Capitalism Vanilla-style

Madagascar provides about 80% of the world’s supply of vanilla. Madagascan vanilla is used in chocolate, cakes and ice-cream sold to consumers around the globe by some of the world’s biggest brands.

Retailers are profiting from the world’s second most expensive spice are ignoring the desperate plight of impoverished Madagascan farmers. According to a new report by research and media centre Danwatch, the vanilla supply chain is keeping farmers locked in a cycle of exploitation, poverty and child labour. Malnutrition and child stunting are realities of family life. The Danwatch report claims that the plight of Madagascan farmers has been largely ignored by exporters and retailers profiting from the $192m (£152m) trade in Madagascan vanilla. 

Prices fluctuate, but industry reports show the commodity is currently selling at between $200 (£160) and $400 a kilo. Xidollien’s mother, Liliane, gets just £6 a kilo for the family’s vanilla pods from the “collectors”, young men on motorbikes who come to the village to buy the pods after each harvest. She has no idea where her crop ends up. “I sell to a collector. When it goes, it’s gone,” she says with a shrug.

Rajao Jean, president of a local farmers’ association, says that when farmers become desperate for food during the long wet months, the same collectors return to offer a “vanilla flower contract” – loans to see them through to harvest. The collectors fix the price and return after harvest to collect their debt and the high interest it has accrued, buying the pods far below market value. Jean says that if farmers have a bad harvest or have their plants stolen, they can be forced to sell land, animals and possessions in an attempt to pay off this debt. He explains that a loan of £1 in March could have escalated to £10 by harvest time in July.

“The farmers are making a scarce profit,” says Jesper Nymark, executive director of Danwatch, adding that the investigation reveals a lack of traceability and transparency in supply chains. “Several of the importers and retailers we have spoken with are not able to say which specific farms their vanilla comes from, and whether there is vanilla in their supply chain that has been produced by children.” He continued, “Retailers and importers are obliged by UN guidelines to do whatever [is] in their power to know their supply chain, and to correct violations of human rights if they occur,” says Nymark. “According to the experts we have talked to, there seems to be quite the task ahead in ensuring that people in Madagascar are supported, not exploited, as a consequence of the lack of transparency in the supply chain for the vanilla sold in local supermarkets.”

The International Labour Organisation estimates 20,000 children are working in the Madagascan vanilla trade, the majority of them in the Sava region. The country has ratified international child labour conventions and set a minimum working age of 15, but the ILO says there are 2 million children between the ages of five and 17 engaged in various forms of work on the island; nearly 9% of the total population.

Many here don’t consider children working alongside their parents as a problem. Tombo Tam Hun Man, former mayor and now local vanilla kingpin in Andapa, one of the main towns in the vanilla-producing region, says that children helping in the fields is a natural way for them to learn about vanilla farming.

 Under Madagascan law, children must go to school until they are 14, but he admits that few children in the vanilla villages will get an education. “If you don’t start to teach your kids to do something, what will they do? It is better than nothing,” he says. With few government schools, private fee-paying schools are often the only option for farming families. There is no visible evidence of any infrastructure or investment in the vanilla communities by any of the exporters or retailers using Madagascan vanilla pods.

The Madagascan authorities have attempted to regulate the vanilla trade, introducing a code of conduct in 2015. However, resources to implement the code are insufficient, says Bety Florent, president of the regional child labour committee. “We are still at a basic stage. There is still no effective measure,” she says, explaining that only 16 of 86 child labour committees proposed by the government have so far been set up in the region.

Somalia's Child Labour

War and famine in Somalia have forced Halima, and thousands of others like herself, to abandon the dream of education and become workers instead. UNICEF statistics from 2011, the last time such data was collected, show that half of all children between the ages of five and 14 hailing from the country’s central and southern regions are employed. In Puntland and Somaliland, which have been more stable than other parts of Somalia for the past two decades, more than a quarter of all children work for a living.

The grueling jobs for which they are hired – mostly manual and domestic labour – pay little but demand a lot. Twelve-year-old Halima Mohamed Ali says she works as a nanny for five children from “sunrise to sunrise”, cooking, ironing, washing floors, bathing the children, and finally putting them to bed before calling it a day.  Her 50-dollar monthly salary is a lifeline for her family of five, who have no other breadwinner.  Ali told IPS, “If I miss even a single day of work, my family will go to bed hungry.”

 According to Mohamed Abdi, programme manager of Somali Peace Line, an organisation that promotes and protects the rights of children, “Hundreds of girls are brought to Mogadishu from rural areas where there is extreme poverty and famine conditions … to work as domestic servants in middle-class homes. They work long hours for food, lodging and low wages, which they send back to their families.” The “Lucky ones” like Ali get paid on a regular basis many others have their meagre salaries withheld for months, are cut off from their families, abused and treated like slaves. “When we try to convince parents not to send their children to work, they ask us for alternative sources of income, which we cannot provide,” he admitted.

In addition to being vulnerable to informal labour conditions such as long hours, children like 11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale also receive lower wages than their adult counterparts, even when they perform all the same functions. Duale – the only boy in the family – left school and took a job in a car-repair centre where he works 12-hour days to support his mother and two young sisters. “On a good day, when there are lots of cars to fix, I earn 50 Somali shillings (about 2.5 dollars) a day. On bad days, I am just given my lunch and sent home with nothing,” said Duale

 70 percent of the population of 10.2 million are classified as “low-income”, with 73 percent of all Somalis living on less than two dollars a day. The unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, with 54 percent of all Somalis between the ages of 15 and 64 out of work. The director-general of Somalia’s ministry of human development and public services, Aweys Sheikh Haddad, said his country’s constitution bans child labour, adding that the government recently ratified an International Labour Organization (ILO) convention forbidding the worst forms of child labour. But challenges in law enforcement mean these commitments on paper have not amounted to much in practice. Various studies and reports have found children as young as five years old engaged in virtually every industry, from construction to agriculture. Only 710,860 youth out of 1.7 million primary school-aged children are enrolled in any kind of education.

Cocoa Capitalism

Cocoa is crucial to the Ivory Coast's economy and is mainly grown around the deep green and undulating lands in the south, centre and west of the country. These areas help the country produce around 40% of the world's entire cocoa supply, and the crop is responsible for 15% of the Ivory Coast's GDP, 20% of its tax revenue, and 35% of its exports. Ivorian cocoa typically ends up at ports like Amsterdam - the biggest cocoa harbour in the world.

The idea that millions of young children are being trafficked, enslaved, and forced to work 16-hour days in dire conditions makes for dramatic and emotive story, and one that campaigners can easily rally around. The concept of inequitable state pricing, misguided economic policies and distorted value chains makes for a much less rousing tale. However, while the former is thankfully a myth, it is the latter that is all too real. There is no shortage of problems within the Ivory Coast's cocoa industry. But despite the headlines, child slavery doesn't seem to be one of them.

Child labour has been a staple of Western campaigners in recent years. In late 2012, for example, this website published an article citing estimates that some 1.8 million child labourers are working in Ghana and the Ivory Coast as well as a US Department of State guesstimate that over 100,000 children are working under "the worst forms of child labour" on Ivorian farms. Meanwhile the Dutch journalist-turned-activist-turned-ethical-chocolatier Teun van de Keuken has claimed there are 460,000 people "working in conditions that have been declared illegal" in West Africa. Figures citing hundreds of thousands of child slaves make for sensations headlines, but they don't chime with the reality.

A 2013 background paper on forced labour and trafficking in Africa, the International Labour Organisation explained that "there are many clear examples where the assumption of forced labour has proved wrong. This is especially the case with cocoa production." The paper cites a range of studies that have disproven the idea of large numbers of child slaves and of widespread exploitation in West African cocoa fields, concluding that "an absence of good quality, accurate, empirical data has allowed for the perpetuation of sensationalist and often misplaced claims."

The Ivory Coast's cocoa industry is wrought with problems, most of which can be traced back to its hasty, ill-considered and poorly executed liberalisation in the late 1990s. Before then, the industry had been regulated by the Caisse de stabilisation et de soutien des prix des productions agricoles, more commonly known as Caistab.

Caistab was a state agency that offered farmers a guaranteed market at set prices. The organisation facilitated the buying and selling of the crop and removed many of the risks and uncertainties associated with cocoa farming. However, Caistab also worked to siphon illicit extra funds into the pockets of the ruling party and its leader Félix Houphouët-Boigny. It was partly this corruption that led the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to call for its abolition. Ivory Coast eventually acceded to its wishes.

Liberalising the industry, however, proved to be a hugely problematic. The cocoa industry disintegrated into a large number of cooperatives and private operators; government oversight and management of the sector lost its coherence as it fractured into various smaller bodies; and a few large multinational buyers were able to use their financial leverage to muscle in on the hitherto protected market and gain a stranglehold on exports.  Prices plummeted to the point that growing and selling cocoa sometimes cost them money.

With cocoa prices differing between neighbouring producers, particularly Ivory Coast and Ghana, many exporters try to get higher profits by smuggling crops across the border. The amount smuggled can be as high as hundreds of thousands of tonnes each year, leading to significant losses in tax revenues for the Ivorian or Ghanaian governments.

Furthermore, the new system hardly rooted out opportunities for corruption. In fact, one could argue that it deepened and intensified it, with vast amounts of embezzled cocoa revenues being used to fund the country's civil war in the mid-2000s. Farmers claim they are still extorted, over-taxed and short-changed by the current system. "With Caistab we had to support a director, his family, his home, his car, his mistress and so on," says one farmer from Sikensi. "With the new system in place, we've got to support four of five of these."

From a report by Bram Posthumus, an independent press and radio journalist with more than 20 years of experience living and working in West and Southern Africa.

Child Slavery

'How can I live in this world?
Oh, what can I do?
It is so dark ahead of me.
Mother and father do not want us.
They sell us to thugs.'
The words of a child in South Africa, originally written as a poem in the Xhosa language

Every day millions of children in Africa are at risk of being exploited, resulting in slave-like working conditions. Their childhood is forever lost.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations (UN), Africa has the world’s largest child labor population, with the agriculture and mining sectors among the worst offenders. Poverty is cited as the primary reason for forced child labor in Africa. The problem is severe in sub-Saharan Africa where more than 40 percent of all children aged 5-14, about 48 million children, work for survival, according to the ILO. Child trafficking for the purpose of labor is common throughout the continent. Family members often exchange children for money, goods or gifts.

According to the UN, in expanding economies the demand for labor increases. Unable to cope with high production quotas, industries turn to exploitative child labor. “Children and teenagers enter the risk of being used as cheap labor,” a UN report states. “Most of these children are vulnerable due to poverty. They are unaware of their rights, overworked, can’t resist.” The report said these children are employed with low or no wages, poor living conditions, hazardous work environments, no healthcare and little to no education opportunities.

“Forced labor robs children of a childhood, which in turn negatively affects their ability to be constructive members of their communities for the rest of their lives,” explains Mark Hatfield, Africa Director of Baptist Global Response, a humanitarian aid and relief organization. “Forced child labor deals a mental blow to the individual child, taking away his ability to dream about a future outside of his present status.” Hatfield says. “Children forced to work before they reach a reasonable age limits their future capabilities by taking away their right to a basic education, which can be the springboard out of poverty. Child labor perpetuates the poverty cycle by keeping the child in a low income, subsistence-only status all their lives.”

In ‘Not for Sale’ David Batstone writes: “There are more slaves today than at any other point in human history. Our mission is to create a world where no one is for sale.”

This too is the mission of Socialist Banner - to end wage slavery - that will not come about by christian charity, but by only ending the capitalist system.

We however ask the exact same question as the article: “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Malawi's Tobacco Child Labour

 Malawi has become one of the five largest tobacco producers in the world, largely due to low export tariffs, cheap labour and lack of regulations. Malawian tobacco is found in the blend of almost every best-selling cigarette brand available in Europe, Asia and the US. But few of the smokers who buy the end product know much about the conditions the tobacco they consume is produced under.

Malawi is one of the least developed nations in the world (ranking 153 out of 169 countries in the Human Development Index) with around half the population living below the poverty line of $1.25 a day and one of the highest numbers of child labourers in Africa – around 1.5 million.

With tobacco sales making up 70 percent of the country's income and a significant part of its industrial activity, it is sadly inevitable that many of these children (aged between five and 15) are being forced by economic necessity to work with their families in the tobacco fields, risking their health, safety, and future. There they are subjected to hazardous manual labour, physical strain, dangerous environments, and long hours; often charged with strenuous tasks such as clearing the land, building tobacco drying sheds, weeding and plucking raw tobacco.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and NGOs such as SOS Children, Plan International and others, when the children cut and bundle the tobacco leaves they are put at risk of absorbing toxic quantities of nicotine through their skin. Many suffer from a disease called green tobacco sickness, or nicotine poisoning. Symptoms include severe headaches, abdominal cramps, muscle weakness, breathing difficulties, diarrhoea and vomiting, high blood pressure and fluctuations in heart rate. Some are even given the task of applying pesticides with their bare hands – chemicals when handled incorrectly can cause serious neurological problems.

It also affects their development and education - children working in the fields cannot be at school - and so their involvement in the industry inevitably perpetuates a cycle of exploitation, illiteracy, lack of opportunity and poverty that will one day force them back into the fields as adults.

The cigarette manufacturers all insist that they are firmly opposed to the use of children working in their supply chain and that in Malawi. But critics claim that these initiatives are little more than window dressing from a multi-billion dollar industry that ultimately benefits from the country's low production costs.

Over the past two years only 49 tobacco farm owners have been prosecuted in Malawi for using child labour. Most received a $34 fine.

They are masquerading around the issue," says Mathias Burton of Malawi's Economic and Legal Social Services Centre. "To ease their consciences, that's why they have this kind of stuff. To say they are fighting child labour. And when they sell their own products ... the profits that they make, what they give out in social responsibility to these organisations is nothing at all compared to what they make."

Child Labour Linked To Economic problems In Zimbabwe

The company closures, downsizings and retrenchments that have led to the demise of Zimbabwe’s manufacturing sector in the past decade, and particularly in recent months, are forcing parents and guardians to send their children out to work to augment household incomes, say labour experts and economists.

An assessment of the manufacturing sector’s performance by the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI), a membership organization that represents the industry, described the situation as “a crisis” and noted that many companies had downsized or closed their doors in 2012. A 2013 report by CZI found that businesses were operating at less than 40 percent of capacity.

The National Social Security Authority, a government body, estimates that between July 2011 and July 2013, 711 companies in the capital, Harare, went out of business, causing 8,336 workers to lose their jobs.

Chronic power shortages, a loss of markets and a lack of capital to invest in new technologies and machinery have been forcing businesses to scale back or close down in the last decade, but according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), the rate of retrenchments increased in the second half of 2013.

This followed the general elections in August, when President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party won a landslide victory. A coalition government with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that had helped stabilize the economy after a protracted period of political and economic instability, was dissolved.

“Children, together with women, are bearing the brunt of company closures that, according to findings by our retrenchment committee for the period from July 2013, have resulted in an average of 300 workers being laid off per week,” said Japhet Moyo, ZCTU’s secretary general.

“The situation is likely to get worse in 2014, and while we don’t have figures for children who have been forced to get into commercial work, the figure is certainly set to be higher than the child labour statistics that are officially available,” he noted.

Zimbabwean law, which defines children as persons under 18 years old, prohibits any form of employment for children under the age of 13, while those between 13 and 15 years old can work only as supervised apprentices. Children aged between 16 and 18 may be employed commercially, providing they are supervised.

However, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 13 percent of Zimbabwean children are engaged in child labour, which the International Labour Organization defines as work that is harmful to children’s physical and mental development and interferes with their schooling.

A global child labour index for 2012, released in late 2013 by Maplecroft, an international risk analysis firm, ranked Zimbabwe among the 10 worst performers, out of 197 countries surveyed worldwide, for the frequency and severity of its reported child labour incidents.

“Whenever companies downsize or fold, household incomes suffer and the tendency among parents and guardians is to look to children to help raise money for upkeep by forcing them to engage in commercial work,” said Moyo. He noted that child labour is common on farms and sugar plantations, and in the retail and mining sectors, while girls are often employed as domestic workers – all occupations “where the wages tend to be very low”, he added.

The US Department of Labour’s 2012 report on child labour in Zimbabwe noted that children engaged in mining “work long hours and use dangerous chemicals such as mercury, cyanide and explosives”, while those involved in fishing “perform demanding tasks, and face dangers such as drowning”.

“While the law is clear on child labour, policing is the problem because the relevant departments lack manpower, and government has no alternative ways of fighting poverty among affected families,” said Moyo.

 Innocent Makwiramiti, a Harare-based economist and former chief executive officer of the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC), said retrenched employees often lose numerous benefits besides their salaries. “In most cases, when they are retrenched, breadwinners would have [already] gone for long periods without receiving their salaries, [they] can no longer access medical aid and, in some cases, they forgo school fees allowances they would have been getting,” he said.

“While companies have been struggling over the years, even under the Government of National Unity (formed in early 2009 and dissolved in August 2013), it seems an unusual number have been folding since last year’s elections.” Makwiramiti said many other companies are struggling to pay employees their full salaries, while public service employees often receive such poor salaries that they rely on their children to supplement the household income, and even top managers who have fallen on hard times are doing the same.

Full article from IRIN can be found here

The sweet bitter truth

Halloween is nearing, a time for trick or treat. Many Western children will be given chocolate candy for the treat. Chocolate’s billion-dollar industry starts with workers like Abdul, a 10 years old, a three-year veteran of the job. He has never tasted chocolate. Children such as Abdul don’t know anything about protocols or certification, prohibiting his exploitation. All they know is work.

At present, nearly 75 percent of the world’s cocoa is supplied by the West African countries of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where nearly two million children work on cocoa farms.  40% children working in cocoa fields of Ivory Coast are not enrolled in schools and that only 5% of Ivorian children are paid for their work. According to UNICEF, hundreds of thousands of these children are engaged in the worst forms of child labor. UNICEF further estimates nearly 35,000* Ivorian children working on cocoa farms as victims of trafficking.

Many of the child-'slaves’ are physically and sexually exploited. Handling of chemicals and prolonged exposure to pesticides make these children prone to incorrigible respiratory and dermatological diseases. Negligent and unassisted working with heavy farm equipments and sharp tools leave many children crippled for life. 

The new slavery

If current trends continue the UN says there will still be about 190 million child labourers in eight years' time.  In the poorest parts of the world, the UN says, the numbers will rise: child labourers in sub-Saharan Africa will jump by around 15 million over the next decade, reaching 65 million by 2020.

 In Ethiopia almost 60% of children work. US chocolate companies had promised to educate all children in areas where it grew cocoa in west Africa – a commitment that would cost the industry $75m or 0.1% of annual sales. Instead it spent about $20m over eight years and reached just 4% of children in cocoa-growing communities in Ivory Coast and 30% in Ghana.

 Kevin Watkins, a former UN official who now works at the respected Washington-based thinktank the Brookings Institution, said: "The conditions of millions of child labourers would shock even the most hardened Victorian social reformers. National governments and international agencies are failing these kids, and reneging on their commitments."