Child Slaves May Be Making Your Chocolate

[Guest guest]

From Muata:

 

Child Slaves May Be Making Your ChocolateTaken http://onepeoples.com/current/childslaves.html ------There may be a hidden ingredient in the chocolate cake you baked, the candy bars your children sold for their school fund-raiser or that fudge ripple ice cream cone you enjoyed on Saturday afternoon. "When (people) eat chocolate, they are eating my flesh." Drissa (?) was forced to work, as a slave on a cocoa plantation in Cote d'Ivoire. Recently there was a report on BBC on cocoa farming - the first step in making chocolate -in the Ivory Coast. According to the BBC, hundreds of thousands of children are being stolen from their parents, shipped to the Ivory Coast and sold as slaves to cocoa farms. These children earn no money for their work, are barely fed, are beaten if they try to escape, and most will never see their families again. Nearly 50% of the world's chocolate

production starts in the Ivory Coast. Forty-three percent of the world's cocoa beans, the raw material in chocolate, come from small, scattered farms in this poor West African country. And on some of the farms, boys who were sold or tricked into slavery do the hot, hard work of clearing the fields and harvesting the fruit. Most of them are between the ages of 12 and 16. Some are as young as 9.The lucky slaves live on corn paste and bananas. The unlucky ones are whipped, beaten and broken like horses to harvest the almond-sized beans that are made into chocolate treats for more fortunate children in Europe and the United States.Aly Diabate was almost 12 when a slave trader promised him a bicycle and $150 a year to help support his poor parents in Mali. He worked for a year and a half for a cocoa farmer who is known as "Le Gros" ("the Big Man"), but he said his only rewards were the rare days when Le Gros' overseers or older slaves didn't flog him with a

bicycle chain or branches from a cacao tree.Intense laborCocoa beans come from pods on the cacao tree. To get the 400 or so beans it takes to make a pound of chocolate, the boys who work on Ivory Coast's cocoa farms cut 10 pods from the trees, slice them open, scoop out the beans, spread them in baskets or on mats and cover them to ferment. Then they uncover the beans, put them in the sun to dry, bag them and load them onto trucks to begin the long journey to America or Europe. Aly said he doesn't know what the beans from the cacao tree taste like after they've been processed and blended with sugar, milk and other ingredients. That happens far away from the farm where he worked, in places such as Hershey, Pa., Milwaukee and San Francisco."I don't know what chocolate is," said Aly.Americans spend $13 billion a year on chocolate, but most of them are as ignorant of where it comes from as the boys who harvest cocoa beans are about where their beans

go.More cocoa beans come from Ivory Coast than from anyplace else in the world. The country's beans are prized for their quality and abundance, and in the first three months of this year, more than 47,300 tons of them were shipped to the United States through Philadelphia and New York City, according to the Port Import Export Reporting Service. At other times of the year, Ivory Coast cocoa beans are delivered to Camden, N.J., Norfolk, Va., and San Francisco.From the ports, the beans are shipped to cocoa processors. America's biggest are ADM Cocoa in Milwaukee, a subsidiary of Decatur, Ill.-based Archer Daniels Midland Co.; Barry Callebaut AG, which has its headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland; Minneapolis-based Cargill Inc.; and Nestle USA of Glendale, Calif., a subsidiary of the Swiss food giant.But by the time the beans reach the processors, those picked by slaves and those harvested by free field hands have been jumbled together in warehouses, ships, trucks

and rail cars. By the time they reach consumers in America or Europe, free beans and slave beans are so thoroughly blended that there is no way to know which chocolate products taste of slavery and which do not.However, even the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a trade group for American chocolate makers, acknowledges that slaves are harvesting cocoa on some Ivory Coast farms.A 1998 report from UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, concluded that some Ivory Coast farmers use enslaved children, many of them from the poorer neighboring countries of Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Togo. A report by the Geneva, Switzerland-based International Labor Organization, released June 15, found that trafficking in children is widespread in West Africa.The State Department's year 2000 human rights report concluded that some 15,000 children between the ages of 9 and 12 have been sold into forced labor on cotton, coffee and cocoa plantations in northern Ivory Coast

in recent years.12-hour daysAly Diabate and 18 other boys labored on a 494-acre farm, very large by Ivory Coast standards, in the southwestern part of the country. Their days began when the sun rose, which at this time of year in Ivory Coast is a few minutes after 6 a.m. They finished work about 6:30 in the evening, just before nightfall, when fireflies were beginning to illuminate the velvety night like Christmas lights. They trudged home to a dinner of burned bananas. If they were lucky, they were treated to yams seasoned with saltwater "gravy." After dinner, the boys were ordered into a 24-by-20-foot room, where they slept on wooden planks without mattresses."Once we entered the room, nobody was allowed to go out," said Mamadou Traore, a thin, frail youth with serious brown eyes who is 19 now."We didn't cry, we didn't scream," said Aly (pronounced AL-ee). "We thought we had been sold, but we weren't sure."The boys became sure one day

when Le Gros walked up to Mamadou and ordered him to work harder. "I bought each of you for 25,000 francs (about $35)," the farmer said, according to Mamadou (MAH-mah-doo). "So you have to work harder to reimburse me."Aly was barely 4 feet tall when he was sold into slavery, and he had a hard time carrying the heavy bags of cocoa beans."Some of the bags were taller than me," he said. "It took two people to put the bag on my head. And when you didn't hurry, you were beaten."He was beaten more than the other boys were. You can still see the faint scars on his back, right shoulder and left arm."The beatings were a part of my life," Aly said.At night, Aly had nightmares about working forever in the fields, about dying and nobody noticing. To drown them out, he replayed his memories of growing up in Mali, over and over again."I was always thinking about my parents and how I could get back to my country," he said.But he didn't think

about trying to escape."I was afraid," he said.Allegations are deniedLe Gros (Leh GROW), whose name is Lenikpo Yeo, denied that he paid for the boys who worked for him, although Ivory Coast farmers often pay a finder's fee to someone who delivers workers to them. He also denied that the boys were underfed, locked up at night or forced to work more than 12 hours a day without breaks. He said they were treated well, and that he paid for their medical treatment. "When I go hunting, when I get a kill, I divide it in half - one for my family and the other for them. Even if I kill a gazelle, the workers come and share it."He denied beating any of the boys."I've never, ever laid hands on any one of my workers," Le Gros said. "Maybe I called them bad words if I was angry. That's the worst I did."Le Gros said a Malian overseer beat one boy who had run away, but he said he himself did not order any beatings.One day early last year, a

boy named Oumar Kone was caught trying to escape. One of Le Gros' overseers beat him, said the other boys and local authorities.A few days later, Oumar ran away again, and this time he escaped. He told elders in the local Malian immigrant community what was happening on Le Gros' farm. They called Abdoulaye Macko, who was then the Malian consul general in Bouake, a town north of Daloa, in the heart of Ivory Coast's cocoa- and coffee-growing region.Macko (MOCK-o) went to the farm with several police officers, and he found the 19 boys and young men there. Aly, the youngest, was 13. The oldest was 21. They had spent anywhere from six months to 41/2 years on Le Gros' farm."They were tired, slim, they were not smiling," Macko said. "Except one child was not there. This one, his face showed what was happening. He was sick, he had (excrement) in his pants. He was lying on the ground, covered with cacao leaves because they were sure he was dying. He was almost dead. .

.. . He had been severely beaten."According to medical records, other boys had healed scars as well as open, infected wounds all over their bodies.Police freed the boys, and a few days later the Malian consulate in Bouake sent them all home to their villages in Mali. The sick boy was treated at a local hospital, then was sent home, too.Le Gros was charged with assault against children and suppressing the liberty of people. The latter crime carries a five- to 10-year prison sentence and a hefty fine, said Daleba Rouba, attorney general for the region."In Ivorian law, an adult who orders a minor to hit and hurt somebody is automatically responsible as if he has committed the act," said Rouba. "Whether or not Le Gros did the beatings himself or ordered somebody, he is liable."Le Gros spent 24 days in jail, and today he is a free man pending a court hearing that is scheduled for this week. Rouba said the case against Le Gros is weak because the

witnesses against him have all been sent back to Mali."If the Malian authorities are willing to cooperate, if they can bring two or three of the children back as witnesses, my case will be stronger," Rouba said.Mamadou Diarra, the Malian consul general in Bouake, said he would look into the matter.Enforcement lackingChild trafficking experts say inadequate legislation, ignorance of the law, poor law enforcement, porous borders, police corruption and a shortage of resources help perpetuate the problem of child slavery in Ivory Coast. Only 12 convicted slave traders are serving time in Ivorian prisons. An additional eight, convicted in absentia, are on the lam. The middlemen who buy Ivory Coast cocoa beans from farmers and sell them to processors seldom visit the country's cocoa farms, and when they do, it's to examine the beans, not the workers. Young boys are a common sight on the farms of West Africa, and it's impossible to know without asking

which are a farmer's own children, which are field hands who will be paid $150 to $180 after a year's work and which are slaves."We've never seen child slavery," said G.H. Haidar, a cocoa buyer in Daloa. "We're only concerned with our work."The Chocolate Manufacturers Association, based in Vienna, Va., at first said the industry was not aware of slavery, either. After Knight Ridder began inquiring about the use of slaves on Ivory Coast cocoa farms, however, the manufacturers association in late April acknowledged that a problem might exist and said it strongly condemned "these practices wherever they may occur."In May, the association decided to expand an Ivory Coast farming program to include education on "the importance of children." And this month, the association agreed to fund a survey of child labor practices on Ivory Coast cocoa farms.Ivorian officials have found scores of enslaved children from Mali and Burkina Faso and sent them home, and

they have asked the International Labor Organization, a global workers' rights agency, to help them conduct a child labor survey that's expected to be completed this year.But they continue to blame the problem on immigrant farmers from Mali and on world cocoa prices that have fallen sharply since 1996, from 67 cents a pound to 51 cents, forcing impoverished farmers to use the cheapest labor they can find.Ivory Coast Agriculture Minister Alfonse Douaty calls child slavery a marginal "clandestine phenomenon" that exists on only a handful of the country's more than 600,000 cocoa and coffee farms."Those who do this are hidden, well hidden," said Douaty (Doo-AH-tee). He said his government is clamping down on child traffickers by beefing up border patrols and law enforcement, and running education campaigns to boost awareness of anti-slavery laws and efforts.Douaty said child labor in Ivory Coast should not be called slavery, because the word conjures up

images of chains and whips. He prefers the term "indentured labor."Ivory Coast authorities ordered Le Gros to pay Aly and the other boys a total of 4.3 million African Financial Community francs (about $6,150) for their time as indentured laborers. Aly got 125,000 francs (about $180) for the 18 months he worked on the cocoa farm.Aly bought himself the very thing the trader who enslaved him had promised: a bicycle. It has a light, a yellow horn and colorful bottle caps in the spokes. He rides it everywhere.Aly helps his parents by selling vegetables in a nearby market, but he still doesn't understand why he was a slave.When he was told that some American children spend nearly as much every year on chocolate as he was paid for six months' work harvesting cocoa beans, he replied without bitterness:"I bless them because they are eating it."Raghavan reported from Ivory Coast and Mali, Chatterjee from London, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Researcher Tish Wells contributed to this report.Editor’s Note: The reemergence of forced labor in the Ivory Coast is related to the same kinds of global economic forces that led to class-based explosions in the past, both between colonial elites and the colonizers and between the Calibans of the plantations like Youssouf who are forced to confront their exploiters near and far.Specifically, over the past 3 years or so cocoa prices have been in a slump. According to the Winter 2002 newsletter of the Global Exchange: "The price drop has been exacerbated by deregulation of agriculture in West Africa, which abolished commodity boards across the region, leaving small farmers at the mercy of the market. With prices in the basement, cocoa farmers have been forced to cut their labor costs, and tragically that has meant relying on slave labor."While the farms that supply the cocoa beans are small, their purchasers are among the most powerful capitalist firms

in the world. The 13 billion dollar chocolate industry is heavily consolidated, with just two firms--Hershey's and M & M/Mars--controlling 2/3's of the market. Although the industry has promised protesters that slavery will be abolished by July 2004, there is little reason to expect that this will happen. Ultimately, the brutal laws of capital accumulation and not the ill will of plutocrats generate slavery. Contrary to the supporters of the Brenner thesis, I would argue that emancipation from slavery would come from socialist revolution rather than "a transition to a capitalist mode of production," as Colin Leys puts it. After all, capitalism has been around in Africa since the Victorian age, whether it takes the form of free or un-free labor.The following is a partial listing of the chocolate companies who buy from the slavers who use child labor or in Africa to harvest the cocoa plants for chocolate making.Anette's Chocolate

Factory06/26/200106/26/2001USABen & Jerry's06/21/200106/28/2001USAChocolate Manufacturers Association06/18/200106/28/2001USAChocolates à la Carte06/26/200106/26/2001USAChocolates by Bernard Callebaut06/25/200106/27/2001USADavid Alan Chocolatier06/26/200106/26/2001USAFowler's Chocolate06/26/200107/02/2001USAGuittard Chocolate Company06/24/2001USAHauser Chocolates06/29/200107/03/2001USAHershey Food Corporation06/05/200106/06/2001USAKraft06/30/200107/03/2001InternationalLammes Candies06/30/200107/06/2001USAMars Confectionaryalso M & M's, Snickers, Twix, others06/18/200106/28/2001EnglandNecco Candy Factoryalso

Clark07/01/200107/09/2001USANestlé06/18/200106/20/2001SwitzerlandPulakos 926 Chocolates07/01/200107/02/2001USASouth Bend Chocolate07/01/200108/07/2001USAThe Chocolate Vault07/01/200107/05/2001USAWockenfuss Candies07/01/200107/02/2001USACarousel Candies06/26/2001USACerreta Candy Company06/26/2001USANabisco06/18/2001USAWorld's Finest Chocolate06/18/2001USA