Buying chocolate can get messy when child labor is in the picture

from Scripps News

By JOAN OBRA, Fresno Bee

OAKHURST, Calif. -- For many folks, chocolate is a guilty pleasure. But for eighth-graders at Mountain Home Charter School, a chocolate fund-raiser inspired only guilt.

That's because about 70 percent of the world's cocoa -- taken from the cacao tree to make chocolate -- comes from West Africa, where reports of abusive child labor have circulated for years.

Alarmed by the evidence, eighth-grader Masha Bluestein hoped to change Mountain Home's fund-raiser for a class trip to Catalina Island. So she and her mother, Cordia Bluestein, pitched an idea to the other parents: Instead of selling any old chocolate, let's choose chocolate that's certified fair trade.

The certification, they explained, indicates products made without abusive child labor, such as work that prevents children from attending school, uses hazardous farming practices or includes child slavery.

"I really didn't expect people to be particularly receptive," Cordia Bluestein says. "But everyone agreed. They said, 'If it's wrong, it's wrong.' "

Now, instead of $1.50 candy bars, the students are selling $3 bars of milk chocolate, bittersweet chocolate and peppermint crunch from Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates, a certified fair-trade company in San Luis Obispo.

There wasn't necessarily a problem with the previous candy, says Joan Madaus, Mountain Home's eighth-grade coordinator.

But the students wanted a guarantee that none of the candy was made with abusive child labor, and Sweet Earth was able to provide what they needed.

"I think it's wrong to have children in slavery to pay for our field trip when we can use fair trade for the same reason," Masha Bluestein says.

Eliminating abusive child labor isn't as simple as buying fair-trade products. The problem has deep economic and political roots. And the proposed solutions are just as complicated.

To understand the rise of child labor, consider the example of Ivory Coast in West Africa.

According to a 2006 report from Fafo, a Norwegian foundation that studies issues such as trafficking and child labor, Ivory Coast tripled its cocoa output between 1955 and 1970 by welcoming migrant workers and expanding the country's farms.

To cut costs, these farms used child labor -- a tool that was seen as "even more necessary as world cocoa prices plummeted in the late 1980s and early 1990s," the report said.

There were other reasons to slash costs. Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny supported his government with "rents extracted from the cocoa economy," states the report, titled "Child Labor and Cocoa Production in West Africa."

After Boigny died in 1993, political instability worsened. From 2002 to 2004, the country was entangled in civil war. In the cocoa-producing areas, natives and migrants bitterly fought over farmland.

By this time, news reports had alerted the world to child labor problems in Ivory Coast and Ghana.

In 2001, Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, created the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which pushes to have those countries eliminate abusive child-labor practices. When the countries didn't meet the 2005 deadline, the protocol was extended until July 1, 2008.

It's considered unlikely that abusive labor will be significantly diminished by the deadline. Tulane University, which was hired by the Department of Labor to monitor the efforts, says the countries have created pilot programs to monitor child labor, but have yet to quantify the problem.

Given these conditions, what can a socially conscious shopper do?

The answers: Buy chocolate that's free of abusive child-labor practices. And support companies that fight poverty and economic decline -- two factors responsible for abusive child labor in West Africa.

This is easier said than done, however. A look at chocolate on the shelves of Whole Foods Market, for example, shows some confusing choices.

Vintage Plantations products have been certified by the Rainforest Alliance, a nonprofit group that supports sustainable agriculture. Alter Eco's products are certified fair trade by TransFair USA. Endangered Species Chocolate calls its products "100 percent ethically traded." The labels also state that "10 percent of net profits (are) donated to help support species, habitat and humanity."

And then there are Trader Joe's Swiss milk and Swiss dark chocolates that bear the Equitable Trade logo.

According to its Web site, www.equitabletrade.org, the association incorporates "a more comprehensive, more meaningful and more transparent set of social, business, environmental and ethically responsible principles and standards into business and trade practices."

The array of choices forces consumers to study different companies and organizations, then decide which ones they trust the most.

One of the most well-known organizations is TransFair USA. Spokesman Anthony Marek explains how it works: Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International in Bonn, Germany, is the umbrella organization for more than 20 fair-trade certifiers. It audits participating farmers in developing countries to verify the absence of abusive child labor and the reinvestment of revenue in projects such as health-care programs, scholarships and microloans to businesses.

In the United States, TransFair USA audits companies to ensure they're paying at least the fair-trade price to these farmers. (Fair-trade agreements set a higher minimum price than the market.)

Marek urges shoppers to choose chocolate with the "fair-trade certified" logo, which depicts a person holding a bowl in each hand. Such products contain 100 percent fair-trade certified products, he says.

(The reporter can be reached at jobra(at)fresnobee.)