Labor & Employment Law

Reverse Trick-or-Treaters Call Attention to Child Labor in Cocoa Fields

By James Parks

Don?t be surprised if the ?trick-or-treaters? at your front door this Halloween give you something in return for the candy or fruit you hand them. This year on Oct. 31, children, students and adults across the country will hand out fair trade chocolates attached to an informational card about child labor abuses in the cocoa industry.     

The Not For Sale Chocolate Campaign is sponsoring ?Reverse Trick-or-Treating? to call attention to the abuse of some 3.6 million children in the cocoa fields of West Africa. Not For Sale?s mission is to recruit, educate and mobilize an international grassroots social movement that effectively combats human trafficking and slavery.

For more information on the Not For Sale Chocolate Campaign, click here.

Several labor organizations are working to end child labor in the cocoa fields.  AFT has launched a campaign to stop the importation of child-harvested cocoa beans or chocolate made from them. Recently, a report by several activist groups, including the International labor Rights Foundation (ILRF), found that Hershey, one of the largest and oldest chocolate manufacturers in the country, lags far behind its competitors when it comes to ensuring that child labor is not used to produce its products. Check out the report here.

More than half of the world?s supply of cocoa is harvested in the two West African nations of Ghana and Côte d?Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Growing and harvesting the crop depends upon the labor of these children caught in the worst forms of child labor, according to the International Cocoa Verification Board (ICVB).

Children must climb trees with machetes to cut down cocoa pods. They handle and apply dangerous pesticides, burn brush and carry back-breaking loads, ICVB says. ICVB is non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization that monitors child and forced labor in cocoa production. Cocoa beans from Ghana and Côte d?Ivoire already are on the U.S. Department of Labor?s list of goods produced by child labor.

Researchers at American University report that slave traders are trafficking boys, between ages 12 and 16, taking them from their home countries and selling them to cocoa farmers in Cote d?Ivoire. Most of the boys come from neighboring Mali, where agents hang around bus stations looking for children that are alone or are begging for food. They lure the kids to travel to Cote d?Ivoire with them, and then the traffickers sell the children to farmers in need of cheap labor.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on October 16, 2010 (boomark / email).