Cocoa buyers join forces on African child labour

A $2m (£1.3m, €1.5m) public-private partnership to combat ‘the worst forms’ of child labour in Africa’s cocoa-growing industry has been formed by a multinational confectioners’ coalition.

Eight companies, which together produce more than half the world’s cocoa, have combined with the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Ghana and the Ivory Coast to stop large numbers of children performing hazardous farming tasks or working, instead of attending school.

The partnership, due to run for four years, aims to develop community-based monitoring systems and strengthen the capacity of governments and cocoa farmers themselves to combat the most damaging forms of child labour.

The project, whose corporate partners include Cargill, Hershey, Kraft and Nestlé, will feed into the ILO’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour in both countries.

Child labour is a huge problem for west Africa’s cocoa-producing countries, and many chocolate companies have committed to buying only cocoa certified against specific fair-trade or sustainability standards.

But many of the companies funding the ILO partnership lack such a purchasing policy, and critics have suggested that structural changes to the companies themselves should be a greater priority.

Ron Graf, head of government relations at Hershey, which was a victim of an ‘alternative’ NGO-produced CSR report detailing its exploitation of child labour last year (EP12, issue 7, p3), said the partnership’s objectives “are critical next steps in helping cocoa communities take action on behalf of their own children”.