Excerpt from Stephanie Black's film Life and Debt: Free Trade
1 2019-11-07T20:55:45-08:00 Food and Society Workshop 0826c60623ca5f5c8c1eb72fc2e97084d0c44cf8 35018 1 A compilation of short clips from the documentary film Life and Debt. The clips focus on the effects of free trade policies in Jamaica. These clips are meant to illustrate basic points from a structural perspective. Posted by Timothy Lim, whose channel "is primarily devoted to videos that help illustrate concepts, ideas, and perspectives in comparative politics and international relations. (Most are tied to topics that I cover in the courses I teach at California State University, Los Angeles.)" plain 2019-11-07T20:55:46-08:00 YouTube 2012-05-02T17:17:27.000Z UzYGaFv1ryo tclim988 Food and Society Workshop 0826c60623ca5f5c8c1eb72fc2e97084d0c44cf8This page is referenced by:
-
1
2019-10-27T09:06:28-07:00
Truth, Reconciliation, and Chocolate
7
Created on the occasion of Halloween 2019, this story considers how chocolate got to be so unfair and explores what's being done to let more people know about and participate in fairer chocolate.
plain
2019-11-08T11:48:02-08:00
Chocolate, something we mostly think of as a delicious tasting part of holidays like Halloween, is not delicious for everyone involved.
Knowing more about the problems with some kinds of chocolate -- and the ways that some chocolate producers have address the terrible labor problems involved -- can help us make better choices in indulging sweet tooth holiday cravings. Ben Paynter's Halloween-timed article in Fast Company gives us a 3-minute overview:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90421251/see-which-halloween-candy-is-contributing-to-child-labor-and-deforestation
One of the tools Paynter mentions is the Green America Chocolate Scorecard:
https://www.greenamerica.org/end-child-labor-cocoa/chocolate-scorecard
Americans each eat ~10 pounds of chocolate per year. (See this CNN story for more details on that!) Although Americans' love of chocolate has been questioned (see Are Americans Falling Out of Love with Chocolate?), it remains a staple of sweet treats.
As we try to understand why beloved sweet treat leads to deforestation and child labor, a few resources can help. Peter Whoriskey and Rachel Siegel's piece on Cocoa's Child Laborers in The Washington Post describes the problem vividly (June 5, 2019):About two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from West Africa where, according to a 2015 U.S. Labor Department report, more than 2 million children were engaged in dangerous labor in cocoa-growing regions.
When asked this spring, representatives of some of the biggest and best-known brands — Hershey, Mars and Nestlé — could not guarantee that any of their chocolates were produced without child labor.
“I’m not going to make those claims,” an executive at one of the large chocolate companies said.
One reason is that nearly 20 years after pledging to eradicate child labor, chocolate companies still cannot identify the farms where all their cocoa comes from, let alone whether child labor was used in producing it. Mars, maker of M&M’s and Milky Way, can trace only 24 percent of its cocoa back to farms; Hershey, the maker of Kisses and Reese’s, less than half; Nestlé can trace 49 percent of its global cocoa supply to farms.
Global food trader and Minnesota economic giant Cargill has responded to these charges, proposing a solution via "supply chain monitoring":
However, as Whoriskey and Siegel point out, there have been problems with this approach, especially as industry-led, unregulated initiatives:We are working hand in hand with government, civil society and other industry members to protect the rights of children in the cocoa sector. We are committed to eradicating child labour in our cocoa supply chain and have developed a strategic action plan to deliver and demonstrate this by 2025. To that end, we have implemented a range of activities within our cocoa supply chain to identify and protect children at risk. We tackle root causes such as poverty in cocoa-growing communities, lack of awareness and education, and insufficient economic opportunities. By designing and deploying programs that help improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers and their communities, we are taking a coordinated, multi-sectoral approach to addressing this complex issue. More information about our efforts and commitment to sustainable and responsible cocoa is available on our website at https://www.cargill.com/sustainability/cocoa/protecting-children.
Taking a step back from this seeming impasse, it can be helpful to consider the history of debt and colonization that has left countries such as those in the cacao producing heartland so strapped for cash. These clips from Stephanie Black's 2001 film Life and Debt highlight the crux of the problem with structural adjustment programs and free trade:While the original promise called for the eradication of child labor in West African cocoa fields and set a deadline for 2005, next year’s goal calls only for its reduction by 70 percent.
Timothy S. McCoy, a vice president of the World Cocoa Foundation, a Washington-based trade group, said that when the industry signed onto the 2001 agreement, “the real magnitude of child labor in the cocoa supply chain and how to address the phenomenon were poorly understood.”
...'A moral responsibility'
The most prominent, sustained public attention to the issue arose 18 years ago with reports from news organizations and the U.S. State Department that linked American chocolate to child slavery in West Africa.
“There is a moral responsibility . . . for us not to allow slavery, child slavery, in the 21st century,” Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) said at the time.
Engel introduced legislation that would have created a federal labeling system to indicate whether child slaves had been used in growing and harvesting cocoa. It allotted $250,000 to the Food and Drug Administration to develop the labels.
The measure passed the House, but the industry was adamant that no government regulation was necessary.
“We don’t need legislation to deal with the problem,” Susan Smith, then a spokeswoman for the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, told a reporter at the time. “We are already acting.”
Engel, along with then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), opted to negotiate an agreement with the chocolate companies.
Now known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol, the deal kept federal regulators from policing the chocolate supply.
But the deal committed the chocolate companies to eradicate child labor from their supply chains and to develop and implement “standards of public certification,” which would indicate that cocoa products had been produced “without any of the worst forms of child labor.”
The top officials of Hershey, Mars, Nestlé USA and five other chocolate companies signed onto the deal. The signing companies had “primary responsibility” for eradicating child labor, lawmakers said, but the Ivorian government, labor organizations and a consumer group also pledged support.
The protocol also specified a deadline: July 2005.
So what could chocolate reparations look like?
Simran Sethi says (in 2018 in The New Food Economy) that you can help by eating more dark chocolate. With many maps, images, and explanations, this article ties the above concerns about labor to those about deforestation:
Over the last year, the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit Mighty Earth discovered evidence of large-scale deforestation in the cocoa-growing regions of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Indonesia, Ecuador, Cameroon, and Peru. The environmental organization states in its West African report, Chocolate’s Dark Secret, that a significant portion of Ivory Coast’s national parks and protected areas has been cleared of forest cover and replaced with cocoa-growing operations. Satellite mapping and other data gathered between 1990 and 2015 show that Ivory Coast has lost 85 percent of its forests, and Ghana is on a similar trajectory. “Without action,” the report reads, “Ghana stands to lose all remaining forests outside its national parks in the next decade. Chimpanzees, elephants, and other wildlife populations have been decimated by the conversion of forests in both countries to cocoa; in Ivory Coast, only 200-400 elephants remain from an original population of hundreds of thousands.”
Chocolate companies, cocoa processors and governments have come together under the Cocoa and Forests Initiative.