7/18/2005
HARKIN CONTINUES EFFORTS TO ELIMINATE ABUSIVE CHILD LABOR IN THE COCOA INDUSTRY
Washington, D.C.—Senator
Tom Harkin (D-IA) today offered an amendment to the Foreign Operations
Appropriations Act that reiterates the Senate’s commitment to
eliminating abusive child labor practices in the growing and processing
of cocoa.
“When a child is
exploited for the economic gains of others, the child loses, the family
loses, their country loses, and the world loses. It is bad economics
and bad development strategy,” Harkin said. “A nation cannot achieve
prosperity on the backs of children. There is simply no place in the
global economy for slave labor.”
The plight of hundreds
of thousands of child slaves toiling in cocoa plantations in West
Africa was reported in a series by Knight Ridder newspapers in June
2001. The report found that some of these children are sold or tricked
into slavery. Most of them are between the ages of 12 and 16 and some
are as young as nine years old. There are more than 600,000 small farms
producing cocoa beans in the Ivory Coast, many in the remote parts of
the country. Local human rights activists in the Ivory Coast estimate
that as many as 90% of cocoa farms use forced child labor.
Harkin, along with
Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), was instrumental in developing an
industry wide protocol in 2001 which aimed to eliminate forced child
labor in processing cocoa beans in West Africa. The Harkin-Engel
Protocol, signed by various stakeholders in the chocolate trade
including the chocolate industry, required that chocolate companies
implement an industry-wide voluntary certification system to give a
public accounting of labor practices in the cocoa-growing countries by
July 1, 2005. While the July 1, 2005 deadline was not fully met,
industry has assured Harkin and Engel that it is fully committed to
achieving a certification system, which can be expanded across the
cocoa-growing areas of West Africa and will cover 50% of the cocoa
growing areas of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana within three years.
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