by Carol Off
The public relations problem for big chocolate was acute. Hershey Park, a sprawling tourist attraction of midway rides and food concessions that was now at the centre of Milton’s Pennsylvania town, had become a wholesome holiday destination for American families. Controlling interest of Hershey Foods was in the hands of the charity that Milton Hershey had established. M&Ms were sold in schools, and Mars had partnerships with publishers to market its wares through books for children, using cartoon characters. Skittles, Reese’s Pieces, Hershey’s Kisses, Aero, Kit Kat—these iconic treats would now have to pass a test of their moral qualities. All were subject to the labelling requirement, from chocolate Easter bunnies to the boxes of candies sold door to door to raise money for school equipment. U.S.-based chocolate companies and foreign subsidiaries Hershey, Mars, Cadbury and Nestlé, as well as the large U.S. food conglomerates, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, faced the possibility of enormous losses from investors and from an American public that, when confronted with injustice, has been known to flex its considerable purchasing muscle. Basketballs and Barbie dolls had become issues in previous fights with child labour activists. Sports and toy manufacturers had come out of the ring with more than a few bruises. How could the candy companies hope to win?
Eliot Engel’s House amendment caused a stir in the hot Washington air but after he teamed up with Tom Harkin, a Democrat in the Senate, the labelling idea became a full-blown windstorm. “Harkin was in a position to do profound things,” says Pete Leon, the Legislative Director for Congressman Engel. Senator Harkin introduced a revised version of the Engel amendment into the Senate that had much bigger teeth and four times the money available to enforce the legislation. “Industry was worried when the amendment passed the house,” says Leon, “but it really flipped when the Senator got involved.”
Harkin presents himself as a small-town boy from Iowa who is willing to take on big international human rights issues—though in some cases he’s done so with disastrous consequences. In 1992, Senator Harkin had first introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which proposed a U.S. ban on importing products made with child labour. The legislation ultimately failed to pass Congress but even the threat of such a boycott sent a chill through industry worldwide and had devastating consequences, particularly in Bangladesh, where the country’s garment manufacturers abruptly dismissed about fifty thousand child workers. Most of the children had been supporting their familes and were subsequently forced to turn to other more dangerous and less lucrative employment—some in rock crushing and many others in prostitution. It was perhaps a well-motivated gesture on the part of the senator, but it demonstrated some of the unintended consequences of benevolence.
The potential for a similar outcome was very real in Côte d’Ivoire. A ban on cocoa could devastate that country’s economy and affect the entire region. Itinerant workers from all over West Africa depended on jobs in the Ivorian cocoa sector. Human rights workers, who had been trying to get the U.S. Congress interested in the worst forms of child labour for years, now worried that grandstanding by publicity-seeking congressmen might actually make matters worse. The reality is, in much of the world, children work. The trick is to identify the fine line between human rights and economic necessity—and the tolerance of morally sensitive consumers who like to have their issues served to them in clear black and white terms.
All of the-back and-forth with human rights activists and the congressmen convinced the chocolate companies that they were going to have a hard time proving they had “clean” chocolate if the “slave free” label system went into effect. At first, the umbrella organizations for big chocolate glossed over the issue. Susan Smith, the vice president of public affairs for the Chocolate Manufacturers Association (CMA), said, “A lot of us grew up on farms and we know it’s normal for children to work.” She speculated publicly whether children were really being exploited in Côte d’Ivoire, or whether the news accounts were sensationalized. “The boy was probably paid to say that ‘you are eating my flesh,’” one cocoa company executive remarked, off the record, when I mentioned the Blewett-Woods documentary to him. “There’s no way that he would know to say that unless he had been coached.” Regardless, the boy did say it, and the media that covered the story now quoted him widely.
Big Chocolate tossed the political hot potato in the direction of the Côte d’Ivoire government: it was the government’s responsibility to guarantee clean cocoa, the industry insisted. But the government in Yamoussoukro only deepened the public relations crisis when it blamed the problem on “foreigners.” A letter from Côte d’Ivoire to the United Nations asserted that “the noble, courageous, proud and assuredly hospitable people of Côte d’Ivoire” produce most of the cocoa in the country. “Of the ten per cent of foreigners [meaning people from Mali and Burkina Faso] involved in agricultural activities, two or three per cent engage in child trafficking, many of whom [child labourers] also join the ranks of street children in the cities.” The communiqué fixed all of the blame on the immigrant population, the Dioula, many of whom had come to Côte d’Ivoire at the invitation of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Malian and Burkinabè farmers were the likely culprits, according to the Ivorian government, since it was they who had access to the children from their own countries.
There is a modicum of truth to these assertions, since the poorest farmers in Côte d’Ivoire are those from Mali and Burkina Faso. Many are sharecroppers—farmers who don’t own land but only use it and they would be the most desperate for cheap labour. Ultimately however, the argument had limited credibility: only a few months after Côte d’Ivoire signed the Bouaké Accords, authorities arrested thirteen child traffickers, several of whom were Ivorians. And Ivorians were prominent among the farmers who were not paying their child workers—Abdoulaye Macko had pursued many of them. Racist arguments were hardly going to help the Ivorian government protect its industry or help the chocolate companies defend their reputations.
Faced with a public relations debacle, Big Chocolate called in the lobbyists. The CMA retained the services of one-time presidential candidate Bob Dole and paired him up with retired Democratic senator George Mitchell. The two savvy politicians, both former majority Senate leaders, argued on their clients’ behalf that chocolate companies could not possibly know what was happening on 600,000 cocoa farms. But according to a source on Capitol Hill, Dole and Mitchell also advised the chocolate companies to try to broker a deal—to get the pesky NGOs and the high-minded congressmen onside before things got out of hand. The lobbyists voiced concerns, according to the source, that “too many reporters are willing to go to Africa and get kids to say on record that they’re slaves.”
With their powerful connections, Dole and Mitchell seemed to make an impact. Their political timing was also providential. There were elections coming in 2002 and people running for office—candidates who needed money and knew it wouldn’t be wise to step on the toes of potential corporate donors. According to official records, Harkin’s election war chest had $12,000 from Archer Daniels Midland, as well as $35,000 from sugar companies and another $20,000 from the dairy industry, one of the key players in the chocolate business. Championing children’s rights was a good idea from an image point of view, but this was perhaps not the year for a senator who was chairman of the Senate’s Agricultural Committee and whose political base was in the farm fields of Iowa to take on the giants in the food business. Before the anti-slavery rider on the agricultural bill could clear the Senate, the politicians found a way to compromise with Big Chocolate.
The Harkin-Engel Protocol, as it came to be called, would be one of the first fully voluntary arrangements for regulating industry in U.S. history and certainly the most ambitious. The cocoa companies agreed to accept a six-point program designed to eliminate child slave labour in the cocoa chain. The chocolate manufacturers, plus the cocoa exporters and importers and the government of Côte d’Ivoire, would work alongside the NGOs and the International Labour Organization (ILO) to set up a
monitoring and verification system. It was a moral undertaking; those who signed on were not legally committed. The transnational corporations also agreed to a vague avowal to help improve the lives of cocoa farmers and to get more African children into schools, the oversight for which would come from the ILO.
Each step of the six-point program had a deadline supposedly leading to the final abolition of abusive child labour in the cocoa supply chain by July 1, 2005, when they would have “credible, mutually acceptable, voluntary, industry-wide standards of public certification consistent with applicable federal law, that cocoa beans and their derivative products have been produced without the worst forms of child labour.” If the industry failed to eradicate “the worst forms of child labour” on cocoa farms within that time, the politicians would revert back to plan A: the much-feared “slave free” labelling system.
Anita Sheth of Save the Children Canada, a veteran activist and champion of child rights on West African cocoa farms, complained that wording in the agreement appeared to be deliberately vague, and there were holes in it large enough to drive a truck through. Sheth now believes the early efforts on the part of the NGOs to reform the industry were hampered by inexperience and ignorance. No one really knew what they were talking about, she says: “We needed a proper definition of what we were trying to solve.” Words like “slavery” seemed overblown and raised the hackles of both industry players and Ivorian authorities. The language slowly evolved until it included the palatable euphemism “the worst forms of child labour,” a legal description of compulsory labour that comes from the directives of the ILO. It was certainly a less sensational term than “slavery,” and many children’s rights activists wanted to crank down the rhetoric of the debate. They were worried that their own campaign might do more harm than good. Says Sheth, “What we wanted was to take the hazards out of the work and not the child out of work. There are circumstances in which children should be able to have jobs—and they want to have jobs.”
In addition to more enforcement of laws against child trafficking, Sheth wanted the industry to enforce a comprehensive ban on work that was too hard for children to do, such as carrying heavy sacks or using tools, such as machetes, that they aren’t old enough to handle. The protocol, as she understood it, was also supposed to cover work that kept children out of school or that exposed them to health hazards such as agricultural chemicals.
Nowhere in the agreement does it suggest that the cocoa companies might simply undertake to make sure the farmers received a decent price for their beans. And yet almost every critic of the industry has identified the key problem: poverty among the primary producers. Farmers seek, and exploit, the cheapest forms of labour possible because of economic necessity. Time and sophistication equipped all the other players in the chocolate production chain to extract a satisfactory return for their investment of work and capital—everyone except the farmers on the bottom of the pile. Sheth throws up her hands at this failure: “How effective will the Harkin-Engel Protocol be in the long run when it doesn’t address the direct correlation between low prices paid to farmers for their cocoa beans and the type and quality of labour employed?” The prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire had warned cocoa companies when the child trafficking scandal first emerged that the manufacturers would have to pay about ten times more for their cocoa if they really wanted to end forced labour.
One labour leader who was involved in the inside talks to establish the protocol says off the record that every time he would ask, “Why not just pay a better price for beans?” of the industry people in the room, “the lawyers for the chocolate companies would snap to attention and announce that it was against U.S. law to price-fix. There was just no way around these guys.”
From a public relations point of view, the protocol was a brilliant coup for Big Chocolate. It bought them some time and possibly did away with the threat of labelling—all they had to do was make a show of compliance, and then drag their feet for a while. The politicians would go away, seduced by some other issue of the moment. Eliot Engel denied that the protocol was a climb-down from his originally aggressive and principled reaction to what he’d learned about life in the cocoa groves. The industry got a clear message from the legislators: “They know we mean business, and we do,” he said in an interview after the protocol was signed. The deadline structure is rigid, he declared, and failure to meet each milestone will mean that that U.S. legislation will once again become likelihood. Big Chocolate had committed itself to having “clean” cocoa by July 1, 2005, and Engel confirmed that they would find a way to independently verify that exploited child labour was not one of their ingredients.
To help sell the initiative, the chocolate companies retained the services of a who’s who of public relations firms. According to La Lettre du Continent, an African-based newsletter for the European market, the lobbying industry experienced a mini-boom, thanks to the Harkin-Engel Protocol: Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy represented Cargill; while Barbour Griffith & Rogers and Hogan & Hartson worked for Nestlé. Other firms opened files for the Chocolate Manufacturers Association—fronting for Hershey and Mars—and still others worked for the Ivorian government.
The NGOs had never managed to take effective control of the issue and were no match for this kind of mobilization. Their uncoordinated efforts had been all over the map, complain some aid workers. “We were playing ‘coalition politics,’” says one activist, who criticized the protocol as an escape hatch for the industry but who also blames the aid agencies and human rights activists for capitulating along with the politicians. The Harkin-Engel Protocol appointed (critics would say co-opted) the NGOs who were involved in the child labour issue to be the watchdogs of the process. A number of American NGOs endorsed the protocol through their own umbrella organizations, declaring it the best possible solution to the problem.
Anita Sheth took a hold-your-fire position, concluding that, if the deadlines were not met, she and others would resume the pressure later. But Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves, who was an advisor and a signatory to the protocol from the NGO side, was immediately effusive in his praise for the deal, calling it a model for other manufacturing sectors: “If other industries acted with such social and moral responsibility, we would be much nearer to freedom for the 27 million bonded worldwide,” reads a statement from Bales.
Only one major U.S. organization publicly broke ranks with the NGOs and rejected the protocol. The International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) is of the old, take-no-prisoners school of political agitation that eschews any compromise with industry. The fund was founded in the mid-1980s by a Methodist minister, at a time when the aggressive and often ruthless expansion of American corporations into the developing world had coincided with a complete lack of concern on the part of the international labour movement in the plight of workers in those countries. Trade union bosses in Central America were being murdered yet no one seemed interested in their cause. The newly-minted International Labor Rights Fund stepped into situations that were just too hot for any other group to handle.
Twenty years later, the ILRF is still marching to its own drum, resisting any compromise with industry. While many activists in the human rights business argue in favour of cooperation with big business, even insisting that “partnerships” with their adversaries are essential in the modern world, the ILRF refuses. The fund has filed eight specific lawsuits in as many years and has initiated a number of charges against big corporations, including an attack on the world’s largest oil company, Exxon Mobil.
Natacha Thys, a young human rights attorney working for ILRF, was the first in the organization to flag the serious flaws in the cocoa protocol. “I thought the congressmen were on the right track with the labelling plan,” she says of the proposed law that would force Big Chocolate to get a “slave free” stamp before selling their wares in the United States. “That idea was punitive. It had teeth. My feeling was why go through this whole process and sign on to it if, in the end, no one is going to
enforce it?” Thys was alarmed, but not surprised, when so many other American aid agencies and activists endorsed the protocol. She says, “Other NGOs who don’t deal with the corporate world were naive about how adversarial business can be. ‘We can dialogue,’ they all said. But those of us who fight corporations—we know their m.o. And we know how to deal with them.”
In the spring of 2002, the ILRF dispatched Haitian-born economist Marx-Vilaire Aristide to West Africa to find out what was really happening on cocoa farms. It was the first of many trips to the region that allowed Aristide to infiltrate the cocoa chain in ways no other researcher had done, making connections with farmers, workers, pisteurs and children, and he was able to discover how the job brokers buy and sell children for farm work. Aristide concluded that the children, even those who were being paid, were forced to stay until the end of the season. Farmers told Aristide quite frankly that the business of child labour bondage was a reality, and necessary for their survival. For the child brokers, the trade was so brisk, and the chances of being caught so slim, that it was worth the theoretical risk of punishment.
In May 2002, based on Aristide’s research, the ILRF filed a petition to the United States Customs Department demanding an investigation into cocoa entering the country from Côte d’Ivoire. All cocoa imports to the United States should be stopped, the claim stated, pending completion of the investigation because of the strong possibility that the importers were in contravention of U.S. law. Since 1930, the United States has prohibited the importation of goods produced with slaves. “The burden is on the industry to prove that it’s not using child labour,” declared Bama Athreya, deputy director of the ILRF. The organization argued that the onus had to be on the transnational corporations, not the cocoa farmers, to stop the odious practice, because they were the only ones with the power to do so. Chocolate is a big international business, Athreya argued, and farmers have no control over the supply chain. For the ILRF, the Harkin-Engel Protocol was a dead letter: “Whatever the chocolate manufacturers claim to be doing about this, we cannot leave a problem as serious as child slavery to voluntary private efforts, particularly when there is a federal law on the books to combat it,” said Athreya.