring and certification regime by 2005.
The strategy has been developed by trade associations representing some of the world’s biggest chocolate firms, including Cadbury Schweppes, Hershey Foods, Mars and Nestle. Among those to have signed up are the UK-based Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate & Confectionery Alliance (BCCCA), the International Cocoa Organization, the European Cocoa Alliance and the US-based Chocolate Manufacturers Association.
Around 3000 farms of various sizes will be audited during the autumn cocoa harvest by a team of human rights, labour and research experts supplied by the International Labor Organization’s office on child labour and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.
Although the industry will fund the survey, which aims to gauge the extent of child labour, chocolate firms say they will have no direct involvement in the study because they want the results to be produced independently. The results will be made public and then, say the trade associations, acted upon.
A Channel 4 television programme in the UK last year alleged widespread use of child slaves on cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire, where 40 per cent of the world’s cocoa is grown (EP2, issue 6). After the Ivorian government said it had uncovered clandestine child trafficking in June this year, the industry produced a document called the Harkin Protocol setting out the strategy it is now following.
The protocol, devised by US senator Tom Harkin and signed by the trade associations and various non-governmental organizations in September, sets out a timetable for action beginning with this year’s social audit and leading to the establishment, by July 2005, of a method to certify publicly that cocoa used in chocolate products ‘has been grown under appropriate labour conditions’.
BCCCA admits certification will be ‘a huge task’ – there are 600,000 cocoa farms in Cote d'Ivoire alone. But it says one key element will be to encourage the farmers to form co-operatives ‘in the hope this will provide greater opportunities for establishing appropriate working practices’.
The Harkin Protocol has been endorsed by a range of bodies including the Ivorian government, trade unions and the human rights groups Free the Slaves and the Child Labor Coalition.
Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves said: ‘This is a step forward to [the companies] accepting responsibility. It’s the difference between the rhetoric of saying we are global citizens and actually being global citizens.’
The cost of the programme is thought to be £1.38million ($2m).