With Christmas around the corner, the demand for chocolate will rise exponentially in the coming month. Yet, even though the chocolate industry is worth over £75 billion a year, cocoa farmers in West Africa – where 60% of cocoa is grown – still struggle to eke out a living.

Fairtrade International recently conducted a survey revealing that only 7% of all farmers currently earn a living income. And in rural Côte d’Ivoire, cocoa farmer households earn just 37% of a living income. According to a further report, Craving a Change in Chocolate, these farmers struggle to get by on as little as 74p per day – well below the world’s extreme poverty line. Yet, in stark contrast, for around £1.86 per day, which is the average price of a large bar of chocolate, they would be able to have a more sustainable life.

Living in abject poverty, they are often unable to afford necessities such as food, medicine, and education for their children. Furthermore, they are frequently exposed to unsavoury conditions, such as working without the proper protection; long hours in the blistering heat; and accidents or injuries as a result of working with dangerous tools.

What is at the root of the problem?

Michael Ehis Odijie, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge, pointed to deforestation as the root of the problem. Many researchers believe that once forestland have been massively cleared, cultivation becomes difficult. Historically, migration into new forestland – following forest depletion – was an inherent part of cocoa production.

“Cocoa production moved from Mexico to Central America in the sixteenth century.  The Caribbean became the production hub in the seventeenth century, and then Venezuela in the eighteenth century. Ecuador and Sao Tomé were the hubs in the nineteenth century before Brazil took over. And then Ghana and Nigeria in the early twentieth century followed by Côte d’Ivoire. The main part of the story is rotation within these countries,” Odijie said.

“These movements follow a line of deforestation. Although cocoa cultivation is vulnerable to several shocks and stressors, such as weather-related shocks (climate change, droughts, floods), biological shocks (black pod disease, swollen shoot virus, pests, mistletoe), price fluctuation, and economic/political shocks, deforestation is the crucial factor in explaining these shifts. This is because, again, forestland is a production factor.”

A constant cycle of deforestation and migration inadvertently leads to a spike in production costs, which farmers are unable to recover by increasing their prices, since they have little control over such things. Chocolate manufacturers do not want diversification, hence many have started collaborating with NGOs to create sustainability in their supply chains. Despite this, sustainability programs do not take into account the changes in the cost structure due to post-forest cultivation.

Fairtrade International identified the problem and have been working towards introducing a reference price to take into account the cost of production. But Odijie argued that their methodology is deeply flawed, since it only collates quantitative responses to changes in cost structure, and instead, a reference price that takes into account the increasing cost of production is needed.

“The increasing cost of post-forest cultivation is what is causing poverty. Planters now have to employ more labour, use more fertilizers, and more pesticides – all of which increases the cost – regardless of price. This explains why planters (especially in Ivory Coast) earn more now compared to the past and are also poorer now. And while some of the extra costs get deflated in several practices, they show up in other areas. For example, some planters use extended relatives to cover the extra labour, but as a result, spend more money on food feeding the relatives,” he explained.

Child labour

With over 2 million children in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana working in cocoa fields, child labour has also become a major concern. In a statement, Amnesty International surmised that the volatility of the cocoa price proves to be a big challenge for the farmers whose livelihood depends on it, pushing them into cost-saving actions such as slavery and child labour. It stated, “The cause is lack of control as well as price manipulation by large hedge funds counting on large quick returns on short term investments. This makes farmers not only the victims of the chronic underinvestment of their own country but also the victim of greedy businessmen at the stock market.”

One of the reasons why it has been difficult to completely eradicate child labour is because big chocolate manufacturers are unable to pinpoint every farm from where they source their cocoa. Mars, the maker of M&M’s and Milky Way, can trace only 24 per cent of its cocoa back to farms; Hershey, the maker of Kisses and Reese’s, less than half; Nestlé can trace 49 per cent of its global cocoa supply to farms.

“Until we address the poverty issue and raise farmers out of poverty, then this will continue to be a problem,” Timothy McCoy, vice president of the World Cocoa Foundation, told Raconteur.

“If there was an easy solution to this, then we would have solved it a long time ago and moved on.”

L'articolo How Your Chocolate Addiction Traps Cocoa Farmers In Poverty proviene da InsideOver.

“My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises. They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes (US$2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said no, but some of the girls did it and got the money.” This was the bleak statement of a 15-years-old Haitian girl in a report by Save the Children.

Her words echo a myriad of child abuse stories committed by aid workers in crisis-stricken countries around the world. The report, which was carried out almost a decade ago, detailed the sexual exploitation of boys and girls by those who were sent to safeguarding their well-being – an irony that reeks of the ultimate betrayal.

One of the reasons that these sexual assaults go unreported is due to the fear of losing much-needed resources in desperately impoverished regions. Many children have been forced to trade sex for food and other necessities that they need to sustain their survival. A teenage girl in Côte d’Ivoire spoke about a girl entrapped by a man whom she relied on to get food. In Southern Sudan, a teenage boy divulged that even though people may be aware that it happens, they are worried that if they were to report the matter, the agencies will stop providing the care that they so heavily relied on.

Although the report failed to disclose the names of those companies that were culpable, it did confirm that it was prevalent in 23 humanitarian, peacekeeping and security organisations. This included civil humanitarian agencies such as those delivering food and nutritional assistance, care, education and health services, reconstruction, shelter, training, and livelihood support, as well as military actors providing peace and security services.

Andrew MacLeod, co-founder and director of Hear Their Cries – an organisation established to stop the abuse of this nature happening, said: “Save the Children have done little to prevent abuse by their own staff and contractors. So while their report was good to highlight the issue, one has to wonder if they too have gone silent on the issue because they have too much to hide themselves.”

Since the publishing of the report almost ten years ago, it was revealed last year that this systematic abuse of vulnerable children had continued. Former Oxfam head, Dame Barbara Stocking, confessed that she “knew for years” that sexual violations had been occurring within Oxfam, which included the hiring of prostitutes – some of whom were underage. Instead of being reprimanded in the appropriate way, the perpetrators flitted freely from one aid job to another.

Oxfam is not the only wrongdoer when it comes to failing these children; in the humanitarian world it a well-known problem. The UK’s former National Criminal Intelligence Service compared paedophiles employed in the aid world to the sex tourism industry. “This problem is out of control and much larger in scale than the abuse of the Catholic Church,” MacLeod explained. “For those who doubt that, consider this: there are more aid workers than Catholic Priests, in more countries than the Catholic church with better access to children and controlling food, water, and shelter. Some of the saddest stories are those of children who were abused and then fell pregnant. The children born of the abuse in many cases have the rights to the nationality of their father – but they do not know who the father is. So this absence is the second abuse.”

A study by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) discovered that fewer people have been donating to charities in recent times. Figures have continued to fall over the past three years with only 48 per cent still believing that charities are trustworthy. “There needs to be a better PDP plan of action – prevention, detection, and prosecution. All NGO’s should report any child abuse immediately to prosecuting authorities. Child abuse will only stop when we have prosecutions,” MacLeod, who has been the recipient of numerous humanitarian awards, advised. “International NGO’s need to remember that many countries make it an offence to have sex with a child under the age of 16 anywhere in the world. So a staff member should be reported to their home police as well as the police where the event took place.”

“Furthermore, the vast majority of victims never report these crimes. So NGOs must fund a report into the causes and cures for the massive under-reporting of abuse, and not wait for victims to come forward. They should develop policies to actively seek out victims and provide adequate compensation to the victims directly – not just through a central fund. “A DNA database of aid workers should also be created to hold aid workers to account and the implementation of independent whistle-blower structures will also be helpful.”

L'articolo Aid Workers Trading Food for Sex with Children proviene da InsideOver.