Child Labour In The Cocoa Industry Is Real.

Children are being exploited everyday, every hour, every minute. Even as i write this article, there are children being trafficked and forced into hazardous labour across the world. This is reprehensible at best and inhumane at worse.

To understand what child labour means, The International Labour Organisation defines child labour as ”work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development”.

Work here refers to activities that are ”mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful to children; interferes with their schooling; depriving them of the opportunity to attend school;obliging them to leave school prematurely or requiring them to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work”.

In the cocoa industry for instance children work for long unrelenting hours, using heavy equipments and receiving just a penny, or at times nothing at all. In Ivory Coast, a country that produces 40% of the world’s cocoa; more than half a million children work in extreme exploitative situations in cocoa farms.

To give you an idea, any time you stick a piece of chocolate in your mouth, remember that you are not only enjoying sweet chocolate. You are actually enjoying the bitter sweat and toil of 1.8 million vulnerable children engaged in various hash working conditions; children whose right to education has being truncated, children whose hope for a better future are being worked away in circumstances synonymous to slavery. Some of the children are involved in applying chemicals such as pesticide and fungicides and do this without the necessary protective gears.

Again statistical figures show that 64% of children working in these cocoa farms are younger than 14 years with 40% of these children being girls. These children grow with emotional, physical and psychological scars that may be beyond remedy during their adult lives.

Many attempts have being made by several NGO’s, some institutions and governments; but much of the onus lies with the chocolate producing companies and their suppliers to curtail these modern-day slavery being perpetuated on innocent children. These companies need to master the moral courage and implement drastic changes that will have far-reaching consequences in the use of children labour in the industry. Commitment and will must be augmented by unflinching actions

Perhaps establishing effective community watchdog and task forces to monitor and report farmers who indulge in child labour may be just one way to annihilate this disturbing situation.Otherwise, simply issuing white papers and protocols may not be a panacea.

As the 35th President of the U.S.A John Fitzgerald Kennedy puts it ”children are the world’s most valuable resource and it’s best hope for future”. It is therefore imperative that we all contribute to protecting them and giving them the development necessary to live better and fulfilling lives. The children working in these cocoa farms could have being any of us, it could have being you or me; it could even be your son or daughter. Lest spread the message and create awareness.