Child labour and the Chocolate Scorecard
In this episode, Fuzz Kitto gives the history of the global fight against child labour from the US Congress to the growing number of reports and surveys from civil society organisations and the development of the Chocolate Scorecard to capture the whole chocolate supply chain.
Listen to Slavery Unravelled - Conversations about being slavery free wherever you get your podcasts!
Welcome to this podcast – Slavery Unravelled, conversations on how you can be slavery free. In this podcast we are going to be looking at child labour in the chocolate Industry.
Understanding child labour
Determining child labour can a challenge as the International Labour Organisation notes: In some societies, the integration of children into social and working life may be so gradual that it is not possible to separate the phases. Others demarcate childhood from adulthood either by fulfilment of certain social rites and obligations, or by age. It is age that international platforms generally use to define a child; they accord the rights and protection of a child for those under age 18, and set the minimum age of 15 for employment.
Not all work is harmful to children. From a young age, many children help around the home, do chores, run errands or assist their parents in the family farm or business. As they get older they take on light jobs or learn valuable traditional trades. In this way, children acquire the skills and attitudes they will need as future workers and useful members of the community. Light work, carefully monitored, can be an essential part of children’s socialisation and development process, where they learn to take responsibility, and gain pride in their own accomplishments. Work of this kind is not without risk, but it is not what is generally meant by child labour.
Child labour is classified as children’s work which is of such a nature or intensity that it is detrimental to their schooling or harmful to their health and development. The concern is with children who are denied their childhood and a future, who work at too young an age, who work long hours for low wages, who work under conditions harmful to their health and to their physical and mental development, who are separated from their families, or who are deprived of education. Such child labour can create irreversible damage to the child and is in violation of international law and usually, national legislation.
Child labour in cocoa growing
In this podcast I want to focus on child labour in the chocolate or at least the cocoa growing sector.
I was at the World Cocoa Conference in Dominican Republic and our good friend Aarti Kapoor was on a panel. She is one of the most respected expert knowledge persons on child labour in the world. In her presentation she mentioned that child labour was not always about bad parenting or being bad parents. All the African females in the room, almost nodded their heads off in utter agreement.
Our great partner Freidel Heutz-Adams was at a conference in Cote d’Ivoire – the biggest cocoa producing country. They were talking about child labour and what growers needed to do to prevent and show that there was no child labour on their cocoa farms. A female cocoa grower stood up at the end and said “let me get this right. We have to take all those measures to assure you that we are not doing the wrong thing, and you are going to pay us how much for our cocoa?”
It was very sobering. To do prevention and help farmers to avoid using child labour, they need to be paid enough for a living income to not feel forced to use children as labourers on their farms.
The NORC Report done by the University of Chicago for the US Department of Labor that was released in 2019 estimated there were still 1.6 million child labourers in the cocoa growing in West Africa! What was even more telling was that they estimated 1.46 million of the children had to seek medical attention or be hospitalised because of the pesticides and chemicals they were using on the cocoa farms. This tipped that number into the hazardous forms of child labour.
The Harkin-Engel Protocol
This report came about because of the work of a congressman and senator called Harkin and Engel. In 2001 they were so overcome by the stories of human trafficking and child labour in cocoa growing in West Africa that they sponsored. A bill to ban any chocolate being sold in the USA that had human trafficking or child labour in their supply chain.
It made it through the Congress and when it was due to come up before the Senate the chocolate company lobbyists went ballistic! “We don’t need a law” they said. “We can self-regulate and deal with this.” They won the day and said that they could abolish it by 2004.
2004 came around and change had not happened. The chocolate companies said something that we hear so often. “This is more complicated than we thought! We need until 2008 to sort it out.”
2008 came and they had not sorted it out by any means. And no new date was set.
In 2010 Harkin and Engel met with them again and a new agreement was reached to extend what became known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol.
The 2010 Joint Declaration summarised the pledge of the Harkin-Engel Protocol and reaffirmed the commitment to achieve the objectives of the protocol. The purpose of the framework of action was to reduce the worst forms of child labour 70% by 2020. Specifically, they were to remove children from and prevent children's involvement in the worst forms of child labour, promote sustainable livelihoods for cocoa growers, establish and implement community-based child labour monitoring and remediation systems, which became known as the CLMRS and continue national child labour surveys.
Persistent Child Labour Issues
The Joint Declaration established the Child Labor Cocoa Coordinating Group to coordinate the activities of the framework and provide governance. To achieve the goals, the governments of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana must fund and conduct child labour surveys, provide remediation for children removed from the worst forms of child labour, prevent children from becoming involved in the worst forms of child labour, enforce laws to protect the children from the worst forms of child labour, and develop the infrastructure of the cocoa growing regions.
The responsibility of the cocoa and chocolate industries was to continue to support the child labour surveys, support remediation efforts, provide sustainable livelihoods for the households of cocoa growers, try to ensure cocoa supply chains are using safe practices.
The industries were to commit $7 million over the next five years with the possibility of $3 million more for remediation activities. The responsibility of the US Department of Labor was to commit $10 million in 2010 for a multi-year program to support the framework and report on the progress of these efforts.
A study of the use of child labour in the cocoa fields, published in Fortune magazine in the U.S. in March 2016, concluded that approximately 2.1 million children in West Africa "still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa". The report suggested that it would be an uphill battle to improve the situation:
According to the 2015 edition of the Cocoa Barometer, a biennial report examining the economics of cocoa that's published by a consortium of nonprofits – which we are a member of, the average farmer in Ghana in the 2013–14 growing season made just 84¢ per day, and farmers in Ivory Coast a mere 50¢. That puts them well below the then World Bank's new $1.90 per day standard for extreme poverty, even if you factor in the 13% rise in the price of cocoa the year before.
Certification and Initiatives
Nestlé published a report in 2017 on child labour in the cocoa supply chain, Tackling Child Labour, with additional specifics as to their "approach to addressing this significant, complex and sensitive challenge". Nestlé led the chocolate companies in starting to tackle the problem and decided to become transparent about what they had been doing and what was happening – the report was done by a third party the Fair Labour Association.
What impressed us was that we got the report the same time Nestlé did. They contacted us and said it is obvious that there is child labour and slavery in our supply chain – what are you going to say? We replied that our response was that we congratulate Nestlé on taking the measures to find it, be transparent about it and now they know more about where it is and what they can do to target is!
Tulane University professor William Bertrand, a co-author of the 2015 Cocoa Report, made this comment in 2018: "We don’t think conditions have changed significantly in terms of the number of children working." The publication concluded that, "despite some positive changes, such as an increase in the amount of finished chocolate sold in the Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana – keeping more of the profits in the local economy – and the introduction of free primary education in the Ivory Coast, broad change is still elusive".
So Be Slavery Free were being asked about the certification they we were asking chocolate companies to use for their cocoa supplies “Which certification is best? Isn’t it Fair Trade? – when it came to child labour”. We released a report called “A Matter of Taste”. It found that the then 3 big certifiers, Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ were doing as much as each other. Since then Rainforest Alliance and UTZ have merged. We then we were asked about the Chocolate Programs the big chocolate companies were starting. They were Mondelez (Cadbury), Nestle, Ferrero, Mars, Hershey and Lindt. They produced together around 80% of the chocolate globally.
Then consumers reflected that it was good to have the whole supply chain covered. But it wasn’t! The big processors and traders were the blind part of the industry. The 3 big ones were: Barry Callebaut, Cargill and Olam. They processed around 80% of the global cocoa and turned it into Cocoa butter, powder or cocoa liquor. So we included them.
Then chocolate companies said “can’t you NGOs get your act together and work together? We have so many surveys on the social and environment that we are getting survey fatigue.” We needed to listen to that.
Chocolate Scorecard
So we merged together the scorecards of Mighty Earth and Green America and some others and came up with the Chocolate Scorecard.
We started this in 2020!
We score chocolate companies, traders, processors and retailers (every 2 years). But are now going to do them annually on their own supermarket brands. We score them on:
Traceability and transparency
Living income for the farmers
Child labour and slavery
Deforestation and climate change
Agroforestry
Chemical Management and pesticides.
Each company is given a colour to see how they are ranked.
Green for a leader in the area
Yellow for they are doing a lot but need to do a little more
Orange for they are on their way but got a bit to go
Red for they got a lot more to do yet.
We also have the Good Egg Award to the best companies and the Rotten Egg award for the companies not changing and broken eggs for the companies that did not come on and a notice for those who are not on for good reasons but are coming on. We publish it before Easter each year then new iterations with the same data at Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s day and White Day in Japan. Its global and has a print reach of almost 1 billion. It’s having an effect.
We work with the chocolate companies, with 23 expert knowledge people who score in the different areas and with 3 Universities - Macquarie and Wollongong Universities in Australia and The Open University in the UK. The Chocolate Scorecard is covered by their ethics standards for research, and we use the Macquarie University’s platform for research.
You can look up the Chocolate Scorecard and it has a search function so if you are out shopping you can put in the chocolate product and it will do the work behind the scenes and work out who the parent company is and you can see how it has scored on child labour and slavery and any of the other 5 areas or how it scored overall on a combined aggregated score of all the areas.
And this is the action you can take that can make a real difference in helping deal with child labour in the cocoa growing sector particularly the most vulnerable areas in West Africa.
Look forward to catching you next time.
This has been Fuzz Kitto and I hope you have a great ethical action day.