Dangerous Cocoa and Textiles
by Brian Gaughan
November 2008
Throughout the world child slave labor is a major issue. Children are being forced to do jobs that are not meant for them and are very dangerous. As this may be a surprising and startling fact, it is a reality. Child slavery is very prevalent in poor regions of the world where people would do anything to survive. Child slave labor is very prevalent in Africa but is also a problem in the Middle East and India. In Africa children may be leased by their parents as indentured servants for 20 dollars per year. This is done because of extreme poverty. The children are forced to live in labor camps and do not have a formal education. They must work in dangerous situations in fisheries, quarries, cocoa and rice plantations. The International Labor Organization states that “1.2 million children are sold as indentured servants each year in an illicit trade that generates ten billion dollars annually”. Unfortunately, the global economy is another factor in contributing to child slave labor. Companies are looking to produce goods at the cheapest price, wherever it might be. Many United States companies have products that have been linked to child slave labor in other countries. No matter what country is using child slave labor common factors are little to no pay, long hours and poor treatment and abuse.
One of the major industries that has been known to use child slave labor is the cocoa industry. The largest cocoa producing countries are the Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Cameroon Brazil and Ivory Coast. The Ivory Coast produces 43% of the worlds cocoa. According to the International Labor Organization(LIO), 284,000 children under the age of fourteen work on cocoa farms, many of them in the Ivory Coast. Most of these children are working on their family farms out of necessity due to extreme poverty. In countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo, families become desperate and sell there children to traffickers from the Ivory Coast believing they will get legitimate work. The children end up working in very cruel conditions. The children are forced to work from six o’clock in the morning to six at night. These children are forced to perform dangerous tasks without proper protection. The tasks include using machetes to cut down tree branches which contain the cocoa pods. They must then cut the cocoa beans out of the pods. They must also apply pesticides and insecticides. Specific examples of this cruelty have been documented by Western protest groups. A young boy who was lured to the Ivory Coast stated he attempted to escape cocoa farm he was working on. When he was caught, as a punishment, his feet were cut. He was forced to continue to work with the injuries.
Tom Harkin, a senator from the state of Iowa, has been a devout advocate to ban child slave labor. Harkin states that, “Abusive child slave labor is a profound moral evil. It is also bad economic policy and it undermines the development goals of emerging nations. When a child is exploited for the economic gain of others, the child loses, the family loses, the country loses and the world loses”. Because Harkin has witnessed child slave labor he feels very strongly about the topic. He tried to then get the senate to pass a bill to stop American companies from using child slave labor but this was unsuccessful. They then compromised and made it into the Harkin-Engel Protocol. This protocol was for the chocolate industry and was named after Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Elliot Engel. This Protocol is a six point problem solving approach. Specifically it provides for the development of global industry-wide standards and independent monitoring, reporting and public certification. To help implement the protocol they got the help from many organizations some of which were Representatives from the ILO, the Child Labor organization and the National consumer league.
Another major industry that uses child slave labor is textiles. It has been noted that India is a big offender of utilizing children in sweatshops for the production of clothing. Specifically, the Gap states they were unaware some of there vendors were allowing this abuse of children. “The key thing India has to offer the global economy is some of the world’s cheapest labor, and this is the saddest thing of all the horrors that arise from Delhi’s 15000 inadequately regulated garment factories, some of which are among the worst sweatshops ever to taint the human conscience”. The outsourcing of garment production to India by large retail chains has renewed great concern because of the discovery of the children working in poor conditions. Companies like the Gap and other large retail stores use outsourcing because it is cheaper for them as well as the customer. “Globalization has turned many middle class jobs into a thing of the past in communities all over the country”.This has led to a big issue because we are putting the production of are products into the hands of people who do not care for the well fair of human beings and especially children.
We as consumers, must take measures to eliminate these issues. As Americans, we must be more aware of the purchases we make and the companies we frequent. People must make it known that they will not tolerate the use of child slave labor for the production of American sold products. One way of doing this is to research companies that use fair trade certified goods. These are companies that in no way use child slave labor for there products. Refusing to buy goods one knows were associated with child slave labor is one step to ending this problem.
Sources Used:
adamash.blogspot.com
www.globalexchange.org
mhutch.blogspot.com/
www.gurdian.co.uk
www.forbes.com
usinfo.state.gov
allafrica.com