![]() ![]() “Over the past five years there has been an increasing call for due diligence, and companies have begun to identify risks and do something about it,” says Nick Weatherill, executive director of the International Cocoa Initiative in Geneva, an independent organization funded in part by the chocolate industry. Monday’s report is not entirely bad news, and it includes signs of progress. For example, the estimate of 1.56 million child cocoa workers is lower than the previous figure of about 2 million, the estimate in a report five years ago, which is now thought to have been a miscalculation.įaced with rising consumer concern over child labor, chocolate giants like Cargill, based in Wayzata, Minn., and the Switzerland-based Nestlé have begun ramping up programs to build schools, monitor cocoa farms, and implement awareness programs among farmers. “If these kids were white, you can bet we would not allow this to happen,” Higonnet says. Mighty Earth has spent years pushing for better cocoa-farming practices. “It is so scandalous to me,” says Etelle Higonnet, senior campaign director of Mighty Earth, an environmental organization in Washington, D.C., after studying the new report. ![]() By some estimates, many farmers earn about $1 a day-not enough to enjoy a bar of chocolate. They describe a $100 billion industry whose lucrative sales are a jarring contrast with the extreme poverty of African cocoa farmers. “We need industry to work with us, and not fight us on it,” he said.Ĭampaigners working on abuses in cocoa farming put it even more bluntly than that. Department of Labor, and Unicef, that much more needs to be done. ![]() Now chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he said in a briefing last week with the International Labor Organization, the U.S. ![]() Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York who cosponsored the 2000 deal, known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol. “The industry and others want to do the minimum amount they can get away with, because it is a pain in the neck to them,” says Rep. Yet in the minds of many, the chocolate companies’ efforts have come very late, and with reluctance. “Child labor has no place in the cocoa supply chain,” he said. “As this report shows, there are today still too many children in cocoa farming doing work for which they are too young, or work that endangers them,” foundation president Richard Scobey said in a statement as the report was released. On Monday, the World Cocoa Foundation, whose 100 member companies comprise about 80% of the industry, said it aimed to have its anti-child-labor programs reach all cocoa farmers by 2025, and that it would invest about $1.2 billion in paying farmers above the market rate for their beans. It also missed interim targets in 2005, 20. Under a 2001 protocol approved by Congress, eight of the industry’s biggest players agreed to eradicate 70% of the worst forms of child labor by 2020-a deadline it has missed. Yet just as worrying-and infuriating to child-labor campaigners-is that companies and cocoa traders have failed to resolve an issue that they committed to tackling nearly 20 years ago. (Read “ Bitter Sweets,” Fortune’s 2016 report from West Africa.) “The injuries reported by children seem to be reflecting the consequences of these hazards related to cocoa agriculture.” “A large proportion of children in cocoa agriculture carry heavy loads, undertake land clearing, and are exposed to agrochemical products,” the report says. The use of pesticides on the farms has surged 20% in five years, according to NORC, which surveyed thousands of cocoa holdings during last year’s harvest season. What’s more, about 95% of those kids face one or more significant safety hazards on cocoa farms, including using sharp machetes to hack away at pods the size of footballs, or working on land sprayed with pesticides. While the report does not fully explain the increase, it suggests that some of it might be due to the fact that cocoa production has risen about 60% over the past decade, drawing in ever-growing numbers of children as farmers race to harvest their beans. The 300-page document says the proportion of children in Ghana and Ivory Coast between the ages of five and 17 who work on cocoa farms has increased by a staggering 14 percentage points in the past decade, up from 31% to 45% of children living in the two countries. Department of Labor and written by the research institute NORC at the University of Chicago, at a cost of nearly $3.5 million. That estimate appears in a major report out on Monday, commissioned by the U.S. ![]()
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