Bitter Chocolate (21 page)

The fact remained that reports of indentured child labour and the trafficking of children into cocoa farms had been emerging from West Africa for years, though the industry had chosen to ignore them, just as chocolate manufacturers a century earlier had disregarded the reports from São Tomé until they were forced to confront the brutal reality.

While the chocolate companies and the Ivorian government went into damage control,
NGO
s and human rights activists moved to take advantage of the publicity and public outrage. Aid
agencies from several countries, including Germany, France and Canada, convened a meeting to devise an action plan to rescue children from Ivorian farms. The director of Save the Children Canada, Michel Larouche, declared, “There are two scenarios. One is that all the children will be expelled … or we will have to change our strategy and pull them out of the plantations. Either way, we will do it.”

Among the NGOs working in the region, Save the Children Canada took the lead to establish a kind of recovery house called Horon So (translated as Freedom House) in Sikasso. Over the four and half years of its existence, Horon So became a temporary refuge for more than two hundred repatriated and intercepted children. Horon So and Mali Enjeu, another local agency, also endeavoured to stop children at the border and prevent them from crossing. The aid agencies started local programs to educate young people about the dangers of venturing to Côte d'Ivoire. But many of the children ignored the warnings. Life in Mali was desperate, and they were willing to play “the lottery” (this is what aid workers call their willingness to believe they will be one of the lucky ones to get gainful employment). Mali Enjeu workers were not surprised when they intercepted the same child more than once.

More revelations of child exploitation in Côte d'Ivoire farming and stories of how young labourers continued to be spirited out of Mali and Burkina Faso emerged following the Blewett-Woods documentary. Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says he hired local people to go into an Ivorian market, where the “job brokers” were known to ply their trade, and pretend to be looking to buy conscripts. Within a half hour, Bales's agents say they had managed to purchase two children for the equivalent of $40 each.

The BBC's Humphrey Hawksley delivered a mind-boggling story in April 2001 about a ship, the
MV Etireno
out of Benin, that was allegedly carrying a cargo of as many as two hundred children, some as young as six, destined for work in Côte
d'Ivoire. When the vessel was finally captured, the captain and his crew were arrested, but only forty-three children and adolescents were still on board, and authorities said all but a few of the young people were accompanied by adults. Aid agencies scrambled to find out whether the original report had been a false alarm or if the children had been unloaded at sea after the captain learned he was about to be arrested. A more plausible story, reported by the BBC, was that the
Etireno
was confused with another ship, name unknown, that possibly did manage to dock, undetected, with a cargo of children.

Despite the growing controversy, Ivorian authorities dismissed child trafficking as a limited activity, practised by a small group of criminals, and they insisted that very few Ivorian cocoa farmers were using children illegally. But only months after the controversial BBC report, the Knight Ridder news agency produced the most explosive series yet on child exploitation in cocoa. The two reporters, Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chaterjee, found that it was relatively easy to locate victims of child trafficking in Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa-producing areas. They interviewed many of them. Even as Malian authorities claimed to be maintaining a constant vigil on the border, Raghavan and Chaterjee discovered that child-trafficking rings continued to work, undeterred by legal action and foreign publicity. The Knight Ridder crew met Madou Traoré and Aly Diabate soon after Macko had liberated them, and they interviewed the notorious Le Gros. Though they borrowed heavily on what other journalists had already uncovered, Raghavan and Chaterjee had the advantage of access to a U.S. audience. For the first time, the sordid story cracked American indifference and generated a public outcry in the world's most lucrative market for cocoa products.

Just as Henry Nevinson had managed to stir an indifferent British public with his articles in
Harper's Monthly
a hundred years earlier, the Knight Ridder series presented similar damning information: chocolate—the innocent, inexpensive little treat—
came to North America from the hands of underfed, ill-treated African children who toiled in bonded servitude. A $13 billion industry in the United States, controlled by a small group of corporations who obtain their principal product from hundreds of thousands of unmonitored African farms, was suddenly jangled to consciousness by a major international wake-up call.

To this day, Abdoulaye Macko is still looking for work, but he has never regretted what he did. As for the boys he rescued, they remember him with the greatest fondness. “He was very good to us,” Traoré told me. “We hope he is happy and doing well.”

I didn't have the heart to tell them what has become of their saviour, or that today he lives in economic circumstances only slightly better than their own.

I
N 2001, AS THE LATE
J
UNE HEAT BEGAN TO MAKE LIFE
unbearable for people working on Capitol Hill in Washington, the representative for congressional district seventeen, comprising the New York counties of Bronx, Westchester and Rockland, was just getting ready to pack up his work for the July fourth hiatus. Congressman Eliot Engel wasn't looking for more to do, but when the Knight Ridder articles crossed his desk, he was genuinely shocked. Child slavery was the secret ingredient of American chocolate—that was the upshot of the newspaper reports. “The more I looked into it, the more it raised my concern,” the congressman told me in an interview about how he got involved in the politics of cocoa.

A run-of-the-mill agricultural appropriations bill was just about to go to a vote in the House of Representatives, and Engel decided he might be able to do something quickly. He attached a rider to the bill, proposing a labelling system for chocolate that would proclaim the candy to be “slave free” if it could be documented that the product hadn't involved the work of exploited children.

“It would be just like the certification on cans of tuna that say ‘dolphin safe,'” Engel explained. To his profound amazement, the rider passed the House of Representatives in a vote of 291 to 115, with even a sizable number of Republicans voting in favour of it. Congress authorized a budget of $250,000 for labels.

The U.S. chocolate manufacturers were blind-sided. At first, the companies expressed shock about reports of slavery while insisting that they had nothing to do with the practice. Although the two U.S. chocolate giants, Mars and Hershey, conceded that Côte d'Ivoire did supply them with a lot of their cocoa (industry observers say most of America's cocoa is Ivorian), the companies insisted that the cocoa chain was outside their control. There are about 600,000 cocoa farms in Côte d'Ivoire. No one would be able to prove which chocolate was “clean”—to use the buzzword that the controversy developed—and which was tainted by the use of slave labour.

“Their attitude surprised me,” Engel said of the conversations he initially had with company representatives. “Industry people came to my office. They were hostile and belligerent. I was going to put people out of business. I thought they would say, ‘We don't think this is a problem but we'll investigate.' Instead it was all about the bottom line.”

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.