Fairtrade Foundation statement after BBC Panorama report on child labour in West African cocoa industry
Last night, BBC Panorama’s hour long report, Chocolate: The Bitter Truth raised a series of questions about whether Fairtrade organisations had systems and structures in place to identify and prevent children working on West African cocoa farms that supply high street chocolate manufacturers.
Panorama clearly stated: “Fairtrade can only take action because its farms are traceable and open to scrutiny. Most are not.”
This explicit validation of Fairtrade’s audit systems should not detract from the central point of Panorama’s findings. And that is the continued serious problem of child labour and child trafficking in West Africa’s cocoa industry.
The Fairtrade movement has already redoubled its efforts to eradicate child labour in the world’s most poverty stricken regions and is investigating some of the findings highlighted by BBC Panorama’s report.
Child labour is caused by deep seated poverty exacerbated by unjust terms of world trade, conflict, drought and extreme weather conditions triggering forced migration. This is the reality that those on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Ghana have to deal with on a daily basis.
The cocoa market continues to work against the interests of growers in West Africa and other cocoa producing regions which provide the environment for child labour to flourish. Cocoa prices in real terms have slumped in the past 40 years from $2.50 per lb in 1970 to less than $0.80 per lb in 2008 according to Food & Agriculture Agency of the United Nations despite recent speculative commodity price hike.
The BBC Panorama journalist concluded: “I asked myself at the beginning of this journey: ‘Do we pay a fair price for our chocolate?’ ...Actually the answer lies here in the reality of the situation in West Africa and the cocoa farms here, and the grim reality of life where they don’t have shoes to wear, they don’t have electricity and running water. And all that begs another question – ‘Are we in the west prepared to pay a little bit more for our chocolate so that they can enjoy a decent standard of living and more importantly so they don’t have to use child labour?’”
Thanks to access to the international Fairtrade market, over 50,000 poor farmers and workers in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) have been able to improve their lives with tangible economic and social benefits including education.
Harriet Lamb, Fairtrade Foundation Executive Director, says: “Fairtrade is part of the solution to alleviate deep poverty underlying child labour. And we call on the chocolate industry to extend its involvement with Fairtrade - to pay a fair price to farmers and to work directly with them to tackle huge challenges farmers and their communities are struggling to overcome. We can’t guarantee there won’t be problems but we can guarantee a better deal for cocoa farmers and a system to tackle the problems where and when we find them.”
The Fairtrade Foundation hopes the programme will be seen as a call to action to chocolate companies, cocoa traders, international agencies, national governments, non-governmental organisations, consumers and those within the Fairtrade movement - into working harder and more constructively to tackle poverty and end child labour.
Share your thoughts on the Panorama programme here.