It's enough to make you sick

10 April 2012

The boat was called Etireno, its cargo 250 child slaves. Etireno means 'end of story'. But for once, yet another tale of poverty and exploitation in some far-flung nation was not quite over. For once, the West had not forgotten.

It all started in April with the news that the Etireno was sailing up and down the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. The boat was prohibited from stopping first in Gabon, then Cameroon, and then went missing. Aid workers said the children were probably heading for slavery on the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast. Thus started a four-day international search that gripped the world, the media feverishly reporting fears that the captain may have panicked and dumped the children into the shark-invested sea. The Etireno eventually docked where it started, in Benin. Although only 30 unaccompanied children were eventually found on board - ending the saga in a somewhat less dramatic fashion - the episode had thrown a spotlight on the modern slave trade.

The slave trade. Most of us thought that it had ended 200 years ago. As a regional diplomat explains, 'The information got inflated over time, partly because it was credible in this region.' And partly because the captain already had convictions for child trafficking.

Until these events, few knew that child slavery was involved in the production of that most inoffensive of consumer products - chocolate. Six months on, and something has been done. After much badgering from aid agencies, who accused the chocolatiers of doing nothing to stop slavery, and from the government, which appealed to chocolate makers not to use cocoa from farms run using slave labour, there's been a step forward. Earlier this month, the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Alliance, the trade association for British chocolate manufacturers, announced it was joining an international plan - the Harkin-Engel Protocol - to eliminate child slavery and other forms of exploitation.

You'll stop cheering, however, when you hear about the BCCCA's immediate response to the Etireno incident. It categorically stated that there was little evidence of slave involvement in cocoa production, before it transpired it had never actually conducted any field research in the region. So can we trust them now?

Not when it seems they can't trust themselves. BCCCA director John Newman sighs when the issue of field research is brought up: 'You know, a lot of people spent a lot of time discussing this issue.' And of child slavery in general: 'There was never any indication of a problem before.' So can it be guaranteed that in four years, the time-span specified in the agreement, that no slave labour will be involved? 'No one can make any guarantees about the future.'

Not all good news, then. The hands of a slave already touch many chocolate bars sold in your local shops - and there can be no guarantee of much of a change in the future. Britain is the world's largest per capita consumer of chocolate. As Mohammed Maiga, a government official in Mali, starkly declares, 'The blood of African children is in our bars of chocolate.' And anyway, four years is a long period. What happens in the meantime?

UNICEF estimates that there are 15,000 child slaves working on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer. Most are bought from impoverished neighbouring countries like Benin or Mali for, on average, £10 (the same price as, say, 28 chocolate bars). They are then sold to plantation owners for up to £200.

This is often voluntarily done. This is slavery without the chains, part of an age-old West African tradition where poor families entrust their children to richer relatives or acquaintances who promise education and a trade in exchange for work. Some do get lucky and return home with money. Some return relatively rich, earning £100 a year, an amount the poorest Malians could not hope to make in five years. Most, however, end up in terrible conditions, the boys on cocoa or cotton plantations, the girls in domestic service: no days off, little food, sleeping in a locked room, beaten if they try to escape. Notably, they receive no money. Some stay, tied to the belief that if they leave, they will never be paid. Others, miles from home, with no possessions, simply have nowhere else to go. This is real slavery.

Children and chocolate are forever linked, it's creamy, soothing texture a treat at Easter and a menace at the dentist's. But the image should be of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with sweet-toothed children eager to break in and gobble the goodies, not of children eager to break out, whose hands are blistered from the long, hard work, harvesting a crop that will make a product most have never tasted. In the slave trade, the younger the child, the higher the value. Small children are more obedient, you see, and less likely to run away.

The Etireno incident rammed home the message of Slavery, a damning TV documentary shown last year, which claimed that up to 40 per cent of the chocolate eaten in Britain could be tainted with slavery. Most memorable was the story of Drissa, whose experience, it seems, is typical. Drissa was tricked into leaving Mali to work on a cocoa farm where he spent five and a half years, working 18-hour days on little food, and locked away at night. He tried to run away but was caught and beaten; flies then infected his wounds. When the wounds healed, he went back to work. He wasn't paid. He was eventually freed by a raid organised by the Malian consulate. Months on, his back was still red raw with the beatings he had endured.

Kate Blewett and Brian Woods, the couple behind the programme, described this as the most upsetting meeting. 'When Drissa took his shirt off, I had never seen anything like it,' says Woods, who came to prominence with his documentary on China's dying rooms. 'There wasn't an inch of his body which wasn't scarred.' Drissa was more succinct when asked if he had a message to the West: 'They are eating my flesh. They enjoy something I suffered to make.'

This seems even more shameful when the original philosophy of British chocolate companies run by Quaker families such as Cadbury and Terry is considered. They believed in looking after their workers, denouncing the exploitation of most 19th-century labour. George Cadbury, for instance, believed the working classes should own houses away from the appalling living conditions of inner cities. He created Bournville, on the outskirts of Birmingham, an idyllic town with big houses, gardens and a village green.

Compare this to 2001. What have the big chocolate companies to say for themselves now? The big three - Mars, Nestl? and Cadbury - produce more than three-quarters of the UK's chocolate. Mars admits that it buys three-quarters of its cocoa from the Ivory Coast, but Gordon Storey, head of external affairs, wouldn't give a guarantee that his chocolate does not originate from farms run using slave labour. Nestl? buys some beans from the Ivory Coast, although the majority come from Nigeria and Ghana. A guarantee, please? 'Like our competitors, we purchase some beans from the Ivory Coast,' says Hillary Parsons, head of corporate affairs. But as for a guarantee: 'It's not possible, unfortunately. No one can give something like this a guarantee.'

They can, actually, especially if the beans are bought in Ghana - one of only three West African states to adopt the 1999 International Labour Organisation's convention to stop child labour. Cadbury, however, Britain's biggest chocolate maker with almost a 28 per cent share, buys 90 per cent of its beans from Ghana (most of the rest are from East Asia). The Day Chocolate Company monitored by the Fairtrade organisation also uses Ghanaian cocoa beans from co-operative farms.

So, are the chocolatiers, by agreeing to the Protocol, finally accepting responsibility for slave labour used on cocoa farms - and effectively admitting that they had previously turned a blind eye. Well, maybe it's too late to congratulate them and continue buying their chocolate, safe in the knowledge that in four - or maybe 14 - years, no exploitation, adult or child, paid or unpaid, will be involved in the making of a single bar. It should have happened sooner. After all, these are companies whose annual turnover is greater than the entire Gross National Product of the Ivory Coast and Mali. Combined.

Both UNICEF and Save the Children advise consumers only to buy products that label the country of origin. Fairtrade is an independent guarantee that what you are buying has been produced without cruelty and that farmers have received a fair price. As Eileen Maybin of Fairtrade says, its solution to slave labour is simple: an increase in Fairtrade sales, where there is an absolute guarantee of no slavery. We are powerless in most developing-world problems, but here we can help a little, boycotting the companies that bring slavery into our homes, choosing Fairtrade chocolate, or chocolate produced in co-operating states such as Ghana, until the companies can give consumers a guarantee.

Would it ultimately solve the problem? Most children leave their villages hoping for a better life. There are few alternatives. In the past few months alone, UNICEF has managed to repatriate 1,400 Malian children. But more often than not, they will return to the Ivory Coast or to another relatively rich country, in search of work, praying for a better employer. Unfortunately, there is no Willy Wonka who can conjure up a perfect, candy-coated future for them. All they have to rely on is luck.

For more about the latest developments on slavery and chocolate, see www.antislavery.org.

Co-op, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Asda and Safeway stock Fairtrade chocolate from the Day Chocolate Company and Green & Black's.

There is also Oxfam, Traidcraft and Equal Exchange chocolate. See www.fairtrade.org.uk

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