BY KAMERYN RICHARDSON
Kameryn Richardson is a second year Masters of International Relations (MAIR) student with a concentration on States, Markets, and Institutions in the Americas. Her past research has focused on the uniquely challenging experiences of historically marginalized populations, including women of color in social, economic, and institutional contexts. She served as lead project researcher and associate producer for the NJ PBS-Aired, Emmy-nominated documentary “The Price of Silence: The Forgotten Story of New Jersey’s Enslaved People,” and, most recently, engaged in a consulting project focused on expanding healthcare access in Kenya.
This past February, ethical chocolatier Tony’s Chocolonely launched an ad campaign calling out its well-known competitors’ use of child labor in their cocoa supply chains. To little surprise, Mondelēz, the company behind the iconic purple Milka bars, responded with legal action, ironically drawing more attention to the campaign it sought to silence. Clearly, Tony's message to “pay farmers, not lawyers” was lost on some.
Tony’s is one of many voices exposing cocoa companies that knowingly perpetuate the use of child labor in their supply chains. And, despite promises for change, voluntary commitments to improve problematic value chains have proven to be weak and ineffectual.
Back in June 2019, The Washington Post featured the story of Abou – one of more than 16,000 children in the West African cocoa industry – exposing a source of layered oppression which robs many of education, joy, and family at as young as 10 years old. These children, lured by traffickers with the promise of bicycles or pay, endure verbal and or physical abuse as they carry out hazardous tasks like the burning of fields, handling of agro-chemicals, and use of sharp tools to harvest cacao, the crop eventually processed into cocoa. After a long day’s work, the children, unable to return home, retire to makeshift huts buried in the plantation-adjacent woods.
Caught in a cycle that chocolate companies have vowed to demolish for over two decades, children laboring on farms in Côte d’Ivoire are paid just 85 cents a day. Meanwhile, major corporations such as Nestlé, Hershey, and Mars, reached $8.45 billion, $10.32 billion, and $22 billion, respectively, in net sales this past year.
Despite publicly denouncing child labor, major cocoa corporations fall short of eliminating distributors engaging in this practice from their supply chains. In the absence of compulsory anti-child labor due diligence, progress on this front has proven stunningly slow. Pledges to eradicate the “worst forms of child labor” by 2005, solidified under the voluntarily-enforced Harkin-Engel Protocol, remain unhonored.
There have been some strides in eradicating child labor, with Nestlé, in particular, recognized by corporate sustainability monitoring organizations such as KnowTheChain (KTC) for its increasingly extensive risk assessment practices and supply chain standards. The largest publicly held food company in the world has also increased its involvement with the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), an association focused on preventing and addressing child- and forced- labor in cocoa, and the Cocoa Coalition, a collective which advocates for mandatory due-diligence legislation applicable to all corporations “placing cocoa and cocoa products on the EU market.”
Yet, even cases of seemingly ideal progress in the absence of mandated due diligence have proven to disappoint. In 2021, International Rights Advocates, a United States non-profit organization intent on ending modern-day slavery, filed its second case against Nestlé, alleging its continued complicity in child labor in Western Africa., The case spotlights the heart-shattering experiences of eight former child laborers trafficked from Mali to Côte D’Ivoire, hoping to hold the major chocolatier “legally and morally responsible” for its continued engagement in this shameful practice. The non-linearity of the same corporation’s progress – a feature of voluntary adherence to internally-defined standards of human rights protection – is also noted in KTC’s most recent “Food and Beverage Benchmark,” where Nestlé’s supply chain score dropped 19 percentage points (a modest 55% to a disappointing 36%) between the 2020-2021 and 2022-2023 evaluative cycles. Though continuing to emphasize its rejection of “bad labor practices,” Nestlé is noted by KTC as having a diminished worker voice, lack of follow-through on remediation measures, and four additional allegations of forced labor within its supply chains. The company’s failure to improve – across themes such as recruitment, monitoring, and commitment and governance – and its astonishingly “[poor]” performance on purchasing practices caused its rank to drop five places from the year prior. Beyond exposure by KTC and other human rights organizations, no substantive measures exist to penalize Nestlé for its failures.
In the context of continued voluntary advocacy and selective due diligence, it is clear that the fight against child- and forced- labor will suffer. It must not be up to corporations to determine when advocacy best suits their business model. Collective constituent voices, then, must compel legislators to chart mandated paths toward greater human rights protection and due diligence, particularly aimed at monitoring increasingly-complex supply chains.
Children in West Africa, like children anywhere else, deserve compassion, enjoyed youths, and opportunities for more. They will have a fighting chance if and only if more regulation exists to protect their rights. The time for an end to the bitter practices of the chocolate industry is now.
This blog was written for Professor Nina Gardner’s Corporate Sustainability, Business and Human Rights course at Johns Hopkins SAIS DC Campus
Photo Credit: MarciParavia, Getty Images, licensed with Canva Pro