Child trafficking: causes, impacts, and prevention strategies

Child Trafficking

Slave labor and child trafficking are commonplace in cocoa industry in the Ivory Coast, and the makers of the documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate (2010) found them working as slaves everywhere on the cocoa plantations there. Even though the largest chocolate companies in the world, including Nestle, Archer Daniels and Cargill signed a protocol with the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 2001 that mandated the end of child labor and trafficking by 2008, this has not occurred. Nestle and these other giant multinational corporations denied any knowledge of these practices or any control over slave labor on these Ivory Coast plantations, but they did not wish t see the evidence in the film. Interpol knew about these practices because it has railed the plantations and rescued dozens of children from slavery, even though the government of the Ivory Coast and the cocoa exporters denied that child trafficking was occurring. Altogether, this film revealed a general indifference and callousness at high levels of governments and corporations to the fact that much of the world's chocolate is produced by child slaves, and even the ILO often felt helpless in attempting to deal with this problem. It is not a question of passing more laws, since child labor and slave labor are already against international law as well as they laws of the Ivory Coast. In reality, though, these laws are simply not being enforced in any meaningful way.

This was a tremendously powerful documentary, often made by undercover filmmakers, who revealed how children as young as age seven are kidnapped or purchased in poor nations like Mali and them sold to plantations in the Ivory Coast. At a bus station in Mali, they actually had hidden camera footage of traffickers on motorcycles surrounded children and then smuggling across the border into the Ivory Coast. One village chief told the filmmakers that 130 children had literally been kidnapped off the roads and sold into slavery, although in other cases desperately poor parents are selling their own children. Bus drivers and business owners in the border towns described how children were smuggled along back roads every day, although the fortunate ones are sometimes able to escape. One planation-owner in the Ivory Coast admitted that the cost of a child started at 230 Euros and that these children were indeed unpaid slave labor. It did not take them long to find many child slaves as young as ten or twelve years old on the cocoa plantations, just selection them at random. They also interviewed children who escaped from plantations and were chased down by the owners, although both the Ivory Coast government and large exporters denied that any of this was going on. After all, these companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the export of cocoa and 42% of the world's supply comes from the Ivory Coast.