Ivory Coast cocoa sector faces struggle with child labor
SOUBRE, Ivory Coast: Twenty minutes into his meeting with a social worker after being picked up by police, 15-year-old Issouf wrings his hands and admits it: He has been working on a cocoa plantation. The scrawny lad is one of an army of youngsters who forego school to provide cheap labor for farmers in Ivory Coast, the world’s top producer of the cacao bean. Police had netted Issouf and 67 other children in a crackdown in Soubre, the country’s cocoa-producing heartland 400 km west of the economic capital Abidjan. The widely-publicized operation last week, named Nawa 2, comes as the West African country faces mounting demands from western consumers for ethical chocolate - a product that is ecologically sound and free of child labor.
According to the NORC research group at the University of Chicago, nearly 800,000 children were involved in cocoa-related labor in Ivory Coast in 2018-19 - a figure that compares to an estimate of 1.2 million in 2013-14, made by researchers at Tulane University in New Orleans. Many of the children in Ivory Coast come from Burkina Faso and Mali, poor landlocked countries and traditional providers of labor for their richer neighbor.
This was the case of Issouf, who said he came from neighboring Burkina with his father two years ago. His father went away after a month and left the boy with a man, who was presented as his uncle, to work on a plantation. “This is a case of trafficking,” said Alain-Didier Lath Mel, director of child protection at the Ivorian ministry of the family.
Vocational training
Operation Nawa 2, the fifth swoop of its kind since 2009, mobilized about 100 men from the security forces, police and paramilitary gendarmes over two days, said Luc Zaka, deputy director of the criminal police. A team of journalists, including those from AFP, was able to follow the police in the Meagui area, 50 km from Soubre.
The convoy of half a dozen 4x4s preceded by a motorbike rider drove along a reddish clay track that wound between the green fields of cocoa and rubber trees. Regularly, the convoy stopped. Children were sometimes surprised along the path, returning from the field with their machetes, sometimes in hamlets tending to the heaps of cocoa beans drying in front of the houses.
Police officers also roamed the fields to flush out children in the plantations. Some of the youngsters were caught only after a chase, but after four hours of activity, a dozen children and adolescents were taken in. They were driven to the Children’s Reception Centre in Soubre, which opened in 2018. Like Issouf, the underage workers were heard and sensitized by social workers and psychologists.
Their parents were due to pick them up the next day, after a discussion with the police and center officials. In serious cases of forced labor or child abuse, young people stay at the reception center for a few months. Many are illiterate. They can go back to school and learn a trade, such as cattle raising, market gardening, sewing, hairdressing and ironwork. Apart from the swoops by police, regular work is carried out in the countryside by local child protection committees.