The Next Time You Eat Chocolate, Think Again

Political Expert: Angeline Chua

Article from BBC


Child Labour and the Pressure of Globalization

The news article reports how many of the children in West Africa, where half of the world's cocoa is produced, are forced to become labourers at cocoa plantations. Working in the cocoa plantations is dangerous for the children as they often have to suffer major cuts and injuries while using a machete, a large knife.

These children are trafficked from extremely poor countries and can be found to labour in approximately 1.5 million small cocoa farms in West Africa.

Globalization As A Cause

Using children as cheap labourers in the cocoa plantations is in fact, a side-effect - if not, a response - to globalization. It blatantly shows the impact of globalization on the people living in developing countries. They grab at the rare opportunities presented to them as a result of an increasingly globalized world in order to pull themselves out of the bottomless pit of poverty.

The chocolate market has been reported to bring in approximately $13 billion in sales for the United States. The is due to the globalized market and increasing international interest in the trade and sales of chocolate. With a huge supply of cacao being the means of living for the people in West Africa, some 7 million of them are involved in economic cacao trade and it has helped to lessen the negative impact of poverty and illiteracy on the people. However, the fact remains that due to the oversupply of cacao, its price still remains low. West African farmers do not have the power and ability to bargain for the sale of cacao at a higher price, and thus have to turn to reducing the cost of their labourers in order to gain profit. Exploitation of children as labourers in a culture where education is set aside and children are hardly able to to go to school thus becomes the ultimate and seemingly rightful choice for the farmers.

Globalization To Tackle With Issue : Cocoa Protocol

After news had reported the exploitation of children as labourers in West Africa, US policymakers responded and Congressman Elliott Engel and Senator Tom Harkin came up with a way known as the Cocoa Protocol, or Harkin Engel Protocol. to get rid of child labour. This was an alternative to the otherwise refusal of entry of such cocoa in US made by forced labour as "under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the US Customs Service is supposed to refuse entry to any goods identified as made by forced labor." However, it is important to note that this would not only worsen the living conditions and the state of poverty that the people in West Africa have already been living in, but also affect the 13-billion-dollar chocolate market in the United States. As a result, the Cocoa Protocol was an apt approach toward ridding West Africa of child labour yet not exacerbating the conditions in West Africa.

The Cocoa Protocol required major chocolate companies, plantation owners and cacao traders to work together with "unions, civil society and government officials" to ensure that all cocoa is produced without forced labour.

This is an example of how globalization can be both "A cause" which can also be "a cure", if I may quote from Sandra Ariel Aaronson's "Child Labour and Globalization : The Cause Can Also Be A Cure.

However, the Cocoa Protocol has failed to deliver the results that Harkin and Engel had hoped it would. Consumption by the worries of the civil war in West Africa has resulted in a lack of action taken and attention paid to solving the issue of child labour. The deadline of the Cocoa Protocol has passed, yet anything but the eradication of child labour has been successful. According to the news article from BBC, it is also due to the fact that the global chocolate industry is unwilling to make changes in the way business is carried out once child labour is rid of in West Africa. The only evidence of the chocolate industry's efforts to eradicate child labour is a mere mud hut to serve as a village school, which was only built five years after the Cocoa Protocol was implemented.

It is not sufficient for a group of US congressman and NGOs to be concerned over the issue of of child labour. A multi-pronged approach is required and it needs the effort of the whole world, chocolate manufacturers and everyone else involved in the global chocolate industry. Most importantly, solving the issue of child labour requires our attention as consumers.

References:

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/article.print?id=8907