Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  The transporters union for this region of Mali has its base on the main drag of Zégoua, and, from its sprawling garage depot, drivers have a unique vantage point for monitoring the daily activities of the town. Car rental offices and minibus agencies are nearby, and they watch the boys and young men as they lurk in the corners, waiting for lifts into Côte d’Ivoire. For many years, the truckers thought nothing of it. They had, themselves, gone to Côte d’Ivoire as youngsters looking for work. But the networks of traffickers, delivering kids to farms where they will work for nothing, are relatively new in their experience.

  As part of a campaign to educate Malians about the realities of bonded servitude, Save the Children Canada conducted a five-day instruction course for the truckers, paid them for the time and handed out certificates afterwards.

  “We were very happy with the program,” Balla Keita tells me. He’s president of the transporters union here, and he calls a number of the men into the garage to explain what they learned on their course. “The instructors told us about the development of a child. How they trust adults when they are young but then turn to their friends when they are a bit older.” The transporters were fascinated with this rudimentary education in child development. They realized for the first time that what they thought to be ordinary activity was, perhaps, abusive. Children seemed to go with the traffickers voluntarily, so the drivers thought nothing of it. “We didn’t think it was a problem,” Keita explains. “We thought the men [traffickers] were just doing their jobs. If we stopped one, he might try to sue us.”

  Save the Children Canada told the transporters they should challenge the traffickers—who would probably abandon the children as soon as they saw trouble—and then bring the children to Horon So, where they would be cared for and returned to their families. The transporters took up the task enthusiastically. A trucker tells me that the previous week he personally took four boys into custody. They were on foot, accompanied by a man who didn’t seem to know them. Emboldened by what he had learned in his five-day course, the driver was suspicious and approached the stranger to ask what he was doing. The man was vague and excused himself on the pretence that he was going to get some cigarettes. He never came back. “I took the four children to Sikasso [a two-hour drive],” the driver explains. “I called Save the Children to come and get the children, but no one came.”

  The driver learned that Save the Children’s Horon So operation had been shut down only weeks after they had finished their five-day course and there was no one from the agency working in the region, despite what they had said during the training program. The driver had used his own petrol to bring the boys to Sikasso. He had very little food—just his own meagre lunch—and he had no money to buy groceries. He lost a day’s pay before someone finally told him that the local agency Mali Enjeu had accommodations for recovered children. He was thankful to leave his charges there, but it had been an unwelcome ordeal and he tells me he will not do it again. As they listen to their colleague’s story, the other truckers finger the corners of their certificates and agree with him, grumbling that they’ll hesitate before getting involved with smugglers.

  Chief Coulibaly says he had the same experience. Aid agencies such as Save the Children Canada alerted him to the child-trafficking problem when he arrived here. But many of these foreign NGOs seem to have gone on to other things. He worries about who will take care of kids he might find in the future. He personally housed a group of intercepted children recently until their parents could be found. But he had to pay for their upkeep out of his own pocket. If child trafficking picks up after the war, as he suspects it will, Coulibaly isn’t sure how he’ll handle the volume.

  Save the Children Canada says the program at Horon So was just too expensive to maintain for the number of children who needed the facility. The war years had made it more difficult and perilous for the traffickers to deliver their human cargo to the cocoa farms of Côte d’Ivoire. With the immediate crisis settled, Save the Children thought it best that local NGOs take over the task. “At the end of the day, it’s a domestic issue,” Save the Children’s Nadine Grant says of the responsibility for taking care of the recovered children.

  Coulibaly says that’s all very well but he’s anticipating a surge in trafficking when—or if—the war should end in Côte d’Ivoire. The country will not only be back to business but also be seeking cheap labour in order to rebuild. The chief expects the job-brokers will be even more aggressive than before and he’s worried about something else. “There are a lot more weapons in the region than ever before,” he says. Northern Côte d’Ivoire is now awash with small arms that will undoubtedly be available to smugglers and crime rings. “I would not encourage the truckers to stop them in the future,” says Coulibaly.

  Save the Children Canada is still training the transporters but now has a somewhat different program in place. A half dozen bus stations in both southern Mali and neighbouring Burkina Faso now have transporters acting as monitors who look for children in flight. The monitors register the names of any unaccompanied young people who are in transit and they also call security when they suspect a child trafficker is pursuing any of the kids. The project is sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency but it’s destined to last only until 2007. Save the Children Canada acknowledges that, should the Ivorian war come to a conclusion, the trafficking business will ignite like a brush fire. And children will be more vulnerable than ever.

  In Sikasso, the Malian aid agency Guamina conducts a training program for teenagers from the region in an effort to discourage them from leaving the country. Since the border into Côte d’Ivoire has become easier to cross, Guamina is anxious to coach young people about the evils of the cocoa farms. Guamina has inherited the indoctrination program launched by Save the Children Canada.

  Working on a little wooden stage at Guamina’s community centre, teenaged boys and girls role-play various scenarios, using stories and anecdotes picked up from boys who have returned from the horrors of bonded labour. The young performers take different parts in what amounts to agitprop. Some of them play-act as traffickers who lure children with promises of wealth. Others take the roles of Ivorian farmers who beat children. Finally, we meet the heroes, representatives from Malian associations who will help them get back home. These are transparent little dramas with unambiguous messages about the evils of working in Côte d’Ivoire.

  When the audience is asked for input, some of the young spectators want to see a version with a different ending, where a boy actually becomes gainfully employed. The Guamina leader steps in at this point to tell them it is not allowed. He whispers to me that they worry parents will want to send the kids, or even sell them, if they suspect there is the slightest possibility that it might yield riches. The young people sitting in the audience also whisper—they’ve all heard of someone who went to Côte d’Ivoire and came back with a bicycle.

  The propaganda fails to dent the faint hope of the desperate.

  The willingness of the children to go to Côte d’Ivoire is often cited as evidence that the children are not slaves. But “volunteering” on the remote chance that one can make a little bit of money to relieve the gnawing inevitability of a hungry belly hardly seems like a reasonable choice.

  In Washington, months before the deadline for the elimination of the worst forms of child labour in the cocoa chain, Representative Engel and Senator Harkin felt they needed to raise a flag. On February 14, 2005, the two congressmen published an op-ed article in U.S. newspapers condemning the chocolate companies for a perceived cop-out. Billed as a valentine to Big Chocolate, the article revealed that cocoa industry officials had informed the congressmen that they were not going to meet the July 1 deadline. “Instead,” the legislators wrote, “they planned to initiate a small pilot project in Ghana and, perhaps, in Ivory Coast. Although this is certainly a positive step, it falls woefully short of the robust action promised in the protocol.”

  The politicians wrote about the W
ashington certification program for precious gems, imposed on the industry a few years earlier, outlawing the sale in the United States of “blood diamonds”—African stones mined and marketed to raise funds for civil war. Harkin and Engel warned that similar coercion might be necessary for cocoa and declared, “The time for talk has passed. Children are suffering.” They concluded, “This Valentine’s Day, much of our chocolate will be bittersweet—tainted by the suffering of Aly Diabate and countless other cocoa slaves.”

  After the article was published, Eliot Engel told me over the phone that he and Harkin were willing to give the chocolate companies some wiggle room so they can get their act together, but “we’re not going to cave,” he warned. “They know we mean business.”

  The International Cocoa Initiative—the alphabet soup of NGOs, labour unions, rights activists and cocoa company umbrella organizations—admitted there hadn’t been much progress. But some participants, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), were encouraged by the “feeling of momentum” and the fact that the chocolate companies themselves still seemed committed to the notion of “clean” chocolate. The government of Côte d’Ivoire was helpfully reminding the reformers that its country was in the middle of a war and could hardly be expected to deal with child labour while it was fighting “terrorists,” the fashionable post 9–11 term the government had adopted to describe the northern rebels.

  Could the low-key reaction have anything to do with money? A number of NGOs had developed partnerships with Big Chocolate since the protocol was signed. When asked about its efforts to improve conditions for farmers in West Africa, the World Cocoa Federation (WCF) says it was involved in “multimillion-dollar” projects in concert with the ILO, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Labour and the Canadian International Development Agency. Bill Guyton of the WCF says Big Chocolate is collectively volunteering US$6 million this year, of its estimated $13 billion of profits, in “partnerships” to aid agencies. Anita Sheth, a thorn in the side of Big Chocolate, says that the WCF offered Save the Children Canada one of its partnerships—an offer the aid agency rejected, in part, because the amount of money to be provided was so appallingly small. But others have signed on.

  Meanwhile, Ivorian cocoa beans flowed, uninterrupted, into the factories of Europe and North America. Canada, a leading advocate against using cocoa that might be the product of child labour, had actually doubled its cocoa imports from Côte d’Ivoire since the outbreak of the war.

  In the spring of 2005, the war between the north and the south of Côte d’Ivoire was locked in a holding pattern that was more inconvenient than violent. Neither side had anything more to gain from fighting but the stand-off made movement from one part of the country to the other more difficult. The cocoa war in the southwest of the country, from which Kader Ouattara had fled, had not abated in the slightest. All around the villages near the border with Liberia, farm workers huddled in poorly protected international displaced persons camps, unable to return to Mali and Burkina Faso. Well-armed militias and paramilitaries roamed the countryside, terrorizing people. Ange Aboa, from Reuters News Agency, dashed off into the countryside to investigate each bloody massacre. Ange and his driver, Koffi Benoît, would not let me travel with them to many of the locations—they said it was suicidal for white foreigners to visit unless they were accompanied by the heavily armed peacekeepers. But the peacekeepers rarely intervened in the fighting, even to protect the civilian farmers and their families.

  For Ivorians, the descent into war was shocking—the country had thought itself immune from the violence into which neighbours Liberia and Sierra Leone had sunk. For the outside world, the story of yet another bloodbath in an African country was a familiar drama. Foreign news agencies might not have bothered with the story at all if Côte d’Ivoire wasn’t the source of such an important commodity—the world’s chocolate.

  Remarkably, cocoa beans continued to arrive at the main Ivorian port. The manifest for the Port Authority of San-Pédro, the cocoa- and coffee-shipping facility for Côte d’Ivoire, actually indicates a substantial spike in cocoa exports between 2002 and 2004, years of extreme violence in the cocoa belt. The first trimester of 2005 records the first dip in cocoa exports, possibly a result of the fighting, but the decrease is not as large as the gains the exports experienced during the two preceding years.

  Noël Kabora is thankful that he still has work. He’s the pisteur who introduced me to the boys in the village of Sinikosson—the ones who didn’t know what people did with the cocoa beans they harvested. Kabora is a Burkinabè who doesn’t want to return to Burkina Faso. Back home, there’s nothing for Kabora. The war-ravaged cocoa belt of Côte d’Ivoire is a menacing place, but at least the cocoa business is still functioning. Kabora lives in Soubré, a depressing knot of shantytowns built of wood scraps, known to burn down from time to time, culling the city’s population. But Soubré is a district centre for numerous cocoa traders and buyers who supply the large transnationals, and he can usually stay busy here.

  Kabora agrees to take me and Ange deep into the backcountry, as close to the western war zone as possible in order to meet some farmers. When we attempt to leave Soubré, Ivorian checkpoint police detain us for hours and then demand money. The bribes we pay are perhaps inflated because I am a white foreigner, but Africans are all facing the same extortion. The pisteurs pay huge fees along every highway. A certain amount of baksheesh is considered normal in African enterprise, but the amount of bribery on the cocoa routes gobbles up much of the profits earned by pisteurs like Kabora. Cocoa middlemen, mostly Lebanese agents who work for the big cocoa companies, give the pisteurs sums of money to pay the farmers and to cover the bribes. By the time the pisteurs get to their suppliers, however, a lot of their funds have been depleted. The Arab traders I talked to speculate that one reason cocoa exports dipped in 2005 was that the highway robbery by the gendarmes had wiped out any potential profits for the pisteurs—consequently, a lot of them are leaving the business.

  Africa is renowned for corrupt police officers, but Ivorian cocoa country sets a whole new standard for Third-World graft. The gendarmes we meet along the road poke Kalashnikov rifles through the windows of trucks and cars and demand money at gunpoint. Many of them are high on palm wine, and no one offers resistance. The few locals who have dared to challenge their authority have simply disappeared. We pass five such checkpoints in the course of ten kilometres, each one more threatening—and expensive—than the one before.

  Kabora takes us to the farm of Siguino Boueima Zongo, a planter in his fifties with thirty hectares of cocoa trees, along with four wives and fifteen children to support. Zongo also has boys and young men working for him whom he recruits from his village in Burkina Faso. “When I visit home,” he explains, “I let people know I am looking for workers.” Boys, or their parents, volunteer. I count eleven hired hands here, ranging in age from fourteen to nineteen, and they seem as well fed as Zongo’s own family, which isn’t saying much.

  The boys all tell me they expect to be paid for their work on Zongo’s farm, but none has ever seen any money. Zongo explains, at length, how the money he earns from cocoa comes nowhere near the expense of cultivating it. I suspect this is an indirect way of saying the boys will probably not be renumerated at the end of the two years for which they have been engaged.

  Zongo’s enterprise was once highly lucrative, and he is respected by pisteurs such as Noël Kabora for the high quality of his goods. Yet even with hard work and a solid reputation, making a living in cocoa is impossible. It’s not hard to see from Zongo’s farm how easy it is for a producer to slip into the practice of exploiting unpaid child labour.

  No one here attends school, including Zongo’s own children; he says this is because there is no school to go to. The area is populated largely with allogènes, and the Ivorian government provides no services. Even if the schools existed, Zongo’s people speak principally Bambara and don’t know the official language of Côte d’Ivoire�
�French.

  Zongo pays a flat fee for health care for his family, but Kabora tells me later that Zongo likely has no health care program for his workers.

  The workers are shy. The youngest one, a slightly built, sad-looking adolescent of fourteen, tells me he is “proud to do the work of men.” Zongo rarely lets them answer questions for themselves. When reporters such as Blewett and Woods first explored the labour issue in this area, farmers spoke openly about their employment practices. But everyone here now knows about the political discussions in Washington and about a possible boycott of cocoa from Côte d’Ivoire. Zongo has heard about it on the radio, and he knows there is a controversy. He says the boys are treated well and volunteers—unprompted—that there is “no slave labour here.”

  According to Zongo, far more menacing to the boys’ welfare than anything he might ask them to do is the proximity of the drunken soldiers, who make frequent and terrifying raids. Zongo says he doesn’t know how much longer he can keep his business going. When I ask him about ownership of the land, he says emphatically that the thirty hectares belong to him, though he admits he has no papers. “But everyone knows it’s my land,” he insists, hardly able to convince even himself.

  Noël Kabora drives us even deeper into the hinterland. The road is almost non-existent, and there are potholes large enough to consume small cars. Several times I tell Kabora that the route is too washed out—we should turn back. He laughs. This is a road he takes twice a week to pick up beans, and it is never any better. The big lorry rumbles over a few planks laid down over a racing river. It’s remarkable that the country’s main commodity and economic staple depends on roads like this. They are one-way streets for resource wealth. The value that rolls into the ports of San-Pédro and Abidjan never bounces back in the form of profit for producers or, it seems, infrastructure for the vital trade. Desperation is the incentive to produce. Government and corporate indifference leaves primary producers virtually orphaned in the system.