Conference discusses child labour on cocoa farms

Chocolate manufacturers, anti-slavery campaigners and US government officials have been meeting this week in Miami, Florida, to discuss global efforts to fight child labour on cocoa farms in West Africa and elsewhere through a worldwide alliance, news organisations reported. The Miami Herald Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News said the three-day meeting, which started on Tuesday, was spurred by reports in 2001 of "child slavery" on cocoa farms in West Africa. It said the reports stunned chocolate manufacturers. Participants have been discussing goals including certification by 2005 on all chocolate and cocoa that it was made without slave labour. However, they said they had no idea how widespread the problem was, nor could they gauge whether they had had any measurable effect so far on so-called slavery. They also believed observers would be needed for a least a decade to monitor the situation. A pilot survey to assess how widespread abuses like child labour on cocoa farms were in Cote d'Ivoire had been halted by the current insurgency, the Tribune said. It quoted a US Labour department report as saying there were 200,000 child labourers in Cote d'Ivoire. "How many were abused or forced to work without pay was unknown. The typical story is a child, sometimes as young as 11, who is lured to leave their homes in Burkina Faso or Mali with promises of high pay and discovers the future is 12-hour days with little food, inhuman living conditions and beatings," the Herald reported. Larry Graham, president of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, told the conference that agricultural specialists the industry had sent to West Africa to work on sustainable tree crop programmes said they had never witnessed slavery. "But everyone insisted that slavery was part of a more difficult problem of rural poverty and that the alliance was only starting to understand what it could do," the newspaper reported.