Child slavery

No, Tony's is still not on the Slave Free Chocolate (org's) List of Ethical Suppliers

Why is Tony’s Chocolonely still absent from the Slave Free Chocolate List still remains a frequent inquiry in my inbox.

Initially, Tony’s Chocolonely earned recognition on the Ethical Chocolate Company’s List due to their commendable efforts in raising awareness about the issue of child and slave labor in cacao production. Despite operating ethically themselves, their partnership with Barry Callebaut, a complicit giant in this matter, gave them a pass in acknowledgment of their public stance against slavery in the chocolate industry.

In 2007, ethical chocolate makers were scarce, and Tony’s emerged as a pioneer, advocating change in the industry. However, despite their promises and efforts to initiate industry-wide reforms starting with Barry Callebaut, they've remained steadfastly independent in their approach, leading to their isolation – hence the "Lonely" in Chocolonely.

While initially left on the list due to their promises, the lack of tangible industry changes, the persistent use of child labor, and their continued association with Barry Callebaut led to questions from other ethical companies. Their absence from the list continues as the industry remains unchanged, with rising child labor and merely superficial commitments to sustainability and labor practices.

Despite numerous announced initiatives by companies profiting from child and slave labor, none have produced meaningful results. The underlying issue is the inability to ensure a true living wage for farmers, leading them to resort to unpaid child labor, while the industry strives to keep cacao prices at rock bottom.

The conclusion is clear: consumer-facing marketing claims unravel to reveal no substantial impact, leaving consumers susceptible to being "brandwashed." Until significant tangible changes are witnessed or an assurance of ethical practices throughout their operations is evident, Tony’s Chocolonely remains excluded from the list.

Slave Free Chocolate is committed to showcasing the chocolate companies that are Ethical the Whole Way Through. If you are one of these companies and not on our list, please contact us.

Brazil court fines Cargill in case involving child labor on Cocoa Farms by By Marcelo Teixeira and Ana Mano

SAO PAULO, Sept 26 (Reuters) - Commodities trader Cargill has been ordered by a Brazilian court to pay 600,000 reais ($120,185) as indemnity for buying cocoa from farms where child labor or forced work has been identified.

U.S.-based Cargill said on Tuesday it disagreed with the complaints and fine and would appeal the ruling to a higher court.

According to a decision dated Sept. 18, seen by Reuters, from the 39th Labor Court in the northeastern state of Bahia, Cargill was also ordered to add to its contracts with Brazilian cocoa suppliers clauses to end the commercial relationship if child labor or other unlawful working conditions occur.

Read the rest of the article HERE

SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVES IN THE COCOA INDUSTRY by Bright Adjei Debrah

SUSTAINABILITY INITIATIVES IN THE COCOA INDUSTRY by Bright Adjei Debrah

The sustainability issues in cocoa are multidimensional and complex. Farmers are getting older, and they tend to be on small farms with large families, they work on the farm with very little to no external paid labor and they don’t have very big harvests. They also have a dropping productivity rate and they have murky land tenure rights. That combination often leads to encroachment into protected lands and forests. Poverty also leads to children needing to contribute to the family income by working on the farms but often by engaging in illegal child labor. Illegal child labor means things like carrying really heavy loads, using dangerous materials like machetes, or using chemicals and they are missing school or not going to school at all.

The latest numbers we have are that more than 2 million children are engaged in illegal child labor on West African cocoa farms. Smallholder farmers also have very little say in the prices that are paid for cocoa, actually pretty much none because the government set the price of cocoa. The farmers are very dependent on their local bean collectors (purchasing clerks) for the timing of when they pass by the farm to collect the seeds. The price that they get paid for the cocoa beans is way too low to earn a living income.

If we as a society want real economically stable societies that are linked up to the global food chain, then that is something that needs to change. Earning a living income is a basic human right that has been agreed upon with the UN as one of the global sustainable development goals, and cocoa farmers are far from it because most West African cocoa farmers are under a dollar a day.

The manufacturing process is very fractured, and this fractured process leads to enmity, when what we really need in the cocoa value chain is connection, empathy, and responsibility.

If we want to change the cocoa industry, and that I mean the entire cocoa industry, we have to look at how cocoa flows through 99% of the chocolate you have ever consumed in your life, and would probably continue to consume because only at scale will we achieve a significant impact on the ground. For now, we are doing much too little, much too late, and much too slowly.

SO HOW DO WE ACHIEVE THAT CONNECTION?

Connection comes through traceability. Chocolate brands have the obligation to know exactly who the cocoa farmers are, and who are providing the cocoa beans for their chocolate. Only then can they understand their circumstances and actually take full responsibility towards them for the human rights and the planet rights that we are all working towards.

Empathy is putting yourself in another person’s experience within their frame of reference. Farmers don’t want to ruin the last standing forest in their country, and farmers don't relish watching their children carry heavy loads, miss school or not go to school.

There is a systematic inequality that exists in the cocoa supply chain that is causing this exploitation. What is happening here in the cocoa-growing regions in Africa is a symptom of how stakeholders approach issues at their end. If stakeholders don't connect, empathize, and take responsibility for what is happening here in the cocoa-growing regions in Africa, then directly or indirectly, they are responsible for deforestation, exploiters, and child traffickers.

The cocoa value chain is shaped like an hourglass ⌛️. You’ve millions of cocoa farmers, mostly smallholders on one side, and on the other are billions of chocolate consumers. In the middle are just a few chocolate giants or stakeholders. The chocolate market is dominated by a few chocolate manufacturers, cocoa processors, and traders. These few actors have all the powers in the supply chain and great power comes with great responsibility. These stakeholders therefore have arapid goal-oriented and collective approach to changing the system.

Here is an interesting thing that is happening. Currently, there are more than 50 active separate sustainability initiatives or programs that are going on in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire alone. A lot of these initiatives are focused on the same groups of farmers but with little to no cohesive approach between the programs, meaning that not a single farmer is being pulled out of poverty. Many of the farmers are also left in the cold and not being engaged at all.

What is happening is that chocolate giants are competing with each other and protecting their sustainability initiatives and they are doing it for just a very small fraction of the supply chain.

WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT THIS

Collaboration is the best new form of competition. Because, in this sharing economy, isn’t collaboration on sustainability programs much more purposeful than competition? As stake holders, we already know what the tools are to connect to farmers and to engage, but we need to do it together so that we can make a positive impact much faster.

As an example, picture a farmer who has been asked to have a map made of his farm. You can make GPS polygon maps by walking the perimeter of the farm and taking coordinate points. These marks are very important to both the farms and the farmer groups as well as the buying companies. Farmers and farmers groups can make an assessment of current yields, potential yields, and collective purchases for example of fertilizers/seedlings they might need for the year and buyers can analyze the maps for deforestation and deforestation risks. The maps are important and a tool that we know.

Picture the farmer welcoming a person with a company logo onto his farm to come and walk the perimeter of the farm. Then picture a week later, a different person with a different company logo came to do the exact same work again. Picture something that is even more frustrating than that wasted time and that duplicated effort. The frustrating part is that the farmer or the farmer groups do not even own, see it, use it, or leverage it.

Another connection, and collaboration that chocolate brands need to do is on living income. Chocolate brands can and should collaborate on paying a price to farmers that enables a living income. It is not fair for one chocolate brand to carry that financial burden for all other chocolate brands. It is also not a good idea for a farmer or farmer groups to sell their entire harvest to just one buyer or buying company. That is not resilient, that is risky business. It is not a good idea. But if you are only selling a fraction of your harvest at a living income price, the price that enables living income, then you are never going to get out of poverty.

There should be a level playing field amongst consumer brands to lift farmers out of poverty to create wealth. When that happens, farmers can make the investment in their farms, that chocolate companies say they need to do. Farmers would invest in their families, farms, and children’s education but without resources, they cannot do that. Chocolate brands and stakeholders that realize this connection, this empathy, and this responsibility can achieve that opportunity to amplify their positive impact on the ground through collaboration. If they are transparent about it, then consumers would know which chocolate brands to award with their chocolate buying sense.

To be clear, chocolate companies should compete fiercely on delicious chocolate, but they should not compete on cocoa. There should be no competition for child labor, deforestation on poverty, community development, additional livelihood programs, etc.

Consumers should award the chocolate brands that make farmers and forest protection their priority, and not a unique selling point, but something that is an absolute baseline.It is not a race we should be competing with each other, but it’s something that we should be doing together, so that we can get to where we are going faster.

The true cost of chocolate- Article from the GlobeandMail. May 12th 2023

The true cost of chocolate by GEOFFREY YORK AND ADRIAN MORROW


Labels for ‘sustainable’ cocoa can hide harsh realities for farmers trying to earn a living and eliminate child labour. In Africa and Latin America, The Globe spoke with growers on the front lines of global price wars.Canadian consumers, seeing labels that boast of “100-per-cent sustainably sourced cocoa” on many of the most popular chocolate products in Canada’s supermarkets, might never imagine that hunger and poverty are the grim daily reality for millions of cocoa farmers in Africa and Latin America.

Sustainable cocoa – a promise of all the major cocoa and chocolate companies – is vaguely defined and can include anything from training and education programs to a variety of supply certification schemes that pay premiums and attempt to trace cocoa origins. But at the heart of the sustainability concept is a pledge by the major manufacturers to help farmers gain a decent income. The promise is crucial to their marketing: a reassuring signal to consumers that a chocolate purchase is an ethical one.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE


Child Labour Undermining Sustainability in the Cocoa Industry in Ghana By Bright Adjei Debrah

Child labour undermining sustainability in the cocoa industry

Sustainability means meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of future generations while ensuring a balance between economic growth, environmental care, and social well-being.

Producing sustainable cocoa begins with responsible land, fertilizer, and pesticide usage devoid of child labour and untrained labour, making the use of artificial insecticides the last resort to control insect pest and diseases. This would lead to high crop production in terms of quality and quantity, better protection of the environment, natural pollinators, and soil.

Organic fertilizers and insecticides which are less expensive and environmentally friendly should be used to reduce the burden on farmers and to protect the environment. Using organic insecticides and pesticides protect natural pollinators so there will be no need for artificial (hand) pollinators. Organic fertilizer does not have any effects on human health, soil fauna, and flora. In addition, it has no impact on water bodies. It rather helps regulate soil temperature, aeration, and water infiltration into the soil and the pH. This helps the uptake of nutrients by plants thereby enhancing productivity.

Child labour is one of those activities that undermine sustainability in cocoa farming.

Child labour is mostly defined not by the activity, but by the impact this activity has on the child.

In this report the focus would be to find out how child labour adversely impacts the quantity and quality of the cocoa produced over time and to propose solutions on how to have sustainable cocoa production without the use of child labourers.

Most of the cocoa in Ghana and other West African countries is grown by smallholder farmers. Studies show that most of the children who work on cocoa farms do so within their immediate or extended family.

The most common jobs children do on the farms include but are not limited to; weeding, planting seedlings/seeds, application of weedicides/fungicides/herbicides/liquid fertilizer, harvesting ripe cocoa pods, gathering harvested pods, pruning cocoa, carrying pods to central point, breaking of pods, preparing mats for cocoa fermentation using banana leaves, carting of fermented beans to dry mats, and drying of the cocoa. All these activities that children do on the farm have impacts on the productivity of the cocoa, soil nutrients, and the environment.

In several farmer meetings at Sefwi in the Western North Region of Ghana, farmers explained that, anytime they allowed their kids to harvest cocoa, gather harvested pods, or break cocoa pods, they noticed a slight reduction in their yield compared to when they hired adult labourers.

How then does child labour impact the productivity of the crops, the soil nutrients, and the environment?

Take for instance harvesting cocoa, children have no proper training on how to harvest, and in the process, they damage the cushions (the very spot where the cocoa flowers are on the trunk). Also, ripe pods high in the branches are mostly left unharvested because they are beyond the reach of these children. Some of the farmers confirmed that sometimes they had to redo the harvesting. During the gathering and carting of pods to the central point, children leave most of the pods on the ground. Farmers explained that they find some of these pods rotten on the ground when they walk through their farms.

According to ILO, Ghana, and Ivory Coast has an estimated 1.56 million child labourers.

If each child labourer damages one cocoa tree during harvesting, an estimated total of 1.56 million trees would be damaged, an equivalent of 3466.67 acres of cocoa farms. If an acre produces 3 bags of cocoa, it means that an estimated 10400 bags (650 metric tonnes) would be lost the following year. If the tree takes a year to heal, the industry will lose the amount of cocoa harvested that year. And because it is a continuous process, the industry will continue to lose year in year out which increases the poverty of farmers and threatens the sustainability of the industry.

In 2021, Ivory Coast and Ghana had 10.75 million and 6.75 million acres of area respectively under cocoa cultivation ( satellite-based high-resolution maps of cocoa for Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana by N Kalischek, June 2022).

If child labourers worked on just a quarter of these acres of land, and each child labourer is causing a loss of 0.2Kg of beans to the farmer on each acre, that may seem insignificant but cumulatively the reality is that the whole cocoa industry of Ivory Coast and Ghana is losing 8600 bags (537.5 metric tonnes) and 2160 bags (135 metric tonnes) of beans respectively.

Most sustainability interventions are not yielding the expected results because of delays in the implementation of some of the components such as youth development and integration into the value chain as service providers, also community development which is being implemented as an independent component should be considered as the main driver of youth, women development, and child labor remediation in farming communities. Also, lack of coordination amongst the components and false reportage are not helping the course. The attention of stakeholders has not gone to the fact that child labour is undermining the sustainability of the cocoa industry because they get the volumes they want without difficulties and attribute any reductions to pests, diseases, old age of farms, environmental factors, etc. The focus has been on certification program standards with its generic processes and procedures.

 

Recommendation

·       Stakeholders could redirect their focus on how child labour is impacting the quality and quantity of cocoa produced.

·       Children should not be allowed to do any work on the farm because apart from having a negative impact on the children, it also undermines the sustainability of the cocoa industry as explained in this report.

Youth development which is a subset of community development should be properly fused into the supply chain to be service providers in the farming communities. This will serve as employment for the youth in the communities.

 

·       There should also be a review of some of the interventions in the industry that can separate child labour and its related issues from the production and procurement of cocoa. Most child labour remediation is done independently even though it is a subset of community development. When communities are developed,  child labour remediation improves.

 

Conclusion

 

The use of child labour in cocoa farming seems cheap at first sight but when we consider the impact of their activities on the farm, they are expensive and have a dire economic impact on every stakeholder in the cocoa value chain. Farmers will continue to live below the poverty line, and some may change to farm other alternative cash crops such as rubber and cashew or sell out their cocoa farms to illegal miners. When this happens the impact will hit every single stakeholder along the value chain.

 

 

 

An agreed food metric labeling system is paramount

For twenty years businesses, governments, NGOs, and activists have been working towards bettering our world in the realm of climate change, labor rights, food security, soil health, etc. But despite the thousands of business-driven initiatives, thousands of NGO projects, new laws, and citizens doing their best, no area has shown any improvement. A glaring void hampering progress is that none of the data used by food companies is verified. What is real? What is Brandwashing? Who the heck knows? Take chocolate as an example, there are many ethical chocolate companies that are running their businesses ethically the whole way through. But there isn’t a chocolate company out there that doesn’t claim to be ethical and sustainable. So then, who is complicit for the 1.6 million exploited children in the industry? Who benefitted from destroying the vital rainforest? At the end of the day does Brandwashing win over progress? Not if I can help it! It is paramount that the food industry adopts a labeling system that is based on independent primary data collected by unvested scientists. In other words, we all should be operating on an agreed food metric that is based on the truth. By “we” I mean, investors, financial institutions, and consumers. Fortunately, there is one. OmniAction has created the OmniLabel. I, Ayn Riggs, director of Slave Free Chocolate, have opened the US office of OmniAction. For more information, please either contact Slave Free Chocolate and/or visit OmniAction.

Please Customs and Border Protection, DO YOUR JOB!!!

The US Customs and Border Protection Agency is sitting on something that could really help.

The Department of Labor has cocoa listed as a child labor and forced child labor commodity. The industrial chocolate industry knows this as they clearly admit it is part of their supply chain and promised to clean this up in 2001 when it signed the Harkin Engel Protocol. Unfortunately, it hasn’t. Despite a slew of paltry initiatives, no positive change as been recorded. What has been documented by the Department of Labor is that the number of exploited children in the cocoa sector of Ghana and The Ivory Coast has risen.

But get this, the US Customs and Border Patrol Agency is supposed to issue an embargo and halt the import of these beans. It’s law. But despite and endless amount of outreach including a detailed petition, they haven’t done their job.

Below are the screen shots to a response that International Rights Advocates receive over 2 years after they filed a detailed petition.

After working on this issue for 16 years now, I really believe that halting these beans would help inspire the complicit industrial chocolate companies to fulfill the promises they not only gave to these children but the rest of the world.

Ayn Riggs

Director Slave Free Chocolate


Bibamba Chocolate Announces Results of Heavy Metal Testing

Bibamba Chocolate Announces Results of Heavy Metal Testing February 22 nd , 2023

Careful Agricultural and Fair Labor Practices Make Safer Dark Chocolate

Denver – February 22 nd , 2023 –Denver artisan chocolate company Bibamba Chocolate

announced today the results of heavy metal testing of their signature dark chocolate

bark.

The presence of high levels of heavy metals such as lead and cadmium found in dark

chocolate has become an issue of growing concern to dark chocolate consumers. First

reported by Consumer Reports in December 2022, many major news outlets have

reported that several large dark chocolate brands tested high in heavy metals, leaving

dark chocolate lovers wary about the safety of their beloved snack.

Bibamba Chocolate owners Patrick and Mara Tcheunou, who have prioritized

sustainable farming and fair labor practices at their family farm in Cameroon since the

inception of their company, responded quickly to this growing concern about heavy

metals in dark chocolate. They had their signature dark chocolate bark “Noir 60%

Cacao” independently tested by a certified food testing laboratory in early February.

The owners were happy, but not surprised, to learn that Bibamba’s chocolate tested

below the acceptable levels of lead and cadmium, according to California's

maximum allowable dose (MADL). The MADL is currently the most protective

standard in the industry.

“I credit this to our good farming and post-harvesting practices by our farm employees,

who are well compensated, thus are incentivized to follow best practices and

procedures,” Patrick said, referring to the harvesting, fermentation and drying of cacao

beans involved in the manufacture of Bibamba’s chocolate. “Lead is likely deposited on

cocoa beans through dust, mostly during drying.”

Bibamba Chocolate is recognized as Slave-Free Chocolate, meaning they do not use

child labor (which is common in the chocolate industry) and pay their farmers fair wages

and healthcare. This investment is not only the right thing to do – it has also resulted in

better cacao making Bibamba dark chocolate both delicious and safe to eat.