Aid for the Starving Biafrans (1969)

From the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "The Ivory Coast is systematically destroying 100,000 tons of 1967-68 season coffee, according to official sources. This is to conform with the International Coffee Agreement and to ease financing of stocks that have become considerable, the sources say". —The Times, 30 November 1968.

The Chocolate Wars

From the Socialist Courier blog:

We all know that capitalism is a crazy system based on competition and profit, so it comes as no surprise when we have wars over oil in the Middle East, over diamonds in Sierra Leone and timber in Liberia but now we have war over chocolate!

"Government and rebel leaders of the world's leading cocoa exporter, Ivory Coast, both siphoned off millions of dollars from the cocoa industry to finance the 2002-03 civil war that divided the once-stable and prosperous country in two, according to a recent report from Global Witness, a London-based group that focuses on resource-fuelled corruption. The government received more than $58 million from institutions and cocoa revenues, while the rebel New Forces pocketed about $30 million since 2004 in taxes and revenues, claims the report titled "Hot Chocolate: How Cocoa fuelled the conflict in Cote d'Ivoire" . . . Fighting here ended with the government of President Laurent Gbagbo in control of the south, where 90 percent of cocoa production takes place, and the rebel New Forces in charge of the north." (Christian Science Monitor, 17 July)

Truly capitalism is a crazy system!

Richard Donnelly

Child Slavery and the Chocolate Factory

From the blog, Socialist Banner

The BBC is reporting that child labour, in fact, near enough actual slavery, remains an unresolved problem in the Ivory Coast, the world's biggest cocoa producer.

A 2002 report by the industry body, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, put the number of children working in dangerous conditions in cocoa in West Africa at 284,000 in 2002, 200,000 of them in Ivory Coast. Many children on cocoa farms don't get to school, some exchange their childhood for work, a roof over their head and a meal a day. Others have been sent by their parents into virtual slavery, suffering beatings and abuse. Progress in eradicating child labour has been slow.

Naturally not very particularly good news for the chocolate manufacturers in the more developed countries. There can be no worse PR for a chocolate company than news that children in West Africa - the source for the bulk of the world's cocoa - are being forced to pick beans used to make chocolate for the children in the West.

A voluntary industry initiative, called the Harkin-Engel protocol, was set up in 2001. Its initial aim was to have a system in place to monitor labour conditions on cocoa farms by July 2005. That deadline shifted has now towards a 2008 deadline to monitor labour conditions in 50% of farms in Ghana, the world's number two producer, and neighbouring in Ivory Coast.

Mme. Amouan Acquah, the government official responsible for child labour issues in Ivory Coast, makes the excuse that "We are in a state of war. We cannot make such guarantees." Yet with or without war, Ivory Coast's cocoa has always made it to the world market. Critics say that if the cocoa can get to market even in times of conflict, then it should also be possible to monitor labour conditions on the farm.

Mme Acquah points out "The issue at the heart of this [child labour] is poverty."

In the words of cocoa farmer Eugene Djedje "No one is obliged to send a child to school. If you don't have money you don't go."

Some major companies that knowingly use chocolate produced by slave labor:
- Hersheys
- M&M/Mars
- Nestle
- Ben & Jerry's
- Kraft
- Toblerone
- Hauser Chocolates

Alan Johnstone