Edward Millard, the Rainforest Alliance’s director of sustainable landscapes, reflects on the causes of child labor in the West African cocoa industry and the tools necessary to combat it.
The Rainforest Alliance believes that independent certification programs, like Rainforest Alliance Certified™, are central to delivering solutions to economic, environmental and social issues that are endemic within the cocoa sector, including child labor.
Eric Servat, senior manager of the Rainforest Alliance’s cocoa program, talks about the growth and challenges of our cocoa work.
While Halloween is the peak time for chocolate news in the US, the holidays are our peak chocolate eating season. Any chocolate enjoyed in the US is likely to contain cocoa grown in Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer. And cocoa beans from Côte d’Ivoire are now increasingly likely to be grown on Rainforest Alliance CertifiedTM farms.
Rainforest Alliance certification has grown phenomenally in Côte d’Ivoire since leading brands such as Mars, Unilever, Kraft and Hershey, and processors such as Barry Callebaut, the world’s largest chocolate manufacturer, committed to sourcing their cocoa from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms. Some 75,000 Ivorian farms, covering more than 1.2 million acres (500,000 hectares), have become Rainforest Alliance Certified in just the last six years. This massive expansion is driven by the recognition that cocoa farmers’ incomes and yields need to rise dramatically to make cocoa production sustainable, and that certification can help accomplish these goals.
There are more than a million cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, the vast majority of them smallholders, plus another 3.5 million Ivorians who depend on income from cocoa-related activities. After a brief spike during the 2011 civil conflict, prices paid to farmers for cocoa beans are again low. Until recently, Ivorian farmers received a fraction of what cocoa sold for on commodities markets in London and New York. Côte d’Ivoire has a long history of price volatility, exploited smallholders earning low wages and child labor.
These are intertwined, systemic and longstanding problems. But they’re problems with consequences too severe to tolerate, and the new Ivorian government acknowledges that they must be remedied. Unfair cocoa prices and poverty wages for cocoa farmers have been cited as important factors in Côte d’Ivoire’s political instability during the last 11 years of civil war. The Nation wrote in 2011, “The fundamental reason that fighting is breaking out again [in Côte d'Ivoire is] a profoundly unjust international economic order that pays the people who supply our primary products a pittance and leaves their nations chronically ill with unemployment and poverty, and with people who will fight one another over scarce resources.”
Unrest in Côte d’Ivoire threatened disruptions in cocoa supply, already under long-term pressure from pests, fungi, unsustainable farming techniques and, increasingly, climate change and drought. Supply will have to increase steadily to meet progressively climbing demand — for the last century, cocoa demand has grown consistently at a rate of 3 percent a year. Low yields have raised speculation about future cocoa shortages. More fundamentally, low yields and inadequate incomes undercut the aspirations of millions of Ivorians for better lives for themselves and their families, and basic equity for growers of this $5 billion global commodity.
The key to achieving justice for Ivorians and an adequate future supply of cocoa for consumers is to raise yields dramatically. It can certainly be done. After working with USDA and IBM to map the cocoa genome, Mars announced this year it knows how to raise yields from 400 kg per hectare to 1,500 kg. Beyond assuring future supply, higher yields generate higher income for farmers, and reduce economic pressures that exploit smallholders and draw children into working on the farms.
Since 2008 the Rainforest Alliance has worked with multiple stakeholders to make cocoa production sustainable and raise yields and profitability. In Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere, Rainforest Alliance Certified farms rely on sustainable soil, crop, pest, water and energy management to cut costs and raise yields on existing farmland, without clearing forestland for crops or resorting to damaging slash-and-burn, chemical-intensive methods. The Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA) recently studied the impact of Rainforest Alliance certification on cocoa farming in Côte d’Ivoire. It found that after adopting sustainable techniques and becoming certified, farms increased their yields 58 percent, and raised their net incomes by almost a factor of four.
Meanwhile, the Coffee and Cocoa Council issued this new reform, which has raised expectations; their objectives are to promote transparency, sustainability, fair pricing and farmers group strengthening. We’re confident that as certification grows, and collaboration continues to improve among the key actors, so will the lives of cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire.
Problems there remain entrenched — prices and yields generally are low, farms are vulnerable, examples of child labor and other abuses aren’t yet hard to find, future and sustainable supply isn’t yet secure. Farmers and those who depend on them are still poor and competing for scarce resources. But certification has proven an efficient tool for increasing yields and multiplying farmers’ incomes, putting more farms and livelihoods on a sustainable footing.
Globally, we’re facing rising food demand as the population heads to 10 billion by mid-century and emerging economies eat higher on the food chain. To meet this demand, the global food system must do what Côte d’Ivoire is now doing: working with stakeholders to raise yields on existing farmland sustainably, without clearing more forests, degrading more grazing land or exacerbating climate change and biodiversity loss. Rainforest Alliance certification offers a body of evidence that argues this can be done, and is being done, by adopting environmentally and socially sustainable farming practices that help local ecosystems and communities thrive together.
Taking a short sabbatical from on-the-ground assignments, Rainforest Alliance trainer and auditor Noah Jackson tackles some of the issues surrounding child labor with a compelling photo essay.
Every year around Halloween, I receive emails about cocoa and child labor – some coming from friends living as far away as Uganda and the Philippines. Since most of the family farmers the Rainforest Alliance works with have children, issues surrounding food and child labor are especially important. It’s a challenging topic because what constitutes child labor is not always clearcut. As someone who grew up working on a farm (likely earning below minimum wage myself) and helping out a lot while young, I definitely recognize the challenges of distinguishing between what constitutes child labor and what is only ordinary family participation. Children too young for school cannot be left at home if they do not have child care. So naturally, parents bring them along to the fields. There is also an intrinsic value to learning to grow food while young and being part of a working family, even if it’s only on the weekends.
On Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms, children are not permitted to work — even part time — if they are younger than 15 years old. Of course, these children are also guaranteed access to school, so that is where they spend their days.
Around the holidays, items made with cocoa, oils and nuts from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms are particularly popular. With that in mind, I thought I would share some images from my archive of the past year of farm visits. Since I spend a lot of time walking to farms, which means passing through a variety of land, the images are not all from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms.
A boy follows his brother for an afternoon of coffee picking. Photo by Kevin O’ Brady.
I found these kids wandering around a plantation. During the coffee season, the children are hired as regular pickers. If this were a Rainforest Alliance Certified farm, the children couldn’t be hired and would need to attend school.
Two girls hang out by a river adjacent to their village in Madagascar. They told me that they occasionally go to their family’s forest garden plot to play and keep their parents company.
I found this band of trailside girls wandering along a series of community forest paths that run adjacent to small rice farms. When I asked about the knife they were carrying, the girls said they were looking for ripe mangos.
A boy carries school supplies across a river in Madagascar. In areas where we work, long walks to school are common. Some large farms provide transportation to distant schools, or set up schools on farms.
This girl sells peppers from house to house in a small village in Ghana.
Children make some of the best fruit harvesters. This young girl is carrying the breadfruit she harvested back home, where it will be a part of a family lunch.
I visited this small farm work plot in the Ivory Coast. As workers cleared land, it was clear that there wasn’t enough food to go around. This is one reason why looking at food security and food for a growing population is important.
One of the most basic ways to identify child labor is to ask how many kids are working on a family farm and identify their roles. When talking with these two boys, I wanted to know if there was enough land to grow both cocoa and the sweet local “cocoa yam” staple. They explained that their parents did the farming; they were just in the process of carrying part of dinner back to the village.
One afternoon, while on a farm, this girl passed our group. Fresh from school, I could see all the farmer’s children and could verify that they had access to education and enough income to pay this girl’s school fees.
Girls from the nearby school peer at us through the window during a meeting.
This girl, fresh from weeding her own plot of beans outside her house, looked up at me as I took this photo. Although she seemed happy and well-fed, this image provided the perfect context for taking her parents aside and discussing their family’s food security.
This boy lives in the Heart of Borneo, a large forested area that is home to the Penan. He is growing up nomadic, the last of a generation. Like a number of subsistence farmers throughout the world, there is not much separation between work, life and play. Although some schooling is necessary for the Penan, it is important that their schooling is culturally appropriate.
This boy peers into my camera while clutching maize, a staple in this Malagasy village. In terms of importance, it’s second only to rice. These kids are intimately connected to where their food comes from -- it’s important for them to learn about farming and the challenges their parents face so that sustainable farming is passed down.
On World Day Again Child Labour (12 June 2010), Edward Millard, Head of Sustainable Landscapes at the Rainforest Alliance looked at how certification can help protect children from exploitation…
Employing children on farms when they should be at school or making young people undertake tasks that are 
dangerous or damaging to their developing bodies is clearly unacceptable practice. This was highlighted in the cocoa industry in 2001 and generated responses at government and industry level. The major chocolate companies signed an agreement with the US government to eradicate the worst forms of child and forced labour from their supply chains. They also funded an independent organisation, the International Cocoa Initiative, with the participation of trade unions and NGOs to undertake educational programmes in cocoa producing communities in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, the world’s two largest cocoa producers.
Rainforest Alliance Certification supports eradicating child labour in three ways:
The root cause of abusive child labour is poverty – putting children to work instead of paying hired labour, or maybe because the parents can’t afford to send them to school. As poverty cannot be eradicated quickly, education is the key to quick improvements. Farmers who take part in training programmes for Rainforest Alliance certification also have to discuss the problems of children working and the rights of all children to attend school. Farmers do not want to put their children at risk and our training programme gives them the skills and knowledge on how to avoid it.
To obtain the rewards of certification, farmers must comply with the Sustainable Agriculture Standard. This prohibits farms from employing full- or part-time workers under the age of 15; and between 15 and 17 children must have written authorisation for employment signed by their parents or legal guardian. Workers between 15 and 17 years old must not work more than eight hours per day or more than 42 hours per week, their work schedule must not interfere with educational opportunities and they must not be assigned activities that could put their health at risk, such as the handling and application of agrochemicals or activities that require strong physical exertion. These are exactly the type of abuses that have been most commonly recorded: children carrying heavy loads of cocoa pods from the tree to the fermentation and drying centre, spraying agrochemicals without protection and climbing trees with machetes to reach the higher up pods.
To achieve Rainforest Alliance certification, each farm has to be visited by an internal auditor and an external auditor every year and random checks may occur at any time. These auditors are recruited and trained in country, not simply flow in from the developed world, with no connection to the country or understanding of its culture. This monitoring system cannot guarantee that child labour never occurs on any day of the year but combined with the education, it provides the best assurance possible. The governments also have their own monitoring system to check for incidences of child labour, so the certification auditors are supporting government policy directly by providing supplementary monitoring activity.
Child labour, though, is a complex issue. Helping the family on the farm is natural to most African children who live in the countryside, as it is in many farming families throughout the world. As long as they are not missing school or exposed to dangerous tasks, it is not difficult to argue it is wrong. The Sustainable Agriculture Standard allows minors, who are part of the family, between 12 and 14 years old, to work part-time on family farms as long as their schedule, including school, transportation and work does not exceed ten hours on school days or eight hours on non-school days. Interpreting what does and doesn’t constitute child labour requires an understanding of local culture and tradition. For this reason, Rainforest Alliance’s policy of training and accrediting auditors from Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana is vey important.
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