Why is child labour still an issue in the Chocolate Industry?

Fuzz Kitto

Fuzz Kitto is co-Director of Be Slavery Free, a coalition of organisations seeking to end modern slavery through engagement with business, government and consumers. He believes we can only end slavery when we work together.

I had a very good friend who was a great speaker and a wise and insightful man - and would you believe it? His name was John Smith. Really! When we would be tackling complex problems, he would often ask “what is the why?” Then he would quote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said

[Humans] will do any how if they know why.

To get to the how of solving the child labour issues in the cocoa growing in West Africa we have to know the why. To find the answer to the why we have to look at the cause.

Smithy would tell the story of his mother who used to get extreme headaches – we often thought he may have been the cause on many of those occasions 😁. So she would take headache tablets to ease the pain. When she was around 40 she had to go into hospital for an unrelated operation and as she went under the general anaesthetic the pressure blew out an undetected aneurism in the major artery to the brain. Sadly, the artery wall burst in her brain putting her into a coma for a month before killing her, leaving a husband and 7 children.

The undetected aneurism was caused by a weakness in the artery wall that balloons out under pressure. This was the root cause of Smithy’s mum’s extreme headaches. If they had known the cause (the why) of the headaches it would have been a simple operation to replace the weak artery with a shunt (the how). But sadly, they continually treated the symptom of a headache rather than the cause.

In cocoa growing the issues of child labour, lack of agroforestry diversity, deforestation, agrichemicals are symptoms. The causes are poverty, a lack of living income and lack of traceability and transparency. Because the farmers lack the necessary level of income to get clean water, food, health care, education for the children, and a little extra for incidentals, they have little choice but to use cheap child and trafficked labour. Farmers cut down native trees and use dangerous chemicals to maximise the land with cocoa plants to the detriment of biodiversity to meet their basic needs. In short, their poverty is the cause for the issues we see in cocoa growing.

This is not simplistic – but it is simple! Until we deal with the poverty (the why) that farmers experience - by paying more for their cocoa, building the needed infrastructure for education and transport (the how) – we will continue to treat just the symptoms and not the cause.