Our guilty pleasure at Easter

Thursday, April 21, 2011

By Martin Thomas
Head of Advocacy
World Vision Australia

Like many Australians - both young and old - I’m looking forward to tucking into a few chocolate eggs this Sunday. I love chocolate and it’s hard to imagine a world without it – especially at Easter.

Of course chocolate is big business, last financial year, Australians spent almost $1.3 billion on it. For many of us chocolate is our guilty pleasure. 

But beyond the few extra unwanted kilograms chocolate may bring, there is another far sinister guilt we, often unknowingly perpetrate, and that is the use of child labour that is involved in the supply chain of almost all the chocolate we eat.

The cocoa used to make big brand chocolate is regularly harvested in part by children and trafficked labourers in West Africa, where more than 70 percent of the world’s cocoa is sourced.  

Research undertaken by Tulane University in New Orleans found that from 2007 until 2008, almost two million children were working on cocoa-related activities in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Nearly 50 percent of these children reported they had sustained injuries from their work and there were also cases where children had been trafficked and exploited for their labour. 

I have also seen this with my own eyes. A few years ago I visited the cocoa fields of West Africa where kids use dangerous machetes and pesticides, work long hours and often don’t go to school.  

I have seen the mug shots of the traffickers; spoken to children, cocoa farmers, authorities and local organisations desperately trying to help trafficked and exploited children. I even learned of one trafficker who secretly brought children into the Ivory Coast by faking a convoy of ambulances containing healthy children who were bandaged to fool authorities. It was an experience that saddened me but also made me determined to do all I can to change the plight of these children.

In 2001, an agreement called the Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed between big chocolate companies, the United States and the Ivory Coast to eliminate the worst forms of child labour from their cocoa supply chains. Unfortunately this agreement has failed and non-government organisations have been lobbying for many years for the cocoa and chocolate industry to take action and deliver meaningful results on eliminating labour exploitation. 

World Vision commenced campaigning for ‘ethical chocolate’ through its Don't Trade Lives campaign three years ago. Ethical chocolate is chocolate that has been ethically certified to have been harvested without the use of forced, child or trafficked labour. Since the launch of the campaign, we’ve seen chocolate companies take significant steps to commit to purchasing cocoa through independent ethical certification schemes such as Fairtrade and UTZ Certified. 

For example, Cadbury has launched its first Fairtrade certified product, the ‘Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate’ block, for Australian shelves last year and they have also just released their first Fairtrade certified Easter egg. Mars has committed to only use certified cocoa by 2020 and 90 percent of Green&Blacks’ product range is now ethically certified.

However, despite this progress, the latest research from World Vision Australia, “Our guilty pleasure: Exploitative child labour in the Chocolate Industry”, shows that only 1-3 percent of the global cocoa supply is currently ethically certified. We congratulate chocolate companies who have committed to using ethically certified cocoa but certification schemes alone won’t solve the problem and more needs to be done. 

One solution put forward by  World Vision in this report  being released today  (Note to editor: Wed 20 April) is for chocolate companies to pay a small levy of 2 cents in every $10 of chocolate sales, to help train poor cocoa farmers in sustainable practices and to abolish child and trafficked labour. Because this levy would be industry-wide it would force all chocolate companies to take action, not just those with a good moral compass. 

And consumers have a part to play as well. Don’t feel guilty eating your chocolate eggs this Easter, buy ethically certified chocolate instead – there is list of ethical brands at www.donttradelives.com.au . And if your favourite chocolate bar or Easter egg is not ethically certified, ring up the chocolate company and ask them about child and trafficked labour in the cocoa industry and what they’re doing about it.    

Chocolate is a luxury many of us enjoy and love. But let’s make sure our luxury does not continue to bring misery to kids on the other side of the world. 

Opinion Pieces, Child labour, Africa, Cadbury, Child Labour, Child Slavery, Cocoa Industry, Martin Thomas, West Africa

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