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Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

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Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#51

Post by zizee »

teachrdan wrote: post #36
zozbot234 wrote: post #20

So it turns out that the enslaved Oompa-Loompas in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory were just truth in advertising. There's quite a bit of irony to that particular controversy.

For those who don't get OP's reference, in the original version of the book, Oompa-Loompas were literal slaves form Africa. The publisher made Roald Dahl change them to mythical creatures.

> Oompa-Loompas were literal slaves form Africa

I can find a lot of stuff written online about this, but none of it quotes the original text.

The original oompa-loompas were pygmies from Africa, written in a pretty racist way, and with wonka being a type of white-messiah-savior for them. I can definitely see an argument that wonka was a shitty employer, violating all sorts of legal and moral rules. But we're they actual slaves? From what I have been able to find they were paid, but chose to take payments in cocoa. Were they forced to work and imprisoned?

I guess I would like to see the original text, as all the articles written on the subject make proclamations of them being actual slaves, but don't show anything from the original text (or make the argument) to demonstrate they were actually slaves.

One such article: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170755

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#52

Post by abeppu »

This article is about Mars. But in 2021, Nestle and Cargill were involved in a Supreme Court case, where it was decided that the Alien Torts act could not used to bring suit by plaintiff who allege they were child slaves, trafficked from Mali to the Ivory Coast, forced to work, beaten, threatened, and not paid. The legal argument was not "we don't have child slave labor in our supply chain, even in areas where we are the only buyers" but just "irrespective of whether we're buying the products of child slave labor, we cannot be sued for it." My belief now is that most cocoa from the large, cheap sources is not produced with ethical labor.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#53

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

User23 wrote: post #12
benj111 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150 years ago child labour in the West was common. If you can barely afford food then everyone needs to work to earn money. I'm kind of in two minds, from their point of view there's probably nothing wrong, but that's incompatible with our morals. But then we obviously aren't willing to pay for those morals.

Child labor is still not uncommon in agricultural communities in the USA. I believe the federal law is age 12 and up for farm work. And de facto if not de jure there is no age limit on children working their own family’s farm. Granted one might call that chores rather than labor. And the minimum age to babysit is as low as 8 based on a quick search.

lets not weaken the term 'child labor' in that manner.

There's a world of difference between growing up on a farm and 'child labor'. What you're doing is the equivalent of calling someone a pedophile for sleeping with a 17 y/o. It may or may not be appropriate but it sure as shit isn't the same as sleeping with a 10 y/o so lets use different words for them.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#54

Post by MyShawdowySelf »

yawboakye wrote: post #44

ghanaian here: it’s not the business of mars (m&m makers) to ensure that no children are exploited during the production of the cocoa beans. and americans shouldn’t eat their chocolate with some trepidation that they might be eating the body and blood of a 5-yo. we, not they, commit these boys and girls to these activities, of our own volition. it’s a fucked up society that looks to hold an external party responsible…

West African here too. This is too simplistic, and a problem can have multiple guilty parties. There is enough blame to go around.

> we, not they, commit these boys and girls to these activities, of our own volition.

We can judge people's choices without taking in consideration the context and the options that they have. The alternative to not sending those young people to work is them starving, or not going to school.

> if child labor is bad, we don’t need mars and the rest of the world to tell us so. we should be civilized enough to get ourselves out of the ongoing era of barbarism and brutishness that has plagued the continent. fuck!

Child labor is the best solution within a see of worst solutions to a complex problem. Having talked and knowing people in similar conditions, every parent naturally wants they kids to have an easy and better life. That's not being civilized it's just being human. Saddly those parent can not afford the luxury of giving that to their parent.

> it’s a fucked up society that looks to hold an external party responsible for ills within itself.

The economical situation in African countries is complex and multivariate. And yes the governments are usually corrupt and ineffective. But the failed policies of international bodies such as the IMF or world banks, the complicity of european banks in money laundering. The meddling of international companies that are happy to support which ever dictatorship du-jour suit their needs best are definitely not helping.

> it’s not the business of mars (m&m makers) to ensure that no children are exploited during the production of the cocoa beans

They made it their business by participating in it.

> americans shouldn’t eat their chocolate with some trepidation that they might be eating the body and blood of a 5-yo.

No... It's a personal choice. If some people can become vegan out of compassion of animals, we should be able to avoid chocolate out of compassion our fellow human beings even if they happen to not be from the same country.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#55

Post by colechristensen »

janice1999 wrote: post #14
bell-cot wrote: post #3

> Munira, 15, is one of those children. [...] Last year, her family harvested only one bag of decent-quality cocoa. A 140-pound bag of the product fetches only about $115. Sounds like "child labor" is downstream of the actual problem.

Call me a bleeding heart but child labor is an 'actual' problem. You can keep destructing societal issues until you reinvent the universe from scratch. It may be difficult to solve global poverty but it's not a lot to ask extremely profitable companies to enforce the supply chain checks they've committed to.

From the ages from about 5 to 18 American children are forced to do office work for 7 hours a day five days a week in conditions that approximate a minimum security prison followed by often several hours of more work to do at home.

Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Plenty of kids would argue picking fruit was more valuable than algebra homework.

Having kids working a little isn't necessarily bad, it is the conditions under which they work which is important but more subtle issue. In regions of extreme poverty it isn't even the conditions that are often the root problem but the foreign exploiters of the extreme poverty failing to pay a fair wage for human work.

>"I feel sad. I want to be, like, a medical doctor," Munira said. "But my family doesn't have money for school."

It's much easier for corporate overlords to focus on cheap issues like child labor and then make the appearances of trying to do something about it... when the causes of child labor are more like "you pay my family so little I can't afford to go to school and nobody else either so the nearest school is an hour away". If you give people the opportunity to barely stay alive they'll fix these things themselves.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#56

Post by goldenshale »

Wait, you mean kids in developing countries work in order to help their families survive poverty. Oh my word, we should stop buying chocolate. Or wait, then nobody is making any money. Seriously, haven't we learned from the "Chinese sweatshop" hysteria throughout the 2000s that if people want to work they are often digging themselves out of a whole rather than being forced into one?

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#57

Post by autoexec »

all2 wrote: post #38
bmacho wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This not. > - Also, if cocoa farming becomes more profitable, it might encourage _more_ child labor as parents pull their kids from school to work "on the family farm". Wtf. No? Do you pull your kids from school so they can help you at work?

> Wtf. No? Do you pull your kids from school so they can help you at work? If I were in a position of "family eats or family doesn't eat" I would be sorely tempted to tap my kids as extra income earners. This isn't a particularly new problem in the world. The West has only gotten stringent on child labor in the last century, and you're seeing other countries coming up that are also struggling with the issue at hand:…

Many of the child slaves in Ghana are trafficked. They're not working on the family farm to help grow food for their next family dinner, they're being forced into slavery and made to work for farms that sell their product to billion dollar multinational corporations.

The solution to ending slavery is to make laws which ban the practice and then strictly enforcing those laws. Once that's done it won't matter how profitable farming is because anyone who uses child slaves will suffer instead of profiting. Exceptions can be made for people farming their own food for their own tables which would still prevent the trafficking of children just so that Mars Incorporated and The Hershey Company can stuff their pockets with more money.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#59

Post by giraffe_lady »

abracadaniel wrote: post #46
mopsi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe and the US, it wasn't too long ago either when families could only afford to send some of their children to school. Others had to work from a very early age to support the family. If you ban child labor without offering anything to supplement the lost income, then you're just harming them more. I think it would be better to frame the issue as why so little of the profit made from their work reaches them. It…

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sa…

Yes thank you good lord. IDK if it's the ritual contrarianism or what but HN consensus is extremely tolerant of or even flat out pro- child labor. Unreal.

Re: Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

#60

Post by otikik »

josu wrote: post #16
janice1999 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a bleeding heart but child labor is an 'actual' problem. You can keep destructing societal issues until you reinvent the universe from scratch. It may be difficult to solve global poverty but it's not a lot to ask extremely profitable companies to enforce the supply chain checks they've committed to.

Child labor tends to go away with the increase in GDP.

The US still has laws protecting child labor in agriculture.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181472559/child-labor-farms-...

(And slavery in prison. But one problem at a time)

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