Oxfam campaigns against chocolate
As much as 99% of the chocolate on the shelves of Flanders’ supermarkets could be the product of child labour or even slavery, according to a new campaign launched last week by Oxfam to coincide with Valentine’s Day.
Nearly all of the chocolate in supermarkets could be the product of child labour
Although chocolate is normally associated with the New World, and especially Mexico where it originated, Ivory Coast in West Africa is now the main producer. Together with Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, the Ivory Coast supplies 70% of the world’s chocolate. Right now, production is down and stocks are low, leading to the highest prices since 1985. Production in those four countries, however, is the work of two million small farmers and their families. Primary producers are poor, often relying on the labour of low-wage children.
More than 200 million children work worldwide, according to estimates from the International Labour Organisation (ILO). About 70% of those work in agriculture. For many, work is a matter of survival for themselves or for their families. The number employed in the cocoa production industry in West Africa is thought to be in the tens of thousands; in some cases, the children may have been bought from their parents and brought from Burkina Faso to work – a modern form of slavery. Even in the best of cases, the work is hard and heavy, and the children have little or no schooling.
“Cocoa producers in West Africa can hardly survive on the income from the cocoa harvest and live in extreme poverty,” said Marieke Poissonnier, commodities policy advisor to Oxfam-Wereldwinkels. “That extreme poverty is at the root of the worst forms of child labour.”
Oxfam’s campaign proposes fair trade as a solution to the problem. The organisation calls on consumers, government and the chocolate industry to switch to fair-trade products, which provide producers with more of an income. “Minimum pricing, community premiums, investment financing and the assurance of a long-term trade relationship offer the members of fair-trade cooperatives the chance to break out of the vicious circle of extreme poverty,” Poissonnier said.
In Brussels, a spokesperson for Kraft, which owns Belgian market leader Cote d’Or, admitted that child labour is a problem in the cocoa industry. He argued that it is difficult to eradicate because the production side is so fragmented, with 90% of world production coming from more than three million smallholders, according to the International Cocoa Organisation.
“There are millions of cocoa producers,” said Dionne Heijnen, corporate affairs manager at Kraft. “We cannot guarantee that there are no child labourers working among them or that our chocolate is produced without child labour.” However, the company is taking steps to tackle the problem by buying beans certified by the Rainforest Alliance. “Plantations where child labour is used automatically lose their certificate. In 2012, all of Cote d’Or’s chocolate will need to have that certification,” she said.
Barry Callebaut, whose factory in Lebbeke, East Flanders, is one of the biggest in the world, announced last month that there is a rise in demand for certified cocoa and chocolate products, as consumers increasingly ask for chocolate that is “responsibly produced”.
“Barry Callebaut welcomes this evolution, given its long-standing commitment to developing a more sustainable cocoa sector, beginning with local growers,” the company said in a statement.” The group expects that the sale of certified products will continue to grow significantly in 2010.”
The company operates its own “Quality Partner Programme” in the Ivory Coast. Launched in 2005, it involves 47 cooperatives and over 42,000 farmers. "While demand for organic certified chocolate has been growing steadily over the past 10 years, we have seen a jump of more than 50% in the demand for fair-trade certified products in 2009 and an increase of 12% in certified products volume overall,” said Callebaut’s chief innovation officer Hans Vriens. “These growth rates are significantly ahead of chocolate market growth rates. We are now complementing our offering with UTZ certified and Rainforest Alliance Certified products. This means that we will have products available that meet the standards of some or more of the most widely recognised sustainability labels in the world."
