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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your solution to not treating children baddly is to not have children? Seems a bit strange instead of just ... you know pay people a descent wage so they don't have to put they children in arms way

As my uncouth grandfather used to say: “Wishes in one hand, shit in the other, which will fill first?” These children work because they have no choice. They are paid these wages because they can’t make more. I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them. If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry u…

I am gonna venture to guess that you never really either interacted with people from those populations.

> I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them.

Let's first get this out of the way. The men don't want children at equal rate. No need for grand plan about empowering women (what ever that means beside just increasing everyone, both men and women economical outlooks) : just make contraceptive and sexual education available.

> If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.

Correlation and causation etc...etc... I might introduce you to orthodox jews, some Mormons and Muslim communities which don't really follow those models.

> By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage.

ahah yes, personal solution to systemic problems... Following this logic, we should all be silent about everything.

> Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.

I don't buy the premise and this sounds like a false dichotomy to me. Just treat people decently and don't participate in system which involve children doing back breaking jobs.

> Hope is not a strategy.

And whatever you are proposing is ? The idea that it's easier to somehow curb the population growth a whole group of nations instead of just having proper international laws to regulate child labour seems both crazy and reversed.

Polution control won't solve child labor, instead child labour, women right and polution growth will be solve by better economical outlooks. And that start by having people actually make living wages...

In the final anlysis the problem is not that deep. To paraphrase Gates, those conditions continue because the market wants it, and the public opinions doesnt particularly care. You are wellcome not to care, but to invent poorly constructed argument to make you sleep better at night.

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

#93
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.

I don't understand what the child was doing if the entire family only harvested one bag of cocoa? Was the child working trying to find cocoa?

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth a try.

I believe it has, indeed, been tried

Where? In former communist countries the workers didn't have any power after the seizing of the means of production, as now they were ruled by brutal dictatorships with powerful militaries who'd send you to the gulag for $REASON.

Hardly the envisioned "seizing the means of production" and more like "being seized for production".

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

#95

It's a phase that countries go through eg Britain's chimney sweeps.

Britain left the "chimney sweep" phase, in part, by extracting extraordinary amounts of value from its colonial holdings. Ghana was formed out of the remnants of four separate British colonies.

How much would Britain need to pay Ghana to get them over the child labor hump?

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

#96
Tony’s Chocolate entire business is about ending slave sourced chocolate [1] and IMO tastes the best

I think they are most likely going to go out of business because CR showed they had the highest lead content [2]

It’s always something

[1] https://tonyschocolonely.com/uk/en/why-we-still-wont-say-wer...

[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

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

#97
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. Sounds good, until you realize that doesn't do much for the starving family with kids to feed. Even though there might be some knock on effect to increase the adults' earnings, there's no way that it'll match the lost income from the kids n…

Why are the families starving? Is the only option in that area growing cocoa for export to the West? Why can't those people work for themselves, to grow their own food, to feed themselves?

Is it because some wealthy landlord owns all the land? Is it because we dump subsidized food on the global markets, making local agriculture non-competitive? Could either of those have anything to do with it?

There seems to be a very obvious economic solution somewhere between 'grow cocoa for other people for a pittance' and 'starve'. These people are poor, not helpless.

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

#98
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we, I don't know, did something to fix the poverty?

Easier said than done.

Antiunion aggression must be ruthless in these places. You can only grow some of these crops in certain regions of the world, yet despite this rare geographically granted monopoly, labor is paid perhaps the worst in these places, certainly much worse than in the western world that does nothing particularly unique in any one place. Nothing quite like coffee or chocolate or even the opium poppy. Unfortunately often when labor organizes, these movements are liable to be taken over by authoritarians who have no one’s collective interest in mind, because the power of being able to command a centrally planned economic force is just too great to not make such an attempt for the morally bankrupt charlatans among us.

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

#99

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.

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 wa…

Are you likening child labor to the public education system? That is absolutely preposterous and I’m not sorry if you’re offended.

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

#100

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?

Somehow, you think that a child is digging themselves out of a hole and that working instead of schooling is not them being forced into one?

Is there even schooling available in those areas? People in rich countries fail to appreciate how bad the situation is in truly poor countries.
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