Child labour is not just the chocolate industry’s problem

Nicaraguan children prepare to weigh freshly harvested coffee beans they picked on plantations. AP Photo/Kent Gilbert

There’s a dirty secret lurking behind the rich and comforting aroma of a morning coffee, the shine on gold jewellery, and the wafting smoke of a lit cigarette.

“There may be a hidden ingredient in the chocolate cake you baked, the candy bars your children sold for their school fund-raiser or that fudge ripple ice cream cone you enjoyed on Saturday afternoon. Slave labor.”

Thus began a sensational investigation by journalists from the Knight Ridder news agency that was splashed across newspapers in the United States on June 24, 2001. It documented how boys as young as nine from Mali were sold into slavery to work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast that supplied beans to the American chocolate industry.

The story, and the outrage it provoked in the US, prompted Congressman Eliot Engel to introduce a legislative amendment to fund the development of a ‘no child slavery’ label for chocolate products sold in the US. The House of Representatives approved his initiative by 291 votes to 115 and it was headed for a vote in the Senate.

To avoid legislation, industry lobby groups thrashed out what became known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol, an agreement signed by them and the eight biggest chocolate companies  including Swiss giants Nestle and Barry Callebaut. They committed to develop and implement voluntary standards to certify that the cocoa they used from West Africa was produced without the worst forms of child labour, as defined by the International Labor Organization (ILO), by July 2005.

But the deadline was pushed back several times and a watered-down version was agreed in 2010 that included a commitment to reduce child labour in West Africa by 70% by 2020. But that was also missed and the most comprehensive survey of cocoa growing households published by the National Opinion Research Centre (NORC) at the University of Chicago in 2020 estimated that around 1.56 million children were still working in cocoa production.

 “Child labour has been on our agenda for over 20 years, with the Harkin-Engel Protocol and industry commitments and targets. However, progress has been limited thus far,” says Christian Robin, CEO of the Swiss Platform for Sustainable Cocoa.

Child work vs child labour

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has two conventions on child labour – Convention No.138 on Minimum Age and Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour – that provide clear guidelines on what tasks children can and cannot perform. Countries are free to tailor the guidelines to their own national settings and it is up to individual governments to decide what qualifies as hazardous work, although this makes it difficult for auditors and certifiers to decide where exactly to draw the line.

Child labour refers to children’s work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential, and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development. It’s work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children; and/or interferes with their schooling. Children are more vulnerable than adults because their bodies and minds are still growing and developing, and they can suffer lasting physical and mental harm from doing tasks or working in conditions that are hazardous and not age appropriate. This is why some tasks and working conditions are prohibited for children.

Examples of child labour include a child under 18 doing a dangerous task like spraying pesticides or carrying a heavy load, handling sharp objects, operating dangerous machinery like coffee sorters or grinders; a child of compulsory schooling age missing school to pick the family harvest; or a child aged 13 working more than 14 hours a week on their family farm; a child younger than 12 conducting light tasks on a farm that is not on their family’s farm.

Child work refers to work that is permitted by law for children. Under some circumstances, children are permitted to work, but they can only do specific tasks that are age-appropriate, do not negatively affect their health or development, and do not interfere with school.

Examples of work that is permitted for children include a 17-year-old doing non-hazardous tasks on a farm, such as sowing or planting; a 13-year-old doing light tasks for less than 14 hours a week after school hours, such as sorting beans with adult supervision; a 12 year old occasionally doing light chores at home or on the farm, such as sweeping or feeding the chickens, after school.

Beyond chocolate

While the chocolate industry has been under scrutiny for more than two decades, other sectors afflicted by child labour, mainly in agriculture, have failed to grab consumer attention to the same extent. The 2024 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced LaborExternal link (TVPRA List), compiled by the US Department of Labor, shows the problem is far more prevalent in other industries including gold, sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco.

“The attention paid to child labour in cocoa is justified but very one-sided,” says Robin. “We need to understand the complexity of the problem and look beyond cocoa or we can’t find the right answers.”

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has been monitoring child labour worldwide since 2000 and produces a report every four years documenting the scale of the problem. Its latest report, published in 2021, makes for grim reading. In 2020, an estimated 160 million children – 63 million girls and 97 million boys – were involved in child labour accounting for almost 1 in 10 of all children worldwide. The figure, up from an estimated 152 million in 2016, was the first increase since monitoring began and means the target of eliminating child labour by 2025, one of the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals adopted by world leaders in 2015, will be missed.

“In the face of this overall increase, increased attention to all forms of child labour is urgently needed,” says Benjamin Smith, Senior Officer, Child Labour, of the Geneva-based UN agency. 

Coffee and child labour

One commodity that’s flown below the radar compared with chocolate is coffee. The US Department of Labor’s report lists 17 coffee-growing countries where child labour has been reported: Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guinea, Honduras, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam.

Statistics for child labour in the coffee industry are rare, but what’s available paint a gloomy picture. According to Costa Rica’s 2011 National Household Survey (ENAHO), published in 2015, coffee accounted for 8.8% of child labourers in the country or approximately 1,422 children aged 5 to 14. Vietnam’s 2012 National Child Labour Survey, published in 2014, showed that an estimated 34,131 child labourers worked in coffee cultivation with about 36.7% under the age of 15, the minimum age for employment in Vietnam.

It is impossible to stick a label on a packet of coffee that gives a cast-iron guarantee it has been produced without any child labour, but certification schemes like those operated by Fairtrade International and Rainforest Alliance do ensure that suppliers are held to account.

Fairtrade only works with farms that are organised into cooperatives and mapped using GPS. Third party audits are regularly carried out by specialists like FLOCERT who visit operations and review working conditions. Farms can be suspended until problems found are corrected, and if they occur systematically, farms can lose their Fairtrade certification. 

“If you buy Fairtrade-certified coffee you are guaranteed that there are mechanisms in place for detection and oversight of child labour,” says Monika Firl, senior coffee advisor at Fairtrade. “It is a high priority for us that children have a safe environment.”

Rainforest Alliance, an international non-profit organization, also has a coffee certification scheme for farmers that includes monitoring of child labour as well as agriculture and sustainability standards. It adopts an ‘assess and address’ approach that requires certified farms to set up internal committees to prevent and monitor child labour and remediate with support from the certifying body. Failure to implement such a system can result in decertification even if no case of child labour is found by auditors. The goal is to move away from a binary pass/fail model and instead create a robust system that is effective in identifying and tackling child labour.

“Our on-the-ground experience shows a strict zero-tolerance approach does not work and can drive cases underground,” says Daria Toschi, director livelihoods & human rights at the Rainforest Alliance.

Context is key

“Life is very, very hard on family farms and everyone pitches in,” says Fairtrade’s Firl, who has worked in the coffee sector for 30 years, including 10 years in Central America.  “The tree doesn’t wait for you nor does the weather.”

School holidays often coincide with the berry picking season and it’s common to find children helping with the harvest, and bean processing. “Sorting the beans is a common family activity in the evening much like how we might play gin rummy,” says Firl.

Older children may be involved in maintenance tasks like pruning, applying compost or clearing weeds.

“They are likely to become farmers and have to learn the trade,” says Firl.

Coffee producer Norvey Vaquiro and his family. He is a member of the ASOBRIS Coffee cooperative in Colombia which is Fairtrade certified. Fairtrade

Factors beyond farmers’ control can also complicate matters. For example, coffee is grown in countries that may be facing socio-political strife. Due to the security situation, the area might lack schools or daycare facilities, and it may even be unsafe to leave a child at home. Firl recalls a case where child labour was flagged but follow-up provided more context.

“Once, there were concerns raised when the young daughter of a farmer was seen in the coffee field. But the father took her there because there were paramilitary around and it was safer for her to be with him,” she says.

Rainforest Alliance also takes local conditions into consideration and has developed social risk maps. Mexico, for example, is classed as ‘medium risk’ for child labour due to a large number of migrant families with children crossing the border from Guatemala. Certified farmers in Mexico are therefore required to go beyond the standard risk assessment and identify the root causes of child labour through an in-depth risk assessment from the second year of certification.

Lessons learned

While the chocolate industry still struggles with child labour after two decades of intervention, its experience can be transferred to other sectors. For example, the chocolate industry was one of the first to adapt the Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) developed by the ILO.

CLMRS revolve around facilitators in local communities who help identify and register cases of children working on cocoa farms and work with the family, company and local government to tackle the root cause. This could involve measures like offering school uniforms or helping mothers set up a small business. Data from the International Cocoa Initiative’s CLMRS shows that 36% of children found working on cocoa farms in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, were no longer in child labour after two consecutive follow-up visits by community facilitators. The chocolate industry has set itself the target of covering all cocoa-growing households in Ghana and Ivory Coast with CLMRS or similar systems by 2025.

Many chocolate companies have been criticised by cocoa-growing countries like Ghana for setting up their own CLMRS instead of working in a collaborative manner across cocoa-growing regions with national cocoa boards.

A €10 million (CHF9.3 million) ILO-backed and EU-funded initiative launched in June aims to foster a more collaborative approach.  The CLEAR Supply Chains ProjectExternal link will address the root causes of child labour in coffee supply chains through an area-based approach instead of a company-based approach in Honduras, Uganda and Vietnam.

“What we learned from the cocoa sector is that governments should lead the CLMRS and the private sector should align with them,” says project manager Wouter Cools.

To avoid duplication there are four UN agencies – ILO, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) – that will work with the same farming communities but with each agency responsible for one specific component necessary to tackle child labour. Nestlé, whose coffee brands include Gold Blend and Nespresso, is among 11 private companies that will link their work on child labour with the project.

Initiatives such as CLMS, certification schemes, and collaboration between industry, local governments, and civil society have proven effective in reducing child labour in cocoa production, according to a spokesperson for the Swiss Sustainable Coffee Platform that was officially launched in June.

“The cocoa industry offers lessons that can serve as a guide for the coffee sector,” the spokesperson says. “These models can be adapted and applied to the coffee sector with the same multi-stakeholder commitment and clear accountability.”

Edited by Nerys Avery