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Globalization and child labor: The cause can also be a cure
15 March 2007
Prof. Susan Ariel Aaronson
Global Politician
Pressure of globalization has led to child trafficking and forced labor. Similar global pressure from public opinion can also put an end to the practice. Five years ago, reports emerged about small groups of children being trafficked and forced to pick cacao beans – the main ingredient for chocolate – in West African plantations. Outraged US officials, industry groups and activists organized the Cocoa Protocol to stop the practice and debated a label that would certify chocolate products as being free of child labor. Major chocolate firms and non-governmental organizations set out to provide education, training and other opportunities for children in nations like the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali and others. But slavery lingers in Africa, making it clear that a strategy that focuses on a single sector cannot end centuries of poverty and cultural practices permeating the continent. Collapse of the cacao industry in West Africa, in order to prevent child labor by a few could devastate millions more lives. Awareness, as provided by initiatives such as the Cocoa Protocol, can instigate change – but many more industries and governments need to join efforts to end the exploitation of Africa’s children.
Many chocolate lovers still have a bitter taste in their mouths from revelations that the candies they adore might have been produced by child labor in West Africa. In an ensuing uproar, cocoa producers, traders, suppliers, governments, unions and civil-society groups agreed to a solution brokered by two members of Congress. In 2001, they created a multi-sectoral partnership, the Cocoa Protocol, to address the conditions that perpetuate forced child labor on these cacao plantations.
Yet five years later, children still toil, picking cacao in unsafe and unfair conditions. Clearly, a sector-specific strategy cannot address the broad cultural, social and economic factors in West Africa that perpetuate child labor.
The number of children forced to labor in the cacao plantations is small. In 2000, the US State Department, Knight Ridder and the BBC reported that some 15,000 children worked in conditions of forced labor picking beans in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Trafficked from extremely poor countries, like Mali and Burkina Faso, the children worked on some of the 1.5 million small cocoa farms in West Africa. These farms produce more than half the world’s cacao that’s processed into candy, cookies or cocoa butter used for cosmetics.
Consumers and regulators don’t know how to protect these child workers without jeopardizing the livelihoods of millions of their compatriots.
Keywords: child labor, globalization
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