Chocolate industry slammed for failure to crack down on child labour

Nearly 20 years after the world’s major chocolate manufacturers pledged to abolish employment abuses, hazardous child labour remains rife in their supply chains, a new study finds.

Research from the University of Chicago finds that more than two-fifths (43%) of all children aged between five and 17 in cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and Ivory Coast – the world’s largest cocoa producers – are engaged in hazardous work.

In total, an estimated 1.5 million children work in cocoa production around the world, half of whom are found in these two west African nations alone. Hazardous work includes the use of sharp tools, working at night and exposure to agrochemical products, among other harmful activities.

The report, commissioned by the US Department of Labor, notes that the overall proportion of children working has gone up by 14 percentage points in the past decade. The increase is accompanied by a 62% rise in production over the same period.

The findings raise difficult questions for industry in particular. Back in 2001, big brands such as Nestlé, Mars, Mondelēz and Hershey signed a cross-sector accord aimed at eliminating egregious child labour. Despite missing deadlines to deliver on their pledge in 2005, 2008 and 2010, they continue to insist that ending the illegal practice remains their top concern.

In response to the scathing report, US chocolate giant Mars reiterated that child labour has no place in cocoa production and said it had committed $1bn to help “fix a broken supply chain”.

Campaign groups dismiss such comments as a duplicitous smokescreen. Indeed, a lawsuit stating that international chocolate manufacturers knowingly profit from abuses against children is currently being heard in the US supreme court.

Charity Ryerson, founder of US campaign group Corporate Accountability Lab, echoes a widespread feeling that the chocolate industry is guilty of “mind-boggling hypocrisy”. If it wished to, it could end child labour tomorrow, she said.

“In the past 20 years, the cocoa industry has invested enormous skill and resources in public relations around sustainability, but the increase in child labour demonstrates it has utterly failed to bring that same expertise and investment to create real sustainability.”

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Cocoa buyers flatly deny the charge, arguing that the issue is complex and not easily fixed. The explanations for their repeated failure stretch from the legal (they don’t own the cocoa farms where abuses happen) to the practical (auditing is expensive; identifying origin farms is complex) through to the nit-picking (the Harkin-Engel protocol on cocoa is nonbinding and only covers the “worst” forms of child labour).

According to the Fairtrade Foundation, only around 6% of the chocolate industry’s total revenues makes its way back to farmers – fair-trade models seek to counter this by increasing consumer prices and passing on the premium to farming cooperatives.

Louisa Cox, impact director at the Fairtrade Foundation, concedes that more help is needed to tackle “practical problems” if child labour is finally to become a thing of the past. Her list includes the provision of long-term finance, training and technical services, as well as helping farmers diversify beyond cocoa.

Taking a leaf out of the fair-trade book, the governments of Ghana and Ivory Coast this month rolled out a price-premium scheme (known as a “living income differential”) for all cocoa sales. The move also includes efforts to avoid oversupply, forward sales and other deflationary practices.