Original New York Times Article that inspired the Harkin Engel Protocol This is an interesting read because nothing has changed for these farmers and children despite a flurry of activity by activists, NGO’s, governments and the complicit chocolate companies themselves. Perhaps a clue is that the industry continues to beat down the price of cacao.
The Bondage of Poverty That Produces Chocolate By Norimitsu Onishi
July 29, 2001
One week after leaving his village in neighboring Mali for the first time, Yacouba Diarra, then 14, fell into the hands of a trafficker of children and was smuggled across the border into Ivory Coast's cocoa-producing heartland.
He was with another boy of the same age, both drawn by the promise of $135 each for a year's labor. ''I did not know what kind of work I would do,'' Yacouba said. ''I did not even know we were coming to Ivory Coast.''
Once here, Yacouba was taken to a village of mud houses, miles from the nearest paved road, where he worked every day on a cocoa plantation, hacking brush with a machete and slicing ripe cocoa pods from trees. But after a year in the village, Petit Tiémé, the owner paid him only $13 -- or about 4 cents a day, he recalled.
He walked away from his employer at Petit Tiémé in late spring, he said, and settled nearby, here in Logbogba, where he had chanced upon a friend from the same village back home. His only concern was to get paid his back wages.
Yacouba's story is like that of many boys and girls in West and Central Africa, who leave their homes to work in foreign places, sometimes separated from their families for years.
Some children fall into the hands of rings of smugglers and end up exploited. Others are reputed to end up in outright slavery. But most often parents send their children away to earn money or learn a trade, in keeping with an age-old tradition.
Child labor does retain deep roots but it is hard to measure, and the line between slave trading and the bondage of poverty is sometimes unclear.
A recent weeklong journey through this country's remotest cocoa plantations, reachable only by driving on flooded and crater-filled dirt roads and hiking for miles though dense forests, revealed only a handful of children brought here this way -- not hundreds. Almost all hired hands were adults from Mali and Burkina Faso.
Only a visit to the hundreds of cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast would be comprehensive. But the discovery of just a few foreign children during visits to dozens of plantations suggests that children who are smuggled by a stranger for profit do not make up a significant share of the cocoa work force here.
But reports of widespread abuse in Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa exporter, have generated accusations and anger, all the way to Europe and the United States.
In Britain, groups have tried to organize a consumer boycott of chocolate. And in Washington, the House passed a bill that proposed a voluntary labeling system identifying the origin of the cocoa in chocolate. The label would read ''No child slave labor.''
The use of children forced to work this way was more common just a few years ago, according to interviews with workers, plantation owners, cocoa industry officials and traffickers themselves.
Since 1998, they say, a drop in cocoa prices and political instability here have made it extremely difficult for foreigners to live in Ivory Coast. The government also pointed to the effects of a bilateral agreement, signed last September, that allows Ivory Coast to repatriate Malian children found working here.
According to a 1998 report by Unicef's Ivory Coast office, children from Mali and Burkina Faso were systematically brought by traffickers to work here; the report contained no estimates of the number involved, effectively acknowledging that it was impossible to determine.
Unicef's office in Mali later estimated the number of foreign children working in Ivory Coast at 15,000. The figure, which was not based on research in Ivory Coast but only in Mali, has been widely cited by private organizations that deal with children and by the Western news media.
Ivory Coast acknowledges the traffic in children, but has angrily denied that it is widespread. ''There are isolated cases of trafficked children whom we are trying to protect by arresting the traffickers,'' Henriette Lagou, the minister of family, women and children, said in an interview in her office in Abidjan.
Much of the confusion stems from the working conditions here. Backbreaking work for 50 cents a day is part of everyday life in much of Africa. Indeed, that wage puts plantation workers at a very low rung, but hardly at the bottom rung, of the ladder in Africa.
According to Unicef, 200,000 children are the victims of traffickers every year and are forced to work in brutal conditions. But experts concede that the figures are only broad estimates.
Just as economic factors push Mexicans into the United States, workers from Mali and Burkina Faso, two landlocked, semi-desert nations, have flocked to Ivory Coast. That this phenomenon includes children is a reflection of this region's enduring poverty, Ms. Lagou said. ''People who don't live here can't understand our realities,'' she said. ''You take a couple in Europe or in the United States. They have one or two children, and they can't understand why people traffic in children. But when you live here, you understand right away.''
A father in Burkina Faso may have 40 children, she said. ''Some of his children don't even know him. It's not the same situation over here.''
Under Ivory Coast law, minors over age 14 are allowed to work, as long as the work is not dangerous and they have parental consent. Children brought by traffickers are not allowed to work at all, but the temptation is often too great because they are routinely paid about $165 a year for plantation work in Ivory Coast. The poorest of Malians, back home, could not make that sum in five years.
In Katiénou, a village north of here, Ibrahim Konaté, an 18-year-old Malian, was in the middle of his second working term in Ivory Coast. During his first, two years ago, Mr. Konaté stayed for 20 months and earned about $350 -- a huge sum to him.
''It was enough to support my family for a year in Mali,'' said Mr. Konaté, the oldest son in a family of 10 children. ''The money is so good here. That's why I came back.''
Stateless and crying for help from the beloved country
DUÉKOUÉ, Côte d'Ivoire, November 27 (UNHCR) – When asked about his past, Ousmane* hesitates, clearly reluctant to talk about it. He has suffered a great deal in his life, and it pains him to recount bad memories.
Once he realizes that his UNHCR visitors are friends, he begins to open up and tell his harrowing tale of life without a nationality. His recollections of childhood are hazy– he knows only that he was born in a small village in south-east Côte d'Ivoire, across the border from Ghana, that his mother was a citizen of Burkina Faso, or Burkinabé, and that his father disappeared when he was young.
But when asked what nationality he has, Ousmane cannot answer. Like many other children born in rural areas of Côte d'Ivoire, the 33-year-old was not registered at birth. He was born out of wedlock, but his mother died shortly after his birth and Ousmane's father was never identified. He was raised in the Burkinabé community.
To make matters worse, he cannot produce any documents that confirm his parents' identity or prove his own nationality. Neither the Ivorian nor the Burkina Faso authorities recognize him as a national of their country. Like more than 10 million other people in the world, he is stateless.
But rather than accepting his legal limbo, Ousmane is trying to do something about it. And he has the support of UNHCR, which is lobbying the authorities to resolve his status, either through the recognition of Burkinabé citizenship or as a stateless person in Côte d'Ivoire entitled to rights, including the right to an ID.
UNHCR earlier this month launched a campaign to end statelessness by 2024, urging governments to change their laws and recognize stateless people. Without legal recognition, many stateless people lack access to basic rights, including travel, education and employment.
The government of Côte d'Ivoire in April launched a special programme to enable certain groups who have been living on Ivorian soil for generations to acquire nationality by declaration. This new temporary procedure is intended to resolve the problem of historical migrants who were legally entitled to acquire Ivorian nationality, but failed to do so in time.
Ousmane discovered how difficult life without a nationality could be, when he tried to escape a life of exploitation. In 1987, aged just six years, he was taken from his village by a woman who claimed to be an aunt and sold him to a landowner in Gbapleu, about 650 kilometres north-west of the Côte d'Ivoire capital Abidjan.
Over the next eight years, he was forced to work in the cocoa plantations of an abusive landowner. He had to clear brush, plant and pick cocoa beans and plough fields, and was severely beaten if he complained or was too slow. "They would hit me across the face, across the chest, over and over again," he says.
Being stateless made him more vulnerable; without legal status it was difficult for him to make a formal complaint. But one day, when he was about 14, Ousmane escaped and made his way to his birth village in search of relatives. Since he had no documents, he did what many stateless people desperate for some kind of legal identity do.
He obtained the consular card of a young Burkinabé man who had recently died and used it to cross the country and get past checkpoints. The card is issued by the Burkina Faso authorities to Burkinabés living in Côte d'Ivoire to confirm their citizenship. There was no sign of his elusive father, so Ousmane had little choice but to return to Gbapleu, where he at least knew people.
He realized more and more over the ensuing years that his lack of documentation was a serious problem– if he was caught using someone else's identity card, he could face criminal charges. So he eventually decided to apply for a consular card from the Burkinabé mission in Duékoué, one of the main towns in western Côte d'Ivoire.
With this document, he would be able to prove that he was recognized by the authorities as a Burkinabé citizen and receive assistance from the Burkina Faso authorities. But, with no documents to confirm his identity other than a stolen ID card, his application was immediately rejected.
To avoid further abuse and stigma, he contacted staff at a local social services centre and they put him in touch with UNHCR. At the time, he was planning to leave Gbapleu the next day, in search of assistance but mostly to escape further forced labour or beatings. He hopes that, with UNHCR support, his case will be successful, but he remains stateless and will continue to live on the margins of society, vulnerable, poor and easy to ignore.
* Name changed for protection reasons.
By Nora Sturm in Duékoué, Côte d'Ivoire