Advocates sue US agencies over cocoa harvested by kids
WASHINGTON — Child welfare advocates filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday asking a judge to force the Biden administration to block imports of cocoa harvested by children in West Africa that can end up in America’s most popular chocolate desserts and candies.
The lawsuit, brought by International Rights Advocates, seeks to have the federal government enforce a 1930s-era federal law that requires the government to ban products created by child labor from entering the U.S.
The nonprofit group says it filed the suit because Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security have ignored extensive evidence documenting children cultivating cocoa destined for well-known U.S. candy makers, including Hershey, Mars, Nestlé and Cargill.
The major chocolate companies pledged in 2001 to end their reliance on child labor to harvest their cocoa by 2005. Now they say they will eliminate the worst forms of child labor in their supply chains by 2025.
“They will never stop until they are forced to,” said Terry Collingsworth, International Rights Advocates’ executive director. He added that the U.S. government has “the power to end this incredible abuse of African children by enforcing the law.”
Spokespeople for CBP declined to comment on the suit, which was filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade. When asked more generally about cocoa produced by child labor, the federal agency said it was “unable to disclose additional information or plans regarding forced labor enforcement activities due to protections of law-enforcement-sensitive and business-confidential information.”
Cocoa cultivation by children in the Ivory Coast and neighboring Ghana is not new. Human rights leaders, academics, news organizations and federal agencies have spent the last two decades exposing the plight of children working on cocoa plantations in the West African nations, which produce about 70% of the world’s cocoa supply.
A 2019 study by the University of Chicago, commissioned by the U.S. government, found 790,000 children, some as young as 5, were working on Ivory Coast cocoa plantations. The situation was similar in neighboring Ghana, researchers found.
The U.S. government has long recognized that child labor is a major problem in the Ivory Coast. The Department of Labor reported in 2021 that “children in Côte d’Ivoire are subjected to the worst forms of child labor, including in the harvesting of cocoa and coffee.”
To try to force companies to abandon cocoa produced by child labor, International Rights Advocates has sued some of the world’s large chocolate companies over the use of child labor in harvesting cocoa beans. It lost a case before the Supreme Court in 2021. Several others are pending.
Ivory Coast officials have said they are taking steps to eradicate child labor but say blocking imports of the nation’s cocoa would devastate the nation’s economy.