Belching Out the Devil

by Mark Thomas

  I have forgotten that there is another equation here in this place where a piece of wire marks out a room, and this is as true as the first one and it is this: kids not working= really bad.

  HRW clearly identifies the kids working/not working equation as they recommend that the sugar mills ‘should never take actions that would deprive child laborers of their livelihoods without ensuring that children and their families are receiving programs and services designed to provide them with alternatives to hazardous labor.’ It is better that children do hazardous work than go hungry. But, in an environment where the only options open to these children are starvation or hazardous labour, then The Coca-Cola Company has only one option, which is to make sure it isn’t responsible in any way for either.

  Field two

  Barely minutes later along the highway we happen upon another harvest. Slowing as we approach we peer out of the van window. David the American squints, ‘I can’t tell how old these people are, they must be 200 metres away…’

  At that moment a young man pops up and looks at us from the field. He was bent over cutting thus making it impossible to see how old he is, but straightening reveals he must be all of 13 - though David is right, it is hard to get an accurate age. Regardless of his exact age this young man is definitely too young to be working here. We know this because as soon as he sees our van with the camera, he runs rushing into the uncut cane and disappears. We have had only seconds to catch the look of panic on his face before he is swallowed by the dense green and brown stalks and hidden from sight.

  The original HRW report had said, ‘Plantation foremen turn a blind eye to the fact that children as young as eight cut cane.’9 Since its publication I had heard that the foremen were now concerned not so much with using child labour, but with being seen to use child labour. Perhaps that is what the boy was doing. Trying to make sure the plantation was not seen to be using child labour.

  Field three

  Another ten minutes down the way and my suspicions are aroused again. This time a young lad, machete in hand, trims cane. Having learnt our lesson from the first incident we don’t slow down, we drive on. Once out of sight, we turn around, head back and stop. The child is out in the open field when the van brakes suddenly, men near to him shout and he breaks for the refuge of the sugar cane, his legs splaying awkwardly as he hops over the stumps and stalks protruding from the ground. He disappears momentarily but can only have gone a few feet into the dense wooded canes, as he pokes his head out to take a quick peak, catches sight of us, and then vanishes once more.

  Barely moments later a white jeep arrives on dirt track by the side of the field, carrying three officials from the Ministry of Labor. This looks like a spot check of some kind and they dismount the vehicle with considerable officiousness. Civil servants they may be but their walk is pure Sweeney. Or at least a version of the Sweeney that works out. Wearing smart short-sleeve shirts and even shorter necks, the body-building bureaucrats start to go through paperwork with the plantation foreman. Coca-Cola say the Ministry of Labor ‘has labor inspectors whose only task is to detect child labor.’10 Could we be witnessing the authorities clamping down on child labour? How will they find the lad who has just hidden? What will happen to him and the foreman?

  Actually, nothing happens. Their inspection seems to be just checking papers. It might appear brusque but it is short, sweet and painless. As they get back into the jeep I run over with Armando translating and say, ‘I wonder can I grab a few quick questions? My name is Mark Thomas from the UK.’

  Sitting in the front passenger seat an official turns to me. His expression is that of a man who can’t quite be arsed to be menacing, like a bouncer with a minor case of ennui. He rolls his shoulders and blankly says ‘Hello’ - though I am sure his shoulders just told me to ‘fuck off’.

  ‘I’m making a programme for TV in Britain and it looked like you were making an inspection and I just wondered what you were doing?’ I say, all breezy and blasé.

  He replies with a mixture of boredom and aggression, ‘What the ministry does is check for children working here and for illegal immigrants.’

  At this stage I realise I might as well be standing before him in plus fours with a 12-bore under my arm, spouting like a toff, ‘I’m on a child hunt don’t you know…’

  Nonetheless I plough on, asking, ‘Oh…is there much child labour here?’

  ‘Here? No.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘Not here…’ He says through rigid lips.

  ‘None?’

  ‘Not on this plantation.’

  ‘You’ve checked for children working here illegally have you?’

  ‘There is none here…at the moment…none.’

  He rolls his shoulders at me. Twice.

  Solving the problem of child labour involves a lot of different groups of people, including the Salvadorean Ministry of Labor. The HRW report highlights the complexity of the problems and is clear that it is not just the problem of one organisation. The solution, they say, will involve people from UNICEF, the Salvadorean Government, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labor, as well as the sugar industry and Coca-Cola. The problem is that Coca-Cola seem to be taking a back seat on this particular example of problem solving. The HRW report made a series of recommendations that The Coca-Cola Company should adopt to play its part in eradicating child labour. Though there is no compulsion for the company to adhere to these recommendations it is worth noting that TCCC has not implemented a single one of them.

  COLA-COLA’S REPORT CARD DID THEY DO ANYTHING THE REPORT RECOMMENDED?

  2004 HRW Recommend that Coca-Cola adhere to UN standards on child labour (which they do) and that they ‘should require suppliers to do the same throughout their supply chains.’11 This would mean insisting the sugar mill in turn insists that the plantation does not use child labour and this should be a contractual condition.

  2008 Coca-Cola says in its Supplier Guiding principles that as a ‘minimum’ the ‘Supplier will not use child labor as defined by local law.’12 But does not require the supplier to enforce this through the supply chain.

  They therefore do not meet that recommendation.

  2004 HRW Recommend that Coca-Cola ‘adopt effective monitoring systems to verify that labor conditions on their supplier sugarcane plantations comply with international standards and relevant national labor laws’13

  2008 Coca-Cola says it is eradicating child labour by being ‘part of a multi-stakeholder initiative working towards hiring [my emphasis] social monitors to work with the co-ops to monitor against child labour.’14 So no one has been hired then…

  2008 Mark Thomas is currently working towards a positive reaction to the above comment. Coca-Cola do not meet that recommendation.

  2004 HRW Recommend ‘In cases where plantations fall short of such standards, Coca-Cola and other businesses should assist their supplier mills in providing the economic and technical assistance necessary to bring plantations into compliance.’15

  2008 The company says, ‘Coca-Cola is eradicating child labour by being a part of a multi-stakeholder initiative working towards hiring social monitors…to provide education and income streams in collaboration with government and NGOs to divert youth from hazardous work in the harvest.16

  2008 Mark Thomas is engaged in a multi-stakeholder dialogue that is working towards the eradication of derision of such corporate statements.

  There is no evidence that Coca-Cola have met this recommendation.

  2004 HRW Recommend ‘In particular, Coca-Cola and other businesses should support programs and services that offer children and their families alternatives to child labor, publicly reporting the status of such efforts at least on an annual basis.’17

  2008 Coca-Cola ‘has partnered with TechnoServe, a local NGO working with targeted co-ops to find alternative sources of income for youth 14-18 years of age.’18

  2008 Mark Thomas asked ‘What is the nature of the partnering of TechnoServe?
Was there any financial assistance involved? Have there been any assessments made of the results of the partnering and if so, by whom?’

  2008 Coca-Cola replied ‘We partnered with TechnoServe to financially support the programs that aid children through educational opportunities in El Salvador.’19 Er, that is it…

  The Company have not provided any details of the financial support it gives to TechnoServe, nor have they shown that the work they partnered with TechnoServe is addressing the specific issue of children in sugar cane harvesting. Nor do they show if the children TechnoServe are working with are being offered alternatives to child labour. And they just ignored the question regarding annual assessment.

  Therefore, Coca-Cola have not fully and properly met the recommendations made by the Human Rights Watch Report. Sitting in the front of the van and leaning on the side window, the sound of the wheels’ low continuous rumble on the road is comforting and I turn to itemising the day. So far this morning has yielded child labour working on the three fields we visited, two of the boys have tried to hide from us to avoid being seen to work and the Ministry of Labor seem uninterested, at best, in doing anything today. But what this all amounts to I simply don’t know. Does what we have seen make child labour on these plantations commonplace? Perhaps what we are seeing represents progress? The only thing I know for sure is that running around plantations filming child labour doesn’t make you friends. I couldn’t be less popular if I were the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. In fact an outbreak of chlamydia in a nunnery would be greeted with less hostility.

  My road-trip meditation is broken as we brake sharply to let a truck out of some gates and on to the highway. This is a rastras, a sugar cane lorry, which is essentially a truck with an enormous metal container coupled to it. These containers are almost literally huge rust buckets, 40 to 50 foot long perhaps and when they are piled high with cane they are easily 18 to 20 feet high. They lumber along the narrow roads, swinging from side to side, with odd sticks of cane falling from the uncovered top. So monstrous and unique are these mechanical beasts that it is a small wonder that Top Gear hasn’t raced them across a conservation area yet.

  ‘Where do these go?’ I ask.

  ‘They go to the sugar mill,’ says Armando, ‘they load up with cane on the plantations and then take it to the mill to be refined.’

  ‘So that lorry has just come out of a plantation then…’

  Field four

  The gates to the plantation are tall and iron and come with a gatekeeper, an old man in a battered straw hat who is in charge of the padlock and chain. As another truck comes out we act as if we are expected and go through. He shuts the gates behind us and we are in, on a dirt track surrounded by tall green sugar cane, taller than the van it leans over the pathway forming a shady lane. This is all plantation land, behind the gates and away from prying eyes. No one expects to see a film crew in a van cruising around these tropical pathways and their expressions of surprise prove to be unnerving. The first harvest we come to has a group of about five or six children standing with machetes. They are young children. Maybe eight years old. One awkwardly puts the machete down when she sees us, holding it by their side and then cautiously dropping it, as if she had been caught doing something naughty. She looks at us and then runs to her parents working further away. Turning down a fork in the track we stop alongside a boy who is standing just off the road cutting. We are so unexpected that he looks up to find the van practically next to him. He too is underage. Through one corridor of cane a group of kids on bikes appear, catch sight of us, drop their heads, lift their backsides out of the saddle and pump their legs in panic, cycling madly to get as far away from us as they can get.

  Further still we arrive at the main harvesting field to find a vision of seething toil. The men’s vests and T-shirts are patched with sweat already and the sun is still far from its midday prime, their hands are black with soot and their faces smudged with ash too. Predictably the sad regularity of the scene unfolds. A young boy in a white shirt is in the cropped area, exposed for all to see, including the foreman who stands watching with his machete in a leather sheaf decorated with tassels slung over his chest. His older and legal workmates shout to him that we are here. He turns in utter confusion and starts to run, but not towards the dense cane that can hide him, but across the cleared field. He throws a long handled shovel to the ground. Someone shouts for him not to panic, ‘Pick it up! Act normal!’ they must have bellowed. In his chaos he picks up the shovel again but starts to run. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself!’ Someone must have shouted, as he slows down and walks to the edge of the field. Trying to gently let go of the long-handled shovel as he goes. He has made it to the path, where older workers are watching. He puts his head down, his hands in his pocket and walks away from us. He goes to turn around but seems to hear an older voice nearby, saying ‘Just keep walking kid, just keep walking.’

  Through it all, the foreman just stands there with one hand holding the machete sitting on his fat stomach. He has not even bothered to turn a blind eye to it all. He watches the whole thing, down to the kid disappearing into the plantations pathways. Along the pathway at the side a few workers stand watching, and it looks like the owner has arrived, or at least someone with money enough to ride a horse around the plantation with a pair of cowboy boots and a posh cowboy hat. No one talks to us directly, but you could cut the atmosphere with a knife and there are plenty of those around here. They stare at us with poker faces. Then turn back and as one group of men does this one of them spits. I couldn’t say if it was out of necessity or with contempt. But what I hear next is definitely shouted for our benefit, as one of the caneros in the field yells, ‘Come and look at the animals! Come watch the animals!’

  Oh Christ, look at us, chasing children as they flounder and flee. Charles Dickens would have loved to have seen us in action, ‘the kid hunters’, caring beadles with compassionless hearts, terrifying youngsters so they can have a better life. We’ve been tracking kids like Fairtrade perverts. No wonder the cutters hate us. They hate our presence. Perhaps the landowners do too, but the landowners won’t lose one moment’s sleep over our visit; we’ve caused them neither distress nor loss. We have not even reprimanded them nor the plantation managers or the foremen either. But our very presence reprimands the cutters, the families and the children. Just standing by the field, we judge them, our presence alone says, ‘you shouldn’t be letting your children work on the cane harvest’. But what are they to do, go without money? So we judge them for having to work like this. We judge them for being poor. Intentionally or not, that is what we do. They did not asked us to come, they did not want to tell their story.

  For all our discomfort, which is nothing compared to the discomfort of actually having to work in these fields, the fact remains that child labour is obviously present on an unacceptable scale. Our film crew, none of whom know the area, or have had any experience of harvesting cane, have in one morning managed to bumble through cane fields and found, by our reckoning, at least 15 children working. Which goes some way to showing that child labour is still commonplace, and on the plantations that provide the raw materials for Coke’s sugar.

  It would be glib and wrong to say The Coca-Cola Company don’t care about this issue. They do - they say so on their website. ‘We care about the plight of these children,’20 they say. They also say. ‘We firmly oppose the use of child labour.’21 Yet despite this and their multitude of codes and practices there is a glaring loophole. The Coca-Cola Company has a Global Workplace Rights Policy that says, ‘The Company prohibits the hiring of individuals that are under eighteen years of age for positions in which hazardous work is required.’22 OK, that’s fine. They have Supplier Guiding Principles, for direct suppliers like Central Izalco, which state that the ‘Supplier will not use child labor as defined by local law.’23 But some countries do not have adequate laws. Nothing compels either The Coca-Cola Company or the sugar mills to investigate, take responsib
ility or prevent children harvesting cane on the plantations - no matter what happens further down the supply chain, it is simply not their problem. And until they make it their problem they will be open to the charge of not trying to solve it.

  Last night as we filmed the foreman burning the dry leaves in the cane field, cutters told me that the Central Izalco engineers will tell the plantation owners which cane to cut, where, when and how much. The rastras have to know where to come to pick up the cane to take it to the mill and the cutters are often driven in company buses to the crops. HRW found that ‘Central Izalco directly administers some of its plantations and provides technical assistance to those it does not administer directly.’24 It is impossible for Central Izalco not to know about the child labour happening under their eyes. But such are the loopholes that a manager from Central Izalco could find children cutting sugar cane literally outside the mill, walk past without batting an eyelid and still comply with all of Coke’s codes of conduct and principles. And this is what we witness next.