Slavery Free Chocolate?

By Brooke Shelby Biggs, AlterNet. Posted February 7, 2002.

Depending on how you look at it, the chocolate industry has either found its soul or dodged a very large bullet.

Last summer, reports surfaced about West African farms exploiting child slaves to pick the cocoa that provides the chocolate industry's lifeblood. In response, the industry entered into an extensive agreement with the U.S. government and several nonprofit groups to combat child slavery. An optimist would applaud "Big Chocolate" for admitting that it has been profiting from child slave labor and pledging to stop. A cynic would say that the industry succeeded in polishing its image while avoiding meaningful sanctions or compulsory changes in how it does business.

The problem of child slavery and indentured servitude in the coffee and cocoa industries in Ivory Coast, where half of the world's cocoa is grown on about 600,000 plantations, is nothing new. UNICEF published a report on the problem back in 1998, and in 2000 the U.S. State Department estimated that 15,000 children were actively enslaved on cocoa farms. In September of that year, British television aired a short but powerful documentary on the subject.

But the rest of world knew hardly anything about it until last summer, when two reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer published a series outlining the brutal conditions suffered by boys as young as nine who work in the cocoa fields. The series explained how slave traders would lure boys from Mali with promises of high wages and gifts of bicycles in exchange for picking beans from the cacao trees in Ivory Coast. Frequently the boys were told they could earn as much as $175 a year (about five times what they could make in the same period in their home countries), and could leave at any time. But once on the plantations, some of the boys were rarely paid, and more often beaten with chains, whips and switches. When they tried to leave, they were beaten and sometimes killed.

At first, the chocolate industry's trade group, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, said it knew nothing about slave labor in West Africa. When Inquirer reporters confronted them with their evidence, they admitted that it might actually be a problem. But they downplayed its extent. And they repeatedly insisted they were not responsible for the problem because the chocolate companies do not own the plantations, they just buy the beans.

The Inquirer series got the attention of Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), who crafted a rider to an agriculture appropriations bill that happened to be on the floor the week the series came out. The rider set aside $250,000 to institute a system of labeling chocolate and cocoa products. Like the "dolphin-safe" labels on tuna, the proposed labels were to read "No child slave labor." Engel's bill passed the House of Representatives in June, and the chocolate industry suddenly became very nervous. Chocolate makers feared such a label would give them a black eye and a multi-billion-dollar public-relations headache. They got so nervous, in fact, that it hired the biggest guns it could find -- former Senate majority leaders Bob Dole, a Republican, and George Mitchell, a Democrat -- to lobby Congress before the Senate could pass a similar bill.

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