The Great African Scandal
Chocolate
Cocoa is one of Ghana’s most important exports and a vital ingredient of chocolate. Robert Beckford has heard stories of hard up parents in the north of the country sending their children south to work. He’s even been told that children are rented out in exchange for a sewing machine or a bicycle.
To find out what it’s like to be a child labourer, he gets himself a job on a cocoa farm. He will be working alongside the farmer’s 15-year-old niece, Alara, and 10-year-old nephew, Baba. To Robert’s amazement, they have never even tasted chocolate.
Child labour is illegal in Ghana, so people are reluctant to talk about it, but local expert Newman Ofosu believes that around 20% of children are working and that only 80% go to school. Newman says: ‘Even if it is one child, it is one child too many.’
No pay and no education
Robert Beckford discovers that Alara and Baba are not paid. They work just for their food and lodging. Alara says that she works six hours a day and has never been to school. Baba shows Robert how to cut down weeds with a machete. He has never been to school, though he would like to.
Shocked by what he has learnt, Robert says, ‘Maybe the advert for some of these big chocolate manufacturers should go along the lines of: Fantastic taste. The best chocolate in the world. Sexual, seductive, beautiful – and produced by illiterate 10-year-old boys like Baba.’
Robert Beckford has tried to ask Cadburys and Nestlé about their policies on child labour. Replying on their behalf, their trade organisation said that the big chocolate companies ‘do not want children to be harmed in the growing or harvesting of cocoa’. They pointed out that they fund projects to help farmers become more productive and support a certification scheme run by the Ghanaian government to register cocoa farms and monitor employment practices. However, the certification scheme is three years behind the original schedule and even when it’s in place will only cover 50% of the growing regions.
Fair Trade for some
More promising is a co-operative farm where, in return for slightly higher profits, farmers promise not to use child labour and are monitored to ensure that they don’t. The extra money goes into a fund which benefits the farmers and their villages, but the biggest difference here, compared to the other cocoa farms, is that the children go to school.
Even then there’s a catch for the Ghanaians: only 3% of the cocoa beans from the co-operative are bought at the Fair Trade price. The other 97% end up mixed with cocoa which may have been picked by children.
It’s impossible for non-Fair Trade chocolate manufacturers to guarantee the cocoa they buy here is child labour free. Buying Fair Trade chocolate from farms like this is the only way to be sure that it has not been made by child labour.
