Companies’ unfair cocoa pricing contributes directly to child labour, says report
New research connects chocolate industry profits to hazardous child labour, the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking is launched, and a UN report highlights the violations committed against conflict-affected children.
The prices chocolate companies pay for cocoa are so low that farmers often cannot hire adult workers and instead must rely on their children or, in some cases, trafficked children, to carry out the labour of cocoa cultivation, according to a new report. In its research, Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL) found that cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana still earn far below a living income, hazardous child labour remains common, and child trafficking still persists despite efforts by West African governments to combat it.
In 2022, chocolate companies brought in US$206 billion in revenue, and the industry is projected to generate as much as US$263 billion by 2030, yet cocoa farmers often earn far less than last year’s World Bank poverty threshold of US$2.15 per day. The prices paid by companies are so low that hazardous child labour is prevalent, with young children – including eleven- and twelve-year-olds – walking on roads, using machetes to cut down and open cocoa pods, facing exposure to pesticides, and carrying heavy loads, say the authors.
According to an October 2020 report by the U.S. Department of Labor, published by NORC at the University of Chicago, there are currently 1.56 million children engaged in child labour in the cocoa sector across Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. About 95 per cent of these children had engaged in at least one form of hazardous labour in the previous year. Despite companies promising for more than twenty years to end child labour in the sector, its prevalence in agricultural households in both the Ivorian and Ghanaian cocoa sectors rose by 14 percentage points over ten years, from 31 per cent in 2008/09 to 45 per cent in 2018/19. Moreover, children were exposed to pesticides at higher rates than they had been just a few years earlier.
Exploitation also affects hired workers, who remain some of the most invisible members of the cocoa supply chain, with some reports putting their pay at around one dollar per day. Without more data on the number of workers, their pay and their backgrounds, they will continue to be invisible actors, overlooked in conversations about the price of cocoa or who suffers because of the low price companies pay, the report says. More information on who these workers are and how much they earn is essential to calculating a fair price for cocoa, advocating on behalf of hired workers, and fighting for a fair cocoa industry for all workers.
CAL’s researchers visited nine cocoa-growing villages across Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana – the two West African nations that collectively produce two-thirds of the world’s cocoa – and, in each one, farmers and workers spoke about companies’ failure to pay the Living Income Differential (LID), a government-mandated price increase designed to ensure farmers receive a higher price for their cocoa. Furthermore, cocoa farmers face other existential threats which put even more pressure on their budgets, including swollen shoot disease, which destroys cocoa trees, the infringement of illegal gold mining on or near their land, and the flight of young people into urban areas.
The report recommends that companies must go beyond the government-mandated price floor to ensure farmers are paid a living income – suggested by farmers to be triple the current rate – and that this full amount reaches them. Companies must also establish long-term contracts at fixed prices with cocoa farmers to mitigate their risk of economic precarity and indebtedness, which both contribute to creating conditions of forced labour; long-term contracts distribute risk to supply chain actors who are better situated to absorb it, resulting in greater stability across the supply network. And companies must provide full and public transparency and traceability down to the farm level in every country from which they source, the authors say.
Meanwhile, the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana must continue to leverage their market power to better regulate companies, and push them to pay the LID and move towards paying a living income. They should also work with the Nigerian and Cameroonian governments to ensure that companies pay a fair price to all cocoa producers in West Africa, the report suggests.
Here’s a round-up of other noteworthy news and initiatives:
Last week saw the launch of the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, an international initiative led by former British prime minister Theresa May; the commission aims to exert high-level political leverage to restore momentum towards achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 to eradicate forced labour and end modern slavery and human trafficking. The launch follows a 2022 scoping study funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which found a compelling need for establishing such an initiative.
The most recent Annual Report of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict highlights the grave violations committed against children during the period of August 2022 to July 2023, emphasizing the risks of displacement, recruitment by armed groups, abduction, sexual violence, and trafficking in conflict-affected areas. The erosion of international protection frameworks and non-compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child by member states further increase the vulnerability of conflict-affected children, especially those between 13 and 18 years old, who may face curtailed rights.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have jointly released global technical guidance on the International Classification Standard for Trafficking in Persons Administrative Data (ICS-TIP) and its accompanying manual, Making Each Case Count. The guidance aims to address the acute lack of quality evidence and research in combating human trafficking by promoting a common approach for national data collection on human trafficking, ultimately enhancing the evidence base for anti-trafficking efforts and supporting governments in monitoring trafficking patterns and responses.
A new issue brief from Justice and Care on the Online Sexual Exploitation of Children: Characteristics and drivers in the Philippines reports that rapid technological advances have given online sex offenders access to vulnerable children in countries where protection has not kept pace with these changes, and that socio-economic vulnerability, increased internet access, and the growth of online remittance technology are among the key factors fueling the exploitation.
This article discusses the anti-trafficking organization Thorn and its digital tool, Spotlight, which is designed to identify potential trafficking victims but has faced criticism for its potential harm to sex workers and its failure to address underlying issues. The actor Ashton Kutcher’s recent PR crisis has brought attention to the challenges and controversies surrounding technology-based solutions in combating child exploitation.
This news investigation explores overlooked human smuggling routes through the Dutch Caribbean. On the islands of Curaçao and Aruba undocumented migrants, especially Venezuelans, are at risk of sex and labour trafficking, it says.
A Kenyan hospital worker caught by the BBC trying to sell a baby has been sentenced to 25 years in jail. The social worker, who was based at Nairobi’s Mama Lucy Kibaki hospital, was filmed accepting US$2,500 to sell a baby boy under the hospital’s care, and found guilty of child trafficking, child neglect and conspiracy to commit crime. Last week, the government announced it would abolish all privately owned orphanages and children’s homes within the next eight years – a move aimed at ending child trafficking.
In the current round of grants from the Survivor Leadership Fund, survivor-led organizations located in Cambodia, the Philippines and Thailand are welcome to apply. The deadline for applications is 31 October 2023.
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