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Child Labor Suffers in West Africa
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By KWASI KPODO
Associated Press Writer
November 18, 2002, 3:03 PM EST
ACCRA, Ghana -- Poverty and poor education will make it tough to end
child labor on the West African plantations that produce most of the
world's cocoa, delegates at a conference said Monday.
West African cocoa growers have been accused of abusive child labor
practices, including indentured servitude and trafficking minors. About
200,000 children are sold across West African borders each year,
according to the U.N. Children's Fund, and many end up on the region's
cocoa and coffee plantations.
The delegates are meeting this week in Ghana to promote responsible
farming in the region. The conference is being hosted by the U.S. Agency
for International Development, the U.S. Department of Labor and the
International Labor Organization.
"Underlying the problem is a need for greater training for farmers and
greater awareness of acceptable and unacceptable labor practices," said
Bill Guyton, executive director of the World Cocoa Foundation, an
association of cocoa growers and chocolate manufacturers.
"We want to make sure that cocoa is grown in a sustainable way, with
good labor, economic and environmental practices."
Children who have escaped from Ivory Coast plantations, which grow 40
percent of the world's cocoa, have said they were savagely beaten and
got little food or pay.
The delegates want to find ways to educate farmers in West Africa's
major cocoa-producing nations and help them find alternatives to child
labor.
They will also promote environmentally safe farming to boost profits and
reduce the need for cheap child labor, organizers said. The focus is on
Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana.
Delegates at the four-day conference planned to approve a
multimillion-dollar fund to pay for some of the programs, conference
spokesman Bill Pendergast said. He said groups attending the conference
would donate money to the fund.
About two-thirds of the cocoa used in the chocolate industry is grown in
West Africa, according to a recent report commissioned by the conference
hosts.
The report documented 5,120 full-time child workers on cocoa plantations
in Ivory Coast. According to the report, 29 percent said they weren't
able to quit, though anecdotal evidence suggested child trafficking in
the country has waned.
Crushing poverty often means children must work instead of going to
school, even when they stay with their families, said Mario Boivin of
the Canadian development group SOCODEVI, which works with 22,000 cocoa
farmers in Ivory Coast.
"It's not that the parents don't want to send them (to school), they
just can't afford it," Boivin said.
Delegates worry an uprising in Ivory Coast that began in September will
slow the new education program.
Ivory Coast's government has imposed a curfew and set up roadblocks
across the country's cocoa-producing south since rebels took much of the
north in mid-September.
Copyright (c) 2002, The Associated Press
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