Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  The ILRF threatened to upset the apple cart so carefully loaded by the collaboration of congressmen, Big Chocolate executives, the government of Côte d’Ivoire and a network of well-intentioned NGOs. The agencies that endorsed the protocol approach regarded the ILRF petition skeptically and grumbled that the labour rights organization was employing guerrilla tactics that would only create more trouble. The effect the ILRF petition was likely to have, said the dissenters, was to get Ivorian cocoa banned from the U.S. market, an act that would bankrupt Côte d’Ivoire and throw everyone out of work.

  It was a risk the ILRF seemed willing to take. Athreya said she believed an actual boycott would never happen, since Big Chocolate would capitulate before it lost access to its prime ingredient. The companies would be forced to prove to U.S. Customs that their cocoa was clean, rather than being able to hide behind a deal made in the backrooms of the industry and Congress. It was effectively the beginning of a game between the ILRF and the U.S.-based transnational cocoa companies to see who would blink first. The stakes were high: the fate of tens of thousands of Ivorian cocoa farmers and their desperately poor employees hung in the balance.

  While the ILRF followed its own course, the circle of protocol supporters only got larger. International organized labour, led by the ILO, along with a broadening number of non-profit groups, plus cocoa companies outside the United States—and the governments of cocoa-producing countries—all met in July 2002 in Geneva, where they agreed to make the Harkin-Engel Protocol global, under Swiss law calling it the International Cocoa Initiative. What had been a gleam in Congressman Engel’s eye a year earlier had developed into a bureaucracy with a thick alphabet soup of initialisms representing dozens of organizations, some newly invented.

  Big Chocolate rejected what its officials considered the hearsay reports of overexcited journalists. And just as the Cadburys had hired an investigator in the face of Nevinson’s disclosures a century before, the companies initiated their own inquiry, assigning the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), a Nigeria-based institution, to find out just how many children worked on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Guinea, and to report on their working conditions. While the industry calls the study “independent,” the World Cocoa Foundation—Big Chocolate’s philanthropic front—actually played a key role in its development, while the U.S. government provided much of the funding. The ILO, already on side to the protocol, helped to design the questions. When the Cadburys wanted their own version of events in West Africa, they openly handed over a wad of cash to the man of their choice. In the contemporary world, such transactions fall under the auspices of a dozen public sector “partners.”

  After some months of research in West Africa, the IITA concluded that assertions of child exploitation on cocoa farms were exaggerated and the problem was not as pervasive as media reports claimed it was. There was poverty, certainly, but most—if not all—of the children on farms worked in conditions that were normal in their culture. “Everyone was pretty surprised by all the wild figures being thrown around,” said Jim Gockowski, who led the study, referring to the earlier suggestion by the U.S. State Department that fifteen thousand children had been victims of trafficking. He told the New York Times, “By and large, the cocoa industry didn’t deserve the rap it got.” He pointed out that everyone knows “that African kids help out on farms.” The IITA published only a summary of its findings, not a full report, and it never explained how it obtained any of its numbers.

  The NGOs and labour rights activists who had endorsed—or in some cases signed—the protocol were livid. Anita Sheth learned, through Save the Children’s field offices in West Africa, that IITA researchers had been “uneasy” when interviewing children about what they did on the farms, and often didn’t ask them hard questions. And she was told that the researchers relied without skepticism on testimony from the farmers, who were allowed to supervise all interviews. In some cases, the farmers spoke on behalf of the kids. Sheth dismissed the IITA study in a report: “Save the Children Canada believes that the IITA study results do not accurately reflect the … practices of child labour and child trafficking on Ivorian cocoa farms.”

  Anti-Slavery International complained that the methodology of the survey was skewed. The researchers didn’t actually investigate child trafficking but simply questioned child workers about their “level of satisfaction in the job.”

  All of the surveying for the IITA report was done in the cocoa-producing countries of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, not in the labour-producing countries throughout West Africa. One aid worker in Mali says he was surprised that the IITA people never came to investigate reports that an estimated one hundred Malian children were crossing the border every week. It may or may not have been the intention of the IITA to take the legs out from under the child labour activists, but that’s the effect the report had, much to the satisfaction of industry players.

  Despite all the limitations, the questionable research and the conservative point of view, the IITA study did acknowledge a very large problem. The survey reported that 284,000 children worked in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in West Africa, over two-thirds of them in Côte d’Ivoire, where they were required to spray chemicals without proper protective equipment and to clear areas using machetes that they couldn’t always manage. The report said most of the children toiled under the supervision of their families and relatives, making them ineligible for the bonded labour or slavery category since this work fell into the category of family “chores.” But it also concluded that 12,000 of the children were working on farms where they seemed to have no family ties and that about 2,500 may have been smuggled into the country for the purposes of working on these farms.

  There was enough alarming news in the study to point to a larger systemic problem, but the chocolate companies preferred to focus on the study’s conclusions that showed previous investigations had exaggerated reports of child slavery. A plethora of media reports, mostly in the sympathetic business press, heralded that the “child slave” issue in the cocoa chain was a crock. “Sigh of Relief for Chocolate” declared the influential Dow Jones Newswire. The industry has “done its homework,” affirmed its business reporter Enza Tedesco, who reported, “Some market participants say they are completely exonerated.”

  Speaking anonymously to selected reporters, chocolate industry officials sprinkled quotes through the media: “They’ll know now,” said one nameless cocoa dealer, referring to the public, “that it’s not big plantation owners with thousands of laborers slaving under poor conditions, but rather small crop holders with heads of households trying to feed their families.” The dealer goes on to suggest that people should eat more chocolate instead of boycotting it so that the farmers in Africa can make more money and poverty in West Africa can be eradicated. A quote from another “relieved” cocoa industry expert said that the hazardous working conditions for children are just part of the culture of those countries and are not abusive by African standards. “The fact that the kids don’t go to school is not because they’re being kept at home working,” claimed the expert, with not a hint of irony. “It’s because there are no schools.”

  What’s remarkable is that the news from the IITA report came as such a comfort to the chocolate companies. A conservative, and by many accounts inadequately researched, report still concluded that hundreds of thousands of children were working in hazardous conditions; that they were poor and unable to go to school; and that many of them had probably been installed in their jobs by child traffickers. But somehow, as long as they were not called “slaves,” and as long as the numbers were in the modest hundreds of thousands, there was no issue. That children in undetermined numbers were suffering from poverty so extreme that they would “volunteer” to accept the tender intervention of child traffickers; that their parents were willing to sell them to anonymous middlemen rather than struggle to feed them for another day; that cocoa producers were so desperate to make a
living that they’d resort to the bondage and imprisonment of children to maintain an affordable labour force—none of these unchallenged findings seemed to bother the leaders of the industry that solicited the information.

  On August 28, 2002, with information from Save the Children Canada workers at Horon So, Malian authorities arrested three men caught transporting dozens of children over the border. They’d paid local people between 25,000 and 30,000 West African francs for each child. The detention of these suspects revealed to all that, in spite of international concerns and publicity, the criminal industry was still quite active. Border police in Mali complained that smugglers were difficult to locate since communities often covered for them. Families received desperately needed money from the “brokers,” and they had convinced themselves and their neighbours that it was all for the best, all part of the faint hope that their kids were really going off to work and would prosper and one day return to share the fruits of their good fortune. How could parents admit that, in reality, they were selling their children into a modern form of slavery?

  The arrests came almost concurrently with the IITA study, but that didn’t mitigate the triumph in the press releases from the industry. Ivorian authorities argued that the detentions only proved that the Bouaké Accords were working and that there was no longer a significant problem with trafficking.

  With the authorities in Africa making arrests and the Harkin-Engel Protocol in force, the child labour issue was well on its way to having being “dealt with,” as one industry player described it. It was back to business and a well-established tradition of privacy among the titans of chocolate. There was no longer any purpose to be served by talking to the public. The corporations refused requests for attributable interviews after the protocol was signed, deferring all comment to the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF). Bill Guyton of the WCF became the face and voice of Big Chocolate, an unflappable, even-tempered young man who exudes profound concern for children. He insists that the industry is doing all that it can. “We will put a system in place to monitor child labour in the cocoa chain and we will take corrective action,” Guyton says in every interview. “But you can’t chase down every bean,” he adds, with prudent caution and a smile that tells you it’s almost absurd to think otherwise.

  Long-deceased Cadburys would envy the effectiveness of modern lobbying and message management. Had it been available in their time, they certainly could have avoided much of their bad press. And contemporary leaders in the cocoa business might have felt a private satisfaction that, in the ranks of their critics, there was no one with the dogged, uncompromising commitment of Henry Nevinson. On the contrary, they had the advantage of a modern phenomenon called pack journalism.

  Like tropical fish, reporters often swim collectively in one direction and then abruptly turn to go the other way. Just over a year after the explosive Blewett-Woods documentary and the florid reporting that followed it, journalists went back to the children and the aid workers who had been interviewed by earlier journalists and filmmakers, but this time to challenge their veracity. The most prominent report to rise from this revision showed up in the pages of the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

  A young maverick reporter named Michael Finkel was making a name for himself at the magazine for daredevil trips and unorthodox reporting methods. He landed his first cover story after he joined the desperate passengers of a rickety Haitian refugee boat as they attempted a death-defying escape through shark-infested waters to the United States. After this exclusive, Finkel was off to cover violence in Gaza and, soon after that, he investigated the illegal market for human organs—all sensational stories that won him high praise in some circles but criticism in others for being a bit of a stuntman.

  In the spring of 2001, the New York Times Magazine handed Finkel a copy of the Blewett-Woods documentary on slavery in Côte d’Ivoire and a file from the British-based Anti-Slavery International along with an assignment to investigate child labour in the cocoa fields. He showed up in Côte d’Ivoire in June 2001 and then hooked up with the Malian Association of Daloa, the same group that had informed Blewett and Woods that ninety per cent of cocoa farms used child conscripts as part of their labour force.

  The association set up interviews for Finkel with teenaged boys who had escaped the drudgery of bonded farm work. Finkel says he quickly grew skeptical of the stories he heard from the boys because they all seemed to be saying the same thing—as though they had been coached. One boy talked of his beatings on the farm, but Finkel doubted the boy’s sincerity. He asked to see the scars from the thrashings, but the boy said his wounds had healed. Finkel asked others to show him scars, but apparently no boy could present a single unsightly blemish.

  Finkel also disclosed that, while it’s routine to “present timely gifts or to grease a few palms” in the course of one’s work in such countries, the fixers and facilitators he met in Côte d’Ivoire were more aggressive and more greedy in their pursuit of fees and bribes than he normally experienced and that made him more suspicious. “If you listened to certain members of the Malian Association and took notes and tilted your head just so—well, yes, there was slavery,” Finkel wrote. “If journalists are willing to pay good money to see slaves, it seemed as though some official with the Malian Association was more than willing to provide them.”

  All of this was enough to convince Finkel that he was in pursuit of the wrong story. “I changed my tack,” Finkel explained in his eventual exposé. “Rather than looking for slaves, I was looking for liars.” A less dogmatic approach might have been to seek out both slaves and liars, since both probably existed in the cocoa fields. But Finkel clearly felt he’d been duped, and that the issue to be investigated wasn’t child labour but deception.

  When he returned to the United States, Finkel told his editors that, instead of writing about slavery, he wanted to write a piece about how journalists see what they want to see and how NGOs perpetuate errors to suit their own interests. His editor thought that a better idea would be to write a feature describing one boy’s story; people could then decide for themselves whether the children are really slaves. Finkel complied. The headline that eventually appeared with his story, which ran over a large photo of a sad-faced teenager, asked: “Is Youssouf Male a Slave?”

  In the article, Finkel describes Male’s life, writing as though he was speaking from the boy’s own point of view. Using this emotive technique, Finkel raises doubt as to whether Male was a slave or just another victim of conventional and systemic poverty. The story strongly suggests that Male had been manipulated by NGOs such as Save the Children Canada, that, according to Finkel, used the Blewett-Woods documentary to indoctrinate the children while they were at the Horon So refuge. The boys were persuaded that they were enslaved against their will, suggests Finkel’s story, even though they were probably just poor kids looking for jobs and a chance to buy American goods such as Nike running shoes, as Youssouf Male apparently did.

  Finkel’s piece, published in November 2001, at the height of the Big Chocolate public relations campaign, was a bonus for revisionists and a blow to the NGOs’ fragile work to stop child trafficking and bonded labour. Save the Children Canada was outraged, as Finkel’s story made it appear as though the organization had been coaching the children. But Anita Sheth saw something even more troubling about the article. As she read “Is Youssouf Male a Slave?” it seemed to Sheth that the details about the boy’s story didn’t quite add up and she instructed her field office in Mali to find Male to ask him some questions. Sheth discovered more than she’d bargained for. Finkel’s story about fabricated facts had its own fishy smell and contained numerous glaring errors—he was even wrong on the dates he said he’d been at Horon So. What was even more intriguing was that the photograph of “Youssouf Male” was really someone else, Madou Traoré, the boy from Sirkasso who had stolen his father’s bike and run away to the cocoa groves with Aly Diabate.

  Finkel was just returning from covering the war in Afghanis
tan when Anita Sheth finally tracked him down. She told him she’d found his article confusing. Could he explain some facts? Finkel complied. When his attempt to clarify his story provoked further questions from Sheth, Finkel finally admitted that he had created a composite character based on a number of the children he had interviewed. He eventually confessed, in a series of emails, that he hadn’t actually seen Youssouf Male at Horon So, nor had he ever witnessed children watching the Blewett-Woods film. Male, he said, was just one of the boys he interviewed. (Sheth has Male on tape saying he never met the American journalist.) Finkel pleaded with Sheth in emails and phone calls not to expose his liberties with the truth. The New York Times was being rocked with scandal over other journalistic lapses. He’d surely lose his job. His small children would suffer. (Sheth would later learn he had no children.)

  Sheth told him that Save the Children was interested only in the truth—his article, loaded with lies, was damaging to the organization. If the New York Times Magazine would simply publish a correction, including the correct name on the photo, that would be enough. Privately, she thought this would probably be sufficient to get Mr. Finkel fired.

  In order to get the photo corrected, Finkel had to come clean with his editors, who quickly became suspicious: If he’d falsified the identity of his main character, what else might be fabricated? Finkel admitted to the composite character and said he was only trying to present a realistic picture. Everything else was true, even if it never happened. But his editors didn’t accept his defence of creative licence. They banished Finkel from the magazine and published a lengthy correction of the facts in the next edition. Months later, the magazine reported that it had closely double-checked all previous articles by Finkel and had found no other serious discrepancies, certainly none on the scale of the Youssouf Male story.