[HN Gopher] Child Labour in Cocoa Production
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Child Labour in Cocoa Production
Author : Red_Tarsius
Score : 21 points
Date : 2024-02-06 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| nickthegreek wrote:
| John Oliver covered this issue last year as well.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwHMDjc7qJ8
| xnx wrote:
| Chocolate brand largely focused around child labor and
| exploitation in chocolate production:
| https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/our-mission
| legitster wrote:
| What's pretty telling is that nowhere in their brand statements
| have they confirmed their chocolate is child-labor free. What's
| more:
|
| > We believe in empowering cocoa farmers and people in cocoa
| communities with a certain level of consciousness about what is
| and isn't allowed. It's fine for children to help out on the
| farm after school and learn about how cocoa is grown, but it's
| important that farmers and communities know where to draw the
| line. They need to understand that certain types of work, such
| as heavy lifting, are harmful to children. Cooperatives have to
| do their part in taking responsibility to combat illegal child
| labor.
|
| By their own admission they are not trying to end child labor -
| just improve the practice.
|
| (Which I think is noble, I just don't think people appreciate
| how difficult eliminating child labor is)
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| About 15 years ago when I was still in the food industry I
| remember a chocolatier telling me she didn't believe it was
| possible to be genuinely completely sure there was no child
| or slave labor in your chocolate.
|
| You could get the number low, possibly zero, you could with a
| lot of effort get a snapshot of your supply chain at a point
| where the number was plausibly zero, but you couldn't
| guarantee it was actually _at_ zero over any length of time.
| It 's entirely possible the situation has improved since
| then, I have no particular knowledge either way.
| MrJohz wrote:
| I mean, we haven't eliminated child labour in most Western
| countries - there's still plenty of kids walking their
| neighbours dogs, babysitting, cleaning cars, delivering
| newspapers etc. I don't think "prevent all children from ever
| doing any work" is the standard expectation here.
|
| And while it's not necessarily about child labour, they're
| very explicit that they won't call their chocolate slave-
| free, and I imagine similar logic applies to child labour:
| https://tonyschocolonely.com/uk/en/why-we-still-wont-say-
| wer...
|
| EDIT: to be clear, exploitative child labour, and child
| labour at the expense of health, education, or resources are
| completely immoral. Children should work because they choose
| to and because they get something out of it, not because the
| industry needs all the hands it can get at in order to
| function. However, I dislike this idea of "but it's not
| perfect, so should we really support it?" The work that
| companies like Tony's do is incredibly important, and -
| slightly less importantly - they produce some of the best
| chocolate on the market (and also not at outrageous prices).
| So this clearly isn't a pipe dream of theirs that will never
| succeed.
| pests wrote:
| Your wording makes it seem they exploit child labor and
| exploitation.
|
| Slightly kidding but reminds me of the "I support brain cancer"
| t shirts which I'm sure we all know what they were trying to
| say.
| xnx wrote:
| Similar: "Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38491826 111 points 67 days
| ago
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The bitter reality is that in a primary agricultural household
| economy, there will be child labor. This has been the case
| through history, and even in the United States the child labor
| laws exempt work on a family farm. The economics just really
| don't work out otherwise.
|
| If in a fit of "virtue" we decide to ban that without taking the
| economic realities into consideration, you are likely to make it
| far worse. Living with your family and working with them
| harvesting cocoa is far better than starving, begging, or
| prostitution.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| This is certainly an important thing to keep in mind but at
| least some of these situations aren't so happy:
|
| > In 2001, the report _A Taste of Slavery: How Your Chocolate
| May be Tainted_ won a George Polk Award. In it were claims that
| traffickers promised paid work, housing, and education to
| children who were forced to labour and undergo severe abuse,
| that some children were held forcibly on farms and worked up to
| 100 hours per week, and that attempted escapees were beaten. It
| quoted a former slave: "The beatings were a part of my life"
| and "when you didn't hurry, you were beaten."
| legitster wrote:
| To OP's point, sending children off to work in a farm is
| still an unhappy choice of desperation.
|
| This is also an example from over 20 years ago - before NGOs
| and brands really began policing this stuff. It could be
| there has been _some_ improvement since then.
| alephnerd wrote:
| The world was also MUCH poorer 20 years ago.
|
| A good friend of mine is from a (still) poor farming family
| from rural Vietnam.
|
| When they were growing up on their coffee farm in the late
| 90s/early 2000s they lived in what was basically a mud hut
| with dirt floors, and helped with the harvest directly.
|
| That friend (and their siblings) all ended up attending
| college in Saigon and getting white collar jobs, and their
| family still runs the same farm.
|
| The difference was agricultural technology and automation
| became much cheaper, so there was less of a need to have a
| lot of kids do manual labor, so they sent their kids thru
| K-12 and later college.
|
| My dad's generation had a similar thing happen as well in
| North India after the Green Revolution.
|
| His dad was working on harvesting, sowing, and other
| agricultural related work at all times when he was a kid,
| yet when the Green Revolution happened - and with it
| reforms in rural financing along with cheap agricultural
| technology - there was no reason for my dad to live that
| kind of lifestyle, so he was able to attend school instead
| of rotting out in a field.
|
| Democratizing relevant agricultural technology AND
| enhancing rural financing has a night and day difference in
| alleviating rural poverty.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Samee with Coffee beans.
| tamiral wrote:
| most of the farmers work in a small hold farm that may be in
| part of a cooperative of their piece of land, so the whole
| family would contribute to any workload.
| legitster wrote:
| This is a hard issue for me to thumb my nose at. Child labor was
| the historic norm for all pre-industrial societies. And to a
| degree, child labor is _still_ practiced in Western agriculture -
| ask anyone who grew up in a farming community.
|
| As far as I understand, the majority of chocolate production in
| places in Africa is still people hauling sacks of cacao into a
| market to be hauled away by middlemen. The only real immediate
| solution is to industrialize the supply chain (corporately
| managed plantations and processing plants), or stop consuming
| products from these regions altogether.
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