Field schools for West African cocoa farmers have been started by international cocoa and chocolate manufacturers to combat child labour.
A coalition of companies and industry bodies is running pilot adult-education programmes in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria and other countries to help small farmers improve their social and economic position, thereby making it less attractive for them to use child labour.
The teaching includes sessions on labour issues, crop husbandry, forming co-operatives, gathering market information and using the internet to improve the price farmers get.
Frans Roselaers, the International Labour Organization’s director on eliminating child labour, said the schools were ‘a spectacular development’ and would be ‘a model for other industries’.
However, the programme has already hit problems in the world’s largest cocoa-producing country, Cote d’Ivoire, where government forces and dissident groups have been fighting.
The cocoa industry aims to concentrate on running schools in fairly stable areas of the country and may use radio to reach farmers elsewhere.
About 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa is grown on West Africa’s estimated 1.5million cocoa farms, which on average are smaller than seven hectares. ‘The idea is to focus our resources on the ground, at the individual farm level,’ said John Rowsome, president of the Confectionery Manufacturers Association of Canada, one of the coalition members. Rowsome said the schools would be the ‘focal point’ of the industry’s work to tackle the economic, social and environment problems of West African cocoa farming.
The industry believes that by incorporating labour issues into a ‘wider suite of learning’ on agriculture, farmers will adopt better practices on child labour.
An independent industry-commissioned study by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture last year concluded that many farmers used children for work because productivity and earnings were low. The study said the 284,000 children thought to work on West African cocoa farms usually did so with their families.
Among companies involved in the field schools are Cadbury Schweppes, Ferrero, Hershey Foods, Kraft Foods, Mars and Nestle. Industry bodies include the Association of the Chocolate, Biscuit and Confectionery Industries of the European Union and the Chocolate Manufacturers Association of the USA.
Anti-Slavery International, a non-governmental organization that has campaigned on child labour in the cocoa industry, said the field schools initiative was ‘sensible’ and well thought-out, but that deeper measures were also needed.
‘The overall industry approach has been pretty good since these issues blew up two years ago,’ said director David Ould. ‘However, one of the biggest problems behind all this is the commodity market in cocoa, which does not guarantee a stable income for farmers. We’d like to see some kind of commitment to pay farmers a minimum price for their cocoa.’