Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  Every kilometre or so there is a stack of bulging bags on the side of the road—cocoa beans ready for pickup—and the unmistakable sour odour of beans still fermenting on the racks, which will be dried and ready for transport in another week. Along the way we see dozens of children who seem to fit Anita Sheth’s description of people working in “hazardous conditions.” Girls carry heavy loads stacked high on their heads, while boys drag machetes as long as their arms behind them. They are stern little people who stare hard at me at first. But a smile and wave is rewarded with trusting grins.

  Some of the older boys carry apparatus on their backs for spraying toxic herbicides and fungicides. They wear no protective clothing. Their feet are bare. When I stop to ask their mothers about the perils of such exposure, the women laugh and tell us the price of a protective face covering would equal the bribes they pay to get their goods to market. They can’t afford to pay for both. The ironic truth is that the danger of the work is reduced by economic circumstances: Many farmers can no longer afford to buy the chemicals they need to keep their trees alive and so spraying has actually decreased.

  Long after it seems there could be no more farms, Kabora edges his truck farther into the woods until we arrive at the most remote of his pickup points, a little Burkinabé commune where, Kabora tells me, there are many boys who work all day in the groves and then attend Koran school in the evenings. He looks at me warily as he tells me this as he seems to find this working arrangement bothersome. The farm sounds suspiciously like a compound for a marabout, one of the Islamic gurus who use religious faith to conceal the exploitation of young workers.

  The owner is just returning from prayers. Even in this remote community, Mohamad has heard about the uproar over child labour, and he is cautious with his answers. Only the older boys work, he tells me, though I can hardly believe that the younger ones I see around me are permitted to sit idle all day. Noël Kabora begins to display anxiety when I persist in my questions about working conditions here. The farmer is indulgent. He shows me the firepit around which he conducts Koran sessions in the evening. Our conversation eventually shifts to less contentious territory—the price of beans, the cost of supplies, the inability to make ends meet. His answers echo the responses I have had from farmers everywhere: The current farm gate price for beans cannot pay even the costs of cultivation, let alone feed a family.

  The sun is melting into the forest as we depart this desolate, forbidding place, conscious of the perils lurking in the darkening bush when night falls and the palm wine starts kicking in at the many checkpoints of the extortionate gendarmerie.

  When we return to Soubré that evening, Kabora takes me to a warehouse where all the pisteurs in this region deliver their beans to be weighed on large scales and stored for pickup by the middlemen. Everyone at the facility knows about the child labour controversy in Washington, and they are reluctant to disclose what they have seen on the farms.

  Alassane Traoré wants me to realize that cocoa farm work is always hazardous. He rolls up his pant leg to show me his machete scars—they all have them—and he insists that such injuries are part of the passage from boyhood to manhood. But Traoré also admits that he sees a lot of abuse on the farms these days.

  Ali Sagnou, another pisteur, says they are all uncomfortable with the word “slavery,” or in French, “esclavage.” It carries the weight of five hundred years of history, the burden of broken societies and their greatest grief. As the term “holocaust” is for Jews, “slavery” is a word reserved for the darkest period of Africa’s collective memory. “Pas d’esclavage,” no slavery, says Sagnou, “but abuse, yes.” What does he mean by abuse? “People don’t pay the kids that they hire,” he explains. As for hazardous conditions, he says everyone—hired hands and even the proprietors—take risks. It comes with the territory.

  Kabora and the other pisteurs are crucial to the cocoa chain of Côte d’Ivoire as none of the cocoa producers have their own vehicles to transfer goods to market. Kabora is their lifeline. The pisteurs have regular contact with the network of 600,000 farms in Côte d’Ivoire and might be the only members of the cocoa chain who have a true overview of farm conditions throughout cocoa country. Abdoulaye Macko depended extensively on pisteurs when he was looking for trafficked children.

  These drivers and warehouse managers could become a crucial link in the chain of enforcement should serious controls ever come into force to limit the exploitation. Activists in Washington and Geneva see them as a potential network of monitors—a front-line force to observe and report on compliance with new rules to protect child workers. Outside inspectors would be spotted quickly and, even if it were possible to create a network of cocoa cops, they would have to depend on the pisteurs to get them to the remote farms where the abuses are occurring.

  Ali Sagnou says he would do it. He doesn’t like the way children are treated. But Noël Kabora shakes his head. “You see where I go to buy the cocoa? I am alone in the bush. If I report people, they will lose their livelihoods. And they would kill me.” I get his point. No one would even find the body.

  But the pisteurs are far more worried about war than child labourers. They can hardly afford to pay the bribes to the gendarmes, whose lucrative roadblocks are becoming ever more common. And they face another threat. The authorities accuse the pisteurs, most of whom are immigrants, of being gunrunners for the rebels. This is a common, and vague, accusation I’ve heard from the authorities throughout the cocoa belt. If Noël Kabora or the others disappeared, it would more likely be at the hands of the soldiers than those of the cocoa farmers.

  Shortly before the July 2005 deadline for the Harkin-Engel protocol, the cocoa companies, in concert with the government of Côte d’Ivoire, announced a small pilot project in a region called Oumé, near Yamoussoukro, and another in Ghana, which were to serve as experiments for how a child labour monitoring system might work. Ghana had no identifiable issue with abusive child labour on cocoa farms and Oumé, in Côte d’Ivoire, was never cited as a problem area. As the congressmen had hinted in their Valentine’s Day address, Big Cocoa was offering up these small pursuits as tokens of their good intentions but little more.

  I first got wind of the Oumé project in June 2005, when I attended a symposium in Abidjan for the stakeholders responsible for putting the project together. The purpose of the event was to explain to members of the cocoa filière or hierarchy, how Côte d’Ivoire proposed to avert any consequences of the July 1 deadline. Delegates—who were all Ivorians and members of the filière—told me privately that they thought the Harkin-Engel Protocol was a crock but they had long ago “learned how to play the game” the way the West wants it played. An official declaration of intent, distributed to members of the media at the end of the two-day get-together, was no less blunt than the informal message people had given me. “Faced with the threats and accusations [from the United States] that weigh heavily on our very existence,” says the communiqué, the delegates to the symposium decided it was necessary to “comply with international laws against the worst forms of child labour.” No mention here of protecting children because it might be the right thing to do. Instead, “We cocoa producers have to show that we are aware of this threat to our livelihood.”

  The Oumé project was the answer to the American critics, and it seemed everyone at the event was certain it was going to be sufficient to satisfy the congressmen in Washington. The program would cost 17 million euros for an initial duration of fifteen months, but no one at the meeting could explain who was going to pay for it or what would happen when the trial period was over.

  I had recently met Malian cocoa farmers from Oumé who told me they had no trouble with either the war or the child smugglers in their region. It’s an old community, and the Dioula are highly organized, with a strong association on the lookout for any badly treated workers. It’s not clear why Côte d’Ivoire chose Oumé for the pilot project. Perhaps it’s because it’s close to the Yamoussoukro airport, an easily accessi
ble showcase for those who might want to inspect conditions and return to the city in time for dinner in one of the many fine French restaurants in the capital.

  Given the stern warning of the congressmen in their article of February 14, it didn’t seem possible that these dubious little undertakings would be enough to satisfy Washington. But indeed, July 1, 2005, the much-heralded deadline for the Harkin-Engel Protocol, came and went without much ado. All those who had endorsed it mouthed platitudes about how much progress had been made, and vowed they would all “continue to dialogue.” But essentially, it was a dead letter.

  The congressmen had some regrets. “I am disappointed that the July 1 deadline established in the protocol was not fully met,” declared Senator Harkin in a prepared statement. “But I am pleased that they [the chocolate companies] have committed to redouble their efforts to create a certification system and eliminate the worst forms of child labor and forced labor in the cocoa fields and throughout the supply chain. The farmers and children in the cocoa-growing countries deserve no less.”

  The “redoubled effort,” seems to be a commitment on the part of the chocolate companies to meet a new deadline in 2008, three years past the original date when they promise that fifty per cent of cocoa farms will somehow be inspected for their child labour practices (the original plan was for 100 per cent). In the meantime, the cocoa companies will pursue a more achievable objective that includes “monitoring, data analysis, reporting and activities to address the worst forms of child labor as aggressively as possible.”

  Eliot Engel insisted again that the congressmen have not caved in. “I am assured that progress will be made and deadlines will be met,” he said in his own press release. Presumably, the representative from congressional district seventeen will still be around to ensure the deadlines are met in 2008.

  Privately, Pete Leon says the congressmen were extremely miffed. “It was very late in the process when the cocoa companies told us they wouldn’t meet the deadline,” says Leon, the legislative director for Eliot Engel’s office. Leon remembers a final marathon meeting with representatives from Big Chocolate that lasted four and a half hours, but in the end, the congressmen know they’d been beat. The buzz on Capitol Hill was that the industry was mobilizing a sizable lobbying effort, preparing sympathetic politicians to take the industry’s side if Harkin and Engel decided to do battle. The Democratic congressmen were no match for such a marshalling of forces. And with the Republicans in control of the Senate, there was no chance of going back to the original plan—the labelling system. Pete Leon says they realized they would be able to do nothing if the industry wasn’t on side. “Do we stop working altogether and just go to war?” says Leon. “Or do we sit down and say ‘let’s work this out?’”

  John Cadbury would have admired the modern chocolate barons who had managed to stonewall effective action for another three years. That will make it seven years altogether since Eliot Engel first read and reacted to the Knight Ridder articles, and a decade since UNICEF first flagged its concerns about the use of children in the industry. If the industry planners play their cards with skill, the impoverished cocoa groves of Africa will no longer matter by the time of the next reckoning. New cocoa producers are springing up around the world—Indonesia is now the third largest supplier of beans after Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana—and the industry could soon leave Côte d’Ivoire in the dust.

  Anita Sheth was deeply disappointed by the cocoa company capitulation. “Imagine all the work we put into this to try to make something come of it. And here’s what came out of it. We had an agreement and it fell on its face.” But the NGOs and activists who had endorsed the deal were mollified by what seemed to be the chastened attitude and good intentions of the chocolate companies. Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves, the most gung-ho of all the activists, who had actually been a signatory of the protocol, issued a press release declaring in bold, “We failed,” though he still goes on to defend the protocol as a historic first where “consumer groups, industry and government joined forces.”

  Bama Athreya argues there was no history made with the protocol, just more of the same old malarkey. The International Labor Rights Fund had been the only US NGO to reject the industry partnership approach. “This whole process should be turned in to a business school case study for how to stage a public relations coup,” says Athreya. “Get everyone onside with your message, come up with a big plan, make sure you have lots and lots of time for the issue to get lost, get some credible outside players like Free the Slaves in your corner and bingo! You’ve got yourself clear of a jam.” But ILRF was determined the chocolate companies were not going to escape responsibility so easily. And it prepared to bring out the heavy guns.

  Marx-Vilaire Aristide, the researcher for the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) in Washington, had made tremendous progress in ferreting out the truth about child labour in Côte d’Ivoire. Since his first visit to the region in the spring of 2002, he had been back several more times and had made key contacts with a number of informers who passed him crucial information. Aristide and the ILRF were building their case against the industry when they suffered a serious setback. In November 2004, on a freeway northwest of Washington, Aristide was killed when another driver in a stolen SUV slammed into his vehicle.

  The workers at the ILRF lost a dedicated colleague and friend, but Aristide’s death also meant they were cut off from his close contacts and inside knowledge of the child labour issue. It took months to recover, which they did mostly through intrepid sleuthing by another ILRF researcher, Natacha Thys, who had been with Aristide on his last trip and was able to recover many of his leads in West Africa. She conducted her own investigations over the following winter and spring and found what she was looking for: plaintiffs. People willing to sue the parties they considered to be ultimately responsible for the abuses in the cocoa business.

  On July 14, 2005, the ILRF filed suit against Nestlé, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland in a federal district court in California, charging the three U.S.–based companies with involvement in the trafficking, torture and forced labour of children who cultivate and harvest cocoa beans that the company imports from Africa. The class action claim was filed on behalf of Malian children who were trafficked into Côte d’Ivoire “and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food or sleep and frequent beatings.” Three individual plaintiffs were identified only as John Doe I, John Doe II and John Doe III. The ILRF argued in its brief that the children had to remain anonymous for their own security.

  The timing of the suit was no coincidence, and the ILRF’s media releases stated clearly that they were pursuing legal action on this scale because the industry had failed to meet its July 1 deadline. “A key part of the [Harkin-Engel] protocol was an obligation for companies to have in place an independent and credible system of farm monitoring, certification and verification for their suppliers, to ensure no child labour was taking place,” says the ILRF statement.

  Legal advocacy is new territory for aggressive activists in the United States, who use powerful tools such as the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) to pursue multinational corporations. The act allows non-citizens of the United States to use federal courts to hold Americans accountable for violations of international law. There are few downtrodden labourers—especially children—who could possibly drag a transnational before a court on their own, but the ILRF frequently takes up their causes.

  The organization has filed suits against Exxon Mobil, DynCorp and Coca-Cola, all under the Alien Tort Claims Act. In 2004, it sued DaimlerChrysler on behalf of the families of nine unionists at a Mercedes-Benz factory near Buenos Aires who had “disappeared” during the Argentine military dictatorship. It sued on behalf of five former Guatemalan trade union leaders who held the Del Monte food giant liable for violations of fundamental human rights.

  Of course, leading U.S. business interests have filed their own petitions, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to nullify the Alien Tort
Claims Act. They argue that it puts U.S. companies at an unfair competitive disadvantage, since companies in other countries don’t face these kinds of suits. Considering the fact that the Act pertains only to slavery, torture, extrajudicial killings, war crimes, crimes against humanity and arbitrary detention, it’s alarming that U.S. companies believe the law gets in the way of their ability to compete in the global market place.

  The “Class Action Complaint for Injunctive Relief and Damages” filed against the cocoa companies on behalf of “Former Child Slave Plaintiffs” is asserting claims not only under the Alien Tort statute but also under the Torture Victim Protection Act. Among the many charges, the suit alleges that the actions of Nestlé, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland “forced the Former Child Slave Plaintiffs against their will and under fear of harm to labour for Defendants’ economic benefit and in doing so the Former Child Slave Plaintiffs were placed in great fear for their lives.” The suit says the children were between the ages of twelve and fourteen when they were taken from their homes; though the brief doesn’t specify, the three John Does are probably over eighteen by now.

  As the class action suit was making its slow passage through the U.S. court system in 2005–2006, the status quo remained unchanged. Côte d’Ivoire still held its place as the leading producer of cocoa in the world, as Le Vieux promised it would, uninterrupted by scandal, war, Washington protocols or legal actions. But the Ivorian cocoa business was suffering its own disease, perhaps as devastating as the scourge of witch’s broom that afflicts the cocoa tree. Cocoa, in Côte d’Ivoire, was becoming infested with the scourge of organized crime.