The use of child labour has risen in cocoa farms in Ghana and Ivory Coast over the past decade despite industry promises to reduce it, academics said recently, largely supporting earlier findings that were questioned by both states. The prevalence of children doing hazardous work, including using sharp tools, has also gone up in the world’s top two cocoa producers, according to the study funded by the US government.
About 45% of children from farming families in growing areas were working on plantations in the 2018-19 season, according to a report from research group NORC at the University of Chicago. That’s up from 31% 10 years earlier. The rise came amid a jump in cocoa output in both countries.
The top growers have come under more pressure to clean up the sector. The European Union plans to introduce legislation that could eventually make firms responsible for human rights abuses and environmental harm in their supply chain, while U.S. lawmakers have proposed banning imports of cocoa produced with child labour. Major chocolate companies including Mars Inc. and Nestle SA have committed to help eradicate child labour from their supply chains.
The findings represent a remarkable failure by leading chocolate companies to fulfill a long-standing promise to eradicate the practice from their supply chains. Under pressure from Congress in 2001, some of the world’s largest chocolatiers — including Nestlé, Hershey and Mars — pledged to eradicate “the worst forms of child labor” from their sources in West Africa, the world’s most important supply. Since then, however, the firms have missed deadlines to eliminate child labor in 2005, 2008 and 2010. Each time, they have promised to do better, but the new report indicates that the incidence of child labor in West African cocoa production has risen.
Mars Inc. highlighted that the company has committed $1 billion as part of a strategy to “help fix a broken supply chain.” The World Cocoa Foundation, which represents the likes of Barry Callebaut AG, said the targets to reduce child labor were set “without fully understanding the complexity and scale of a challenge heavily associated with poverty in rural Africa and did not anticipate the significant increase in cocoa production over the past decade.”
“The findings suggest the importance of continued investments focused on child labour in cocoa production,” NORC said. Tackling the issue can be effective if the industry works together on improving education, legislation and community monitoring, it said. Ivory Coast earlier this year rejected a draft of the report, saying there were shortcomings in “sampling and extrapolation” and that other problems in previous surveys probably led to misleading conclusions. Authorities have made multiple raids on farms this year, rescuing children and adults who were allegedly forced to work on cocoa plantations.
