No Love For Chocolate Producers

(The New Republic)  This column was written by Jeremy Kahn.

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Late last week, Teun van de Keuken, a Dutch journalist, walked into an Amsterdam court and did something strange: He asked a judge to jail him for eating chocolate. The stunt was part of a long-running effort by van de Keuken to draw attention to abusive child-labor practices in the harvesting of cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate. By eating chocolate, van de Keuken argued, he was abetting child slavery. "If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that," van de Keuken told Reuters. "I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and make them do something about the problem."

So far, the sins of van de Keuken's sweet tooth haven't landed him in the slammer. But his hijinks are well-timed: Today is Valentine's Day, a key holiday for chocolate sales, and van de Keuken at least made headlines. Every year since 2001, when stories first surfaced about child slavery on cocoa plantations in Côte d'Ivoire — where about 40 percent of the world's cocoa is currently produced — activists have used Valentine's Day as an occasion to push for a boycott on chocolate. Their concern makes sense: A 2001 U.N. Children's Fund study estimated that as many as 200,000 children were trafficked for labor within the region. A survey conducted jointly by the International Labor Organization and the chocolate producers in Côte d'Ivoire the following year estimated that perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 children were used as indentured or slave labor on the country's cocoa plantations; many thousands more were working for family members but subjected to harsh manual labor inappropriate for their age.

Yet, while the boycott drive is well-intentioned (if decidedly unromantic), it is also wrong. It is true that abusive child labor continues to plague cocoa production. But calls for a boycott would harm the very children the activists are trying to help. In truth, the civil war in Côte d'Ivoire is currently a greater obstacle to ending child labor in the chocolate business than any other factor, including the chocolate companies. If consumers really cared about ending child slavery in Côte d'Ivoire, they would direct their protests less at the makers of chocolate turtles and more at Turtle Bay.

In 2001, amid pressure from consumers and international labor groups, the world chocolate industry signed an accord aimed at combating illegal child labor. Under that agreement, known as the Harkin-Engel protocol, chocolate producers pledged to introduce a certification system by 2005 that would guarantee that cocoa had been harvested without using child slaves. But, in September 2002, Côte d'Ivoire plunged into a civil war that has left the country split in two, with the government controlling the south and a rebel coalition controlling the country's north. Since then, a kind of cold peace — with occasionally violent flare-ups — has taken hold. Some 8,000 U.N. peacekeepers and 4,000 French soldiers currently separate the warring parties.

Although actual combat between the two sides has only been sporadic over the past four years, the instability and the de facto partition of the country has hampered any efforts to educate farmers and monitor the cocoa harvest. The International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), the industry-funded foundation that, in accordance with the Harkin-Engel Protocol, is charged with stamping out the worst child labor practices, has managed to launch pilot programs in just six Ivorian communities (compared with 24 pilot programs in Ghana, which is at peace). Also, the chocolate industry had hoped to rely on Ivorian government inspectors to police labor practices on the farms.

But the government has been in such chaos since the war began that few inspectors have been trained — and even those available have not been permitted to work in the rebel-held north. The same goes for representatives of the chocolate industry and a variety of labor rights NGOs: Their travel to the north has also been restricted due to safety concerns. In October, Peter McAllister, the ICI's executive director, cited Côte d'Ivoire's civil war as a "major hindrance" to developing programs in the country. There's not much the industry can do: It missed its 2005 deadline to create a certification system, and it has negotiated an extension until 2008, by which time it promises to implement monitoring for just half the cocoa-producing areas of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.

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