Labor by Herod Andrew

Author:Herod, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509524129
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

The ILO (2013a) estimates that in 2012 there were 168 million child laborers in the world (11% of the world’s children), of whom 59% worked in agriculture. Although this figure is significant, it is much less than the 246 million who were working in 2000. Of the 168 million, 85 million were employed in hazardous work (compared to 171 million in 2000). While the largest numbers of child workers are found in Asia and the Pacific (almost 78 million, or about 9% of the region’s children), sub-Saharan Africa has the highest incidence of child labor – one in five children (a total of some 59 million). Globally, most children work in agriculture (some 98 million), but about 54 million work in services and 12 million in industry, mostly in the informal economy. According to some estimates, there are as many as 2.1 million working in the cocoa fields of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. The vast majority of child cocoa workers toil under fairly hazardous conditions, including using sharp machetes (in Côte d’Ivoire 37% of them had suffered wounds), working long hours, carrying heavy loads (children frequently drag 50 kilogram bags of beans through the forest), and/or being exposed to agro-chemicals (Tulane University 2015). Most of these children are between about 11 and 16 years of age, though investigative journalists have found some as young as 5. In many cases, they are so young and malnourished (and therefore small) that the machetes they wield to cut the cocoa pods from the trees are as tall as they are. About 40% of these children are girls. Both boys and girls also sometimes suffer sexual abuse at the hands of their employers.

There are two aspects of cocoa harvesting that I particularly want to highlight with regard to connecting working practices in West Africa with how chocolate GPNs function to bring cheap chocolate to global consumers. The first involves how the labor force upon which the GPN relies is created. In the case of the actual manufacture of chocolate in Europe or North America, the workers involved are typically hired in the same manner as any other factory worker and they do fairly typical factory work. However, when it comes to securing the essential raw material for chocolate, the industry has become reliant not just on children but, increasingly, on the forced labor of children. Hence, although many children are the offspring of the cocoa farmers themselves, many others are trafficked from countries in the West African interior to work, including in cocoa harvesting and preliminary processing (mainly extracting the beans from pod husks and drying them). These are not the only trafficked children in the region. There are boys from Guinea who work in Côte d’Ivoire’s mining regions, in construction in Togo, and fishing in Ghana. Many young girls and women are trafficked to work as domestic servants or street vendors. Some are also forced into sex work, both in West Africa and in Europe. Whereas the children trafficked to work in Ghana

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