World top cocoa grower Ivory Coast is on track to meet a US-imposed July 1 deadline to certify its cocoa beans as produced free of the worst forms of child labour, US government officials said on Tuesday.
US Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Eliot Engel, who proposed the scheme in 2001, are visiting the West African state to check progress by the Ivorian government and chocolate industry to eradicate slavery and abusive child labour.
"We believe that working together Ivory Coast will make (the deadline) and that industry has a major, major role to play," said New York Congressman Eliot Engel. "We are going to insist on the deadline," he said after a meeting with Ivorian Prime Minister Guillaume Soro.
Child labour on cocoa farms has become a controversial issue following heavily-publicised campaigns by some rights groups calling for boycotts of "blood chocolate" or other goods produced by "child slaves" on West African cocoa plantations. A 2002 survey by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture said 284,000 children were working in dangerous conditions on West African cocoa farms, mainly in Ivory Coast which produces nearly half the world's supply.
The Ivorian government denies accusations of slavery and says most child farm workers are the children or relatives of the farmer and that helping on the farm will teach them a trade that will provide them with a living in their adult years. The certification scheme calls on the cocoa industry and government to determine the extent of child labour in half of the country's cocoa growing zones. It must then tackle the problem through awareness campaigns, building schools and other means and then allow independent monitors to check progress.
"We want them to go to school. We want to make sure that they are not doing harvesting work like lifting heavy loads," Engel said. A pilot study last year involving 184 children in three cocoa zones showed that almost all were related to the farmer but did undertake difficult or dangerous tasks including carrying heavy loads, burning brush and applying pesticides.
It found nearly half of these children did not attend school. Neighbouring Ghana, the world's No 2 cocoa producer which is also subject to the deadline, has said it expects to be ready on time. US legislators could impose a ban on Ivorian or Ghanaian cocoa purchases if monitoring and corrective schemes are not in place though the senators would not say what would happen if the deadline, already extended from July 2005, was missed again.
Comments
Comments are closed.