Tanzina:

With Halloween nearly a week away, you may be one of the many Americans planning to give out candy to trick or treaters. But do you know where that chocolate you're handing out actually comes from and who's laboring to harvest the cocoa it's made from? Most chocolate, the production chain begins in West Africa. Nearly, two-thirds of the entire world's cocoa production comes from that region, and the majority of that comes from the Ivory Coast. But there's growing concern about labor practices in cocoa farming. According to government estimates, there are more than 2 million children laboring in cocoa farms throughout West Africa. Journalists and NGOs have been exposing these troubling labor practices in the region for years, but lately, there's been a renewed push to expose and end them. I'm joined now by Peter Whoriskey, staff writer at The Washington Post. And earlier this year, Peter visited Côte d'Ivoire and expose the widespread use of child labor in cocoa farms. Peter, welcome to the Takeaway.

Peter Whoriskey:

Hi, Tanzina. Thank you for having me.

Tanzina:

I'm also joined by Charity Ryerson, legal director and founder of the Corporate Accountability Lab. And this year, Charity was also in Côte d'Ivoire looking into the labor conditions at cocoa farms. Charity, thank you for joining us.

Charity Ryerson:

Happy to be here.

Tanzina:

So, Peter, let's start with you. Tell us about your investigation. How many cocoa farms did you visit and what were your top-line findings there?

Peter Whoriskey:

It's hard to count how many there are because they're very small farms, they're in the forest, dozens, at least. The top-line finding was though the chocolate companies and the cocoa industry promised 20 years ago to eradicate child labor from the West African cocoa supply, it's still there in abundant numbers. Some of these are kids who are working on their parents' farms, some of them not going to school. But the most tragic cases are probably the kids who are coming in from Mali or Burkina Faso come alone. They're between the ages of 10 to 15 years old and live in fairly deplorable conditions picking or harvesting cocoa.

Tanzina:

Charity, you also did research in Côte d'Ivoire and I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on what Peter was saying and tell us a little bit about what the labor conditions look like on the cocoa farms that you visited.

Charity Ryerson:

Yeah, we visited five different cocoa growing villages over the past year and a half, and those villages represented about 18,000 cocoa farmers. We talked to tribal leaders, farmers, women farmers, children, a lot of different stakeholders, hired labor. And what we saw was really extraordinary, and I think consistent with Peter's finding, which is just that the level of poverty that these farmers are living in is often similar to indentured servitude. So people are just working to pay off their last season's debts, hired laborers are working for something that is just utterly unlivable, a lot of children didn't have shoes. We just saw very difficult conditions. And in the end, our analysis was that these farmers just lacked any power to be able to negotiate for better prices. And these very, very low prices were what was creating the conditions that made child and forced labor so rampant.

Tanzina:

Peter, you spoke to children who were working in these cocoa farms. What did they tell you?

Peter Whoriskey:

The ones we talked to, we focused on the kids who were coming in from Burkina Faso. They generally very poor families. They got on a bus, told that they would get some money and they might even get some schooling. They took the bus, they end up in terrible conditions. They're not going to school. They're making barely enough to pay for what they might be able to eat. Huts would be two grand a word for where they were living. They were drinking water that was cloudy and milky, just pulled up from dirty streams. Really terrible conditions for these kids and many of them seemed sort of traumatized.

Tanzina:

Let's talk about the scope of the chocolate and cocoa industry. How big is this industry that we're talking about, and who's buying this cocoa that's being harvested by kids?

Peter Whoriskey:

Well, we all are. It's $100 billion industry. None of the big cocoa or chocolate companies, Nestle, Hershey, Mars knows actually where their West African cocoa is coming from. And so if you don't know where it's coming from, you can't eradicate child labor from the supply chain. The U.S. Department of Labor has done studies. They've found 2 million kids working in Ghana and Ivory Coast. It's just everywhere.

Tanzina:

Charity, you are the legal director and the founder of the Corporate Accountability Lab. How is it that these multinational mega corporations don't know, to Peter's point, that there's child labor involved in the sourcing of the cocoa that we all are consuming?

Charity Ryerson:

I think they do know. I think every multinational who is sourcing cocoa from West Africa knows that there's a significant amount of child labor in those supply chains, and that none of the initiatives that they have taken thus far have eradicated that child labor. And they continue to engage in the same practices regardless of that fact.

Tanzina:

So let's talk a little bit about the historical precedent you hear. Have companies attempted to make real change to these labor conditions, Charity?

Charity Ryerson:

Yeah, I think that there's sort of a scandalous story here, which is that for the last 20 years since the Harkin–Engel Protocols, there have been all of these corporate social responsibility initiatives, lots of different voluntary actions. Companies have committed to get rid of child labor by various dates that keep getting pushed back. So they have committed to buying more certified cocoa. And each of these activities has done very little. So if you look at the impact of all of these initiatives, you find that the companies are not showing demonstrated results of their efforts. And so ultimately, what they're doing is they're doing small projects in certain places across the country that creates this piecemeal system with no real accountability. In the end, when we went to these farms, we even went to farms that were certified, and we saw that the conditions were almost identical to those that were not certified.

Charity Ryerson:

So earlier this year when we visited a number of villages, we brought with us a number of different chocolate products, but in particular, we brought a regular Hershey bar and then we brought a fair-trade certified chocolate bar. And we held each of those bars up in each village, and we were talking to tribal leadership and farmers and we explained what each of these chocolate bars meant to consumers. And that the label, we talked about the price difference between the fair-trade certified bar and the uncertified bar, and that consumers when they see that label, believe that means that farmers earn a living wage, have access to health care, that their children go to school and don't work on the farm, etc. And the reaction of the farmers was really just pure outrage. People stood up, people yelled, one man pulled on his shirt to show how worn it was and stained and torn and said, "Does it look like I make a living wage?"

Charity Ryerson:

And so the idea that consumers were being misled in this way to think that fair trade or the certification meant that they were buying an ethical product was not just problematic from a misleading consumer standpoint, but for farmers it was really, I would say, morally offensive and outrageous. So I think that's scandalous. I think if we look at the amount of leeway that companies have gotten from regulators as a result of all of these voluntary actions and how little impact it's had, it really raises the question, why are we still listening to their voluntary commitments?

Tanzina:

Peter, I'm just curious if the workers, particularly the child laborers that you've spoken to or the farmers who are being shortchanged here, are they aware of how their product is being used and sold at a premium basically by these multinational corporations?

Peter Whoriskey:

I don't think so. There's some videos that you can see them on YouTube of kids who've... some of these child laborers and they've just having chocolate for the first time. It's not like chocolate is part of their lives. They're really just focused on really basic human subsistence questions and not the larger global trade issues. We're working on a story about the certification efforts. Basically, certification works by saying we're going to set out some rules for how cocoa will be done. We're not going to have child labor, we're not going to have deforestation. And then there's third-party inspectors that are supposed to make sure you're living up to the rules. And this is what the chocolate companies have all said, "We're going to go to 100% certification or some large percentage." And that certification effort has been in many ways a mask or it's a failure because some of their own research shows that there's actually more child laborers on the certified farms.

Tanzina:

Is there more that can be done here in the United States? I'm thinking on a couple of levels, whether that's pressuring these multinational corporations to do more. Is there more that can be done to inform consumers? Is there more that can be done at the congressional level?

Charity Ryerson:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it has to be done at the congressional level. It's very important for consumers to be informed about these issues and to understand that we're not going to buy our way out of this problem, which is to say purchasing a certified chocolate bar is not going to stop child labor and child trafficking in West Africa. But instead, we need to be communicating in clear ways to the companies, but also to our representatives that we need some regulatory action here.

Tanzina:

Peter, could this problem shift somewhere else? Is there somewhere else that cocoa could be farmed which is more sustainable and more humane than what we're seeing happen in Côte d'Ivoire in particular?

Peter Whoriskey:

That's a good question. Yes, we'll really find out soon. The US is currently investigating whether or not there is enough evidence of forced child labor. And if they do make that finding, they can stop all imports of any products that are cocoa or involve cocoa from getting into the United States, in which case they will have to find a replacement for what happens to be the largest source in the world.

Tanzina:

Peter Whoriskey is a staff writer at The Washington Post, and Charity Ryerson is the legal director and founder of the Corporate Accountability Lab. Peter, Charity, thanks for joining us.

Charity Ryerson:

Thank you.

Peter Whoriskey:

Thank you.

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