Press investigation finds child slavery in Ivory Coast

By Namrata Savoor
freedomforum.org

07.11.01

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ARLINGTON, Va. — Cocoa-farm owners in Ivory Coast enslave children, an investigative reporter says, but the country's ambassador angrily denies the charge.

Many cocoa farms in the central and southwestern parts of the country force children to work under grueling conditions for little or no pay, said Sudarsan Raghavan, Knight Ridder's Africa correspondent, on July 9 at an African Correspondents Association program at The Freedom Forum. Raghavan was part of a team that chronicled the alleged child slavery in a Knight Ridder special project titled "A Taste of Slavery."

Some of the boys interviewed at these farms said "they were sold and tricked into slavery in order to harvest the cocoa that goes into the chocolate we all eat," Raghavan said.

His investigation of four of the 600,000 small, family-owned cocoa farms used several criteria to identify cases of slavery, he said. In the Knight Ridder reports, Raghavan said, a slave was defined as "someone who [was] bought and sold by people; who wasn't paid at all after long hours of work or (was) paid a fraction of what he was owed; who wasn't free to leave his job; who was controlled by others through fear and abuse both physical and psychological."

Many of the 12- to 16-year-old boys migrated from their villages in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali searching for better jobs to support their families, he said.

When they arrived in larger towns, slave traffickers approached them, promising good jobs as welders and shop workers in the Ivory Coast. But on reaching the country, the traffickers sold them to farmers, Raghavan said.

"The boys didn't have any money, they didn't speak French (the native language), they had no idea where they were," he said.

Raghavan said the boys were reluctant to give up their only source of income by returning to Mali, so they signed yearlong contracts with the farmers at an average salary of $150 per year, to be paid at year's end. Some boys said the farmers took their identification cards and luggage, Raghavan said.

"On the worst of farms we found boys who said they were whipped with cocoa-tree branches and chains," he said. At night they were locked up in small, windowless rooms, and "if they tried to escape they were made an example and beaten in front of the other boys," Raghavan said.

But Youssoufou Bamba, the Ivory Coast's ambassador to the United States, said he was "outraged that my country is … portrayed as the bad guy."

Bamba said that these cocoa farms are owned by foreigners. The idea that an Ivorian could be guilty of such acts was an "outrage," he said.

"We cherish our children," he said. "How could you think we (would) use them as slaves?"

Bamba also denied allegations that the farmers rarely paid their workers. "The first thing the farmer [does] when he receive(s) his income is to pay" his workers, Bamba said, and "anybody who really knows the Ivory Coast will recollect that."

Forty-three percent of cocoa and cocoa products in the United States comes from the Ivory Coast, said Sumana Chatterjee, a Knight Ridder reporter who tracked the cocoa-bean trade. But trying to determine whether major U.S. chocolate manufacturers used the cocoa harvested by child slaves was difficult, she said.

Despite contacting every large chocolate company, "we didn't really get a response from them in terms of whether or not they used Ivory Coast beans, whether it was in their recipe," she said.

Larry Graham, president of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, said they were unaware of and condemned these practices." The idea that our industry knew about this and did nothing about this is completely wrong," he said.

Graham said they were working with advocacy groups and international organizations to end these practices.

"Rather than debate the past, I think we need to focus on the future," he said.

Related

Modern cocoa slavery exposé got results
Knight Ridder investigative report blew lid off U.S. chocolate companies' dependence on foreign cocoa farms using slave labor, reporter and activist say.  10.25.01