Understanding in progress

For today’s post I am almost taking a step backward.  I want to talk about some of the actual people and conditions on the cocoa plantations.  Sometimes I have a hard time imagining it. 

So I wanted to know what does slavery look like in our world?  I wanted faces, names, stories and specifics.  What I found wasn’t lives filled with savage beatings, chain gangs and whip wielding overseers.  The slavery I read about is more subtle but just as cruel and hopeless.  I found stories of children whose childhood was stolen along with their freedom, who live on the edge of subsistence with little hope and no one to look out for them. 

SPECIFICS:

Most reports estimate that about twelve thousand of the two hundred thousand child laborers on the cocoa plantations and farms of the Ivory Coast may be victims of trafficking and slavery. 

In sub-Saharan Africa thirty percent of children under fifteen are child laborers, mostly in agricultural industry including cocoa harvesting.  Just a note about what we mean by child labor (found this definition and think it explains it well)

Child Labor:  work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children.  Interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school, by obliging them to leave school prematurely or by requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.

Not all work that kids do is child labor – work done that is not detrimental to children’s health, development or schooling is not labeled as “child labor”

For the most part kids working with cocoa are either slaves or child laborers.

Here’s the process they go through:

Cocoa trees are treated with pesticides and fungicides.  The harvesting happens year round so the chemical treatments do as well.

The clearing of vegetation and harvesting of the pods from trees is done with machetes.  So kids as young as seven wield these weapons against grass and brush and their little limbs often bear the scars of their missteps.

They then transport wet beans to the place where they will be dried.  This can be a long distance and usual involves heavy loads to maximize the return

Young kids are forced to carry up to thirteen pounds of cocoa sacks on their shoulders

They then spread the beans in baskets or on mats and cover to ferment then uncover and dry in sun

                Finally the dried beans are loaded into bags and placed on trucks for transport

About the kids:

64% younger than 14

40% are girls

Usually work twelve hour work days

Beatings are common for failing to complete assigned work, being unable to carry a certain load or trying to leave

In the Ivory Coast 34% of kids on farms go to school compared to 64% of non workers.

NAMES AND STORIES:

Aly Diabete was 11 when a slave trader promised him a bike and $150 a year to help support his poor family in Mali.  After being taken to the Ivory Coast and sold to a farmer the only reward he has seen is a rare day off or any day when the overseers or older slaves don’t flog him with a bicycle chain or cacao tree branch.  He serves with 18 other boys on a 494 acre farm.  They work sunrise to 6:30 everyday.  Their dinner is usually burned bananas except when they are treated to yams with salt water “gravy”.  After dinner the boys are ordered in to a 24x20 room to sleep on wooden planks without mattresses.  The room has a baseball sized hole in it to let air in.  They are given cans to urinate in.  The boys were told they had been sold to the farmers and had to work off that debt.  They are beaten for not moving fast enough, not being able to carry a heavy enough load or trying to escape.

Brahima Male (12) and Siaka Traure (14) are also from Mali. At a bus station they met a man who promised them training and work as carpenters or welders.  Work they were told would pay $170 a year.  The man promised to take them to their work site for free.  When they neared the border the boys were told that if the police stopped them they were to say the man was their older brother.  They slipped over the border after separating in to motorcycle taxis, small vehicles that are generally not stopped by border patrol.  A man bought them  for $28.    Tarure tried to leave once.  For this he was tied up, beaten and threatened with a gun.

Abdul is ten years old and had been enslaved for three years when he told his story to a western journalist.  After his mother died a stranger brought him over the border from Mali.  He is given little food.  He and his fellow workers toil long hours with little hope for something better, something different.

Yacou ‘s scars from the machete he uses to clear vegetation criss-cross his legs.  His dream?  “I wish I could go to school. I want to read and write.”

Some of these stories are from years ago and I wonder where the children are now.  Unfortunately their circumstances are not unique or rare and as conditions have remained unchanged for so long they provide us with a look at what children have suffered through in the pursuit of chocolate over the past decades.

Children like these are being stolen, tricked or coerced onto cocoa plantations all over West Africa by a vast international network of human traffickers.  The kidnappers troll bus stations searching for kids traveling alone and offer them “jobs”.  They prey on the most vulnerable and seem to operate with little fear of legal consequences.

The toil and suffering of these children bring us cheap chocolate for our candy, our cakes and our drinks.  The cocoa they produce is sent away to be processed and combined with that produced by more humane means and by the time it reaches the companies who produce our chocolate it may hardly seem tainted by Yacou’s scars or Abdul’s stolen childhood.  But it is . . .

Next I’ll be bringing the results of my taste testing.  I’m going to sample whatever Fair-trade chocolate I can get my hands around here and let you know my thoughts . . . I know I’m so giving, I just really believe in empirical research!