Slavery Then, Slavery Now
In July 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund and Global Exchange filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Federal District court against Nestle, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland. In the suit, they claim that these companies (which supply over 70% of the beans for American chocolate) knowingly traffic in a substance, cocoa, that was produced by child slave labor. ILRF and Global Exchange claim to have gathered evidence that will stand up in court.
ILRF, Global Exchange, and Oxfam have used the child slavery issue to push Fair Trade, which is one way to ensure that the chocolate you eat has not been made from beans picked by slaves. This past Halloween, these three organizations ran a "Fair Trade is Boo-ti-ful!" campaign in which a bag of orange foil wrapped milk chocolate crunch chocolates was sold along with a postcard addressed to the CEO of Nestlé. The chocolates were produced by Yours Truly, as was the slogan.
The child slavery-chocolate connection is not new. Only a hundred years ago, between 1901 and 1909, the Cadbury company, owned by a Quaker family, was presented with an ethical dilemma. At the time, most of their cocoa beans were coming from the island of Sao Tomé, off of the west coast of Africa. Labor for the cocoa plantations, owned by prominant Portuguese families, was imported from nearby Angola, which supplied thousands of slaves. A great number of these workers were killed before they ever embarked, and mortality of workers on the plantations in Sao Tomé was very high. Children born to these slaves themselves became slaves.
A lawsuit, documented in the book, Chocolate on Trial, brought by Cadbury against a newspaper, highlighted the hypocrisy of the Cadbury corporation which felt that it could better terminate slavery by purchasing cocoa beans from the Portuguese and then exert pressure on the Portuguese government via the British Foreign Office. During the 8 years that Cadbury purchased Sao Tomé beans, some of the worst slavery as has ever been practiced on this planet was used to harvest the beans used in Cadbury products. This did not sit well with the British public.
In the ensuing hundred years, Cadbury encouraged the planting of cocoa on Ghanaian farms. Today Ghanaian cocoa beans are considered among the world's best, and Cadbury has been active in promoting new cocoa varieties, drilling wells in villages, and promoting sustainable agriculture in Ghana.
The situation in Ivory Coast is not even in the same realm as that of Sao Tomé one hundred years ago. Instances of slavery are subtle and difficult to document. Unlike the slavery of Angola and Sao Tomé, there are no skulls, no dead bodies, no shackles hanging from trees along trails. The children who claim to have been enslaved are already back in Mali. But there are other factors that make this kind of story especially irritating. For example, 30 years ago, the disparity between the richest and poorest quintiles of the world's population was a factor of 30. Today, it is 60. The rich (us) have doubled our incomes relative to the poorest (families in Mali.)
There are other differences as well. This time, the trial is not between two corporations, one claiming to have been defamed by the other. Instead, the trial is against three corporations by two NGOs. In this case, the plaintants have to prove something a lot more difficult: that slavery is obvious enough that the companies knew it existed and persisted anyway.
Still another difference--the audience. The American public is not nearly as well-read as the British public was a hundred years ago, and people who care about this issue are arguably a smaller proportion of the population. In the opinion of this observer, the average American citizen has no idea where Ivory Coast is, does not know how chocolate is made, and has little interest in learning about labor issues or about people living in far-off lands. Apologies for the cynicism, but I fear I am right about this.
ILRF, Global Exchange, and Oxfam have used the child slavery issue to push Fair Trade, which is one way to ensure that the chocolate you eat has not been made from beans picked by slaves. This past Halloween, these three organizations ran a "Fair Trade is Boo-ti-ful!" campaign in which a bag of orange foil wrapped milk chocolate crunch chocolates was sold along with a postcard addressed to the CEO of Nestlé. The chocolates were produced by Yours Truly, as was the slogan.
The child slavery-chocolate connection is not new. Only a hundred years ago, between 1901 and 1909, the Cadbury company, owned by a Quaker family, was presented with an ethical dilemma. At the time, most of their cocoa beans were coming from the island of Sao Tomé, off of the west coast of Africa. Labor for the cocoa plantations, owned by prominant Portuguese families, was imported from nearby Angola, which supplied thousands of slaves. A great number of these workers were killed before they ever embarked, and mortality of workers on the plantations in Sao Tomé was very high. Children born to these slaves themselves became slaves.
A lawsuit, documented in the book, Chocolate on Trial, brought by Cadbury against a newspaper, highlighted the hypocrisy of the Cadbury corporation which felt that it could better terminate slavery by purchasing cocoa beans from the Portuguese and then exert pressure on the Portuguese government via the British Foreign Office. During the 8 years that Cadbury purchased Sao Tomé beans, some of the worst slavery as has ever been practiced on this planet was used to harvest the beans used in Cadbury products. This did not sit well with the British public.
In the ensuing hundred years, Cadbury encouraged the planting of cocoa on Ghanaian farms. Today Ghanaian cocoa beans are considered among the world's best, and Cadbury has been active in promoting new cocoa varieties, drilling wells in villages, and promoting sustainable agriculture in Ghana.
The situation in Ivory Coast is not even in the same realm as that of Sao Tomé one hundred years ago. Instances of slavery are subtle and difficult to document. Unlike the slavery of Angola and Sao Tomé, there are no skulls, no dead bodies, no shackles hanging from trees along trails. The children who claim to have been enslaved are already back in Mali. But there are other factors that make this kind of story especially irritating. For example, 30 years ago, the disparity between the richest and poorest quintiles of the world's population was a factor of 30. Today, it is 60. The rich (us) have doubled our incomes relative to the poorest (families in Mali.)
There are other differences as well. This time, the trial is not between two corporations, one claiming to have been defamed by the other. Instead, the trial is against three corporations by two NGOs. In this case, the plaintants have to prove something a lot more difficult: that slavery is obvious enough that the companies knew it existed and persisted anyway.
Still another difference--the audience. The American public is not nearly as well-read as the British public was a hundred years ago, and people who care about this issue are arguably a smaller proportion of the population. In the opinion of this observer, the average American citizen has no idea where Ivory Coast is, does not know how chocolate is made, and has little interest in learning about labor issues or about people living in far-off lands. Apologies for the cynicism, but I fear I am right about this.
posted by Tom Neuhaus at 6:26 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home