Globalization has made supply chains considerably complex, involving multiple suppliers in various locations around the world. In this environment, monitoring of the supply chain has inevitably become challenging.
Off The Wall With Padre James Bhagwan
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
According to the writer, the reality of chocolate is far from romantic. Around 70 per cent of the world's production of cocoa comes from West Africa Ghana, Nigeria, C"te d'Ivoire and Cameroon. Most of the chocolate sold in Australia will contain cocoa f
Every week I receive an email from Dudley Church which has their weekly newsletter, the "Dudley Samachar" (samachar means news). It's handed out at the four churches in Dudley Circuit/Parish in Suva and emailed out to friends and former members.
Last Sunday's issue contained, among other things, articles from the Uniting Church of Australia magazine "Revive" on St. Valentine's Day.
One article which caught my attention and prompted a discussion with my children was titled, "A LOVE TO DIE FOR":
St. Valentine's Day, 14 February, isn't quite as big a deal in Australia as it is in the United States; nonetheless, many romantics like to mark the day with a small token of affection to the one they love. In 2011, Australians were estimated to have spent about $285million on Valentine's Day chocolate and confectionary. But is that heart-shaped box really giving the right message?
The reality of chocolate is far from romantic. Around 70 per cent of the world's production of cocoa comes from West Africa - Ghana, Nigeria, C"te d'Ivoire and Cameroon. Most of the chocolate sold in Australia will contain cocoa from West Africa, produced by children forced to work in slave-like conditions or have been trafficked.
The US Department of State estimates that more than 109,000 children in C"te d'Ivoire's cocoa industry work under "the worst forms of child labor", and that some 10,000 are victims of human trafficking or enslavement. Think about it. One of life's simple pleasures, one we share as an expression of love, comes to us courtesy of children who have been taken from their families and denied a childhood.
Children who understand what the beans they collect are used for, because they have never seen chocolate.
Naturally you can imagine the look on my two little one's faces after they read the article (they had to read it for themselves to make sure this wasn't one of Daddy's "made up stories").
Yesterday as many chocolates were given out and eaten on St. Valentine's Day (which was not a public holiday as one Fijian television channel's programming seemed to suggest) I wondered how many people thought about where their chocolate came from (beyond of course the giver or the shop at which it was bought).
A BBC Panorama investigation found that that there is no guarantee, despite safeguards, even with chocolate marketed as Fairtrade, that child labour - as defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) - has not been involved in the supply chain. Investigative journalist Paul Kenyon, posed as a cocoa dealer and in a village in Ghana, met 12-year-old Ouare Fatao Kwakou, who was sold to traffickers by his uncle and taken from neighbouring and impoverished Burkina Faso to work as a cocoa picker.
More than a year later, he had not been paid a penny for his work - the profits of his labour going instead to his new cocoa masters and to the uncle who sold him.
Fair Trade is a growing, international movement which ensures that producers in poor countries get a fair deal.
According to the BBC, the Fairtrade cocoa co-operative in Ghana which supplies Cadbury and Divine, suspended seven out of 33 of their cocoa farming communities in one of its 52 major growing districts in the country after they were found to be using the worst forms of child labour. Some suspensions were lifted when the cooperatives stopped using child labour
In the port city of San Pedro in Ivory Coast, Kenyon posed as a trader and sold on cocoa beans which had been produced by the worst forms of child labour. It is at this point where the traceability of the cocoa ends and it can be sold on to major chocolate makers worldwide who cannot say how it was sourced.
For more on child labour and chocolate read the BBC article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_8583000/8583499.stm
For the last few years I have enjoyed the local chocolate made in Tailevu. However I have only been able to obtain a few precious bars during the Ministry of Primary Industries' Fiji Agricultural Show.
However those bars from Namau Village in Naloto, Tailevu, in their no frills foil wrapping are the closest I have come to in terms of guilt-free chocolate!
I have not had an opportunity to visit our local chocolatiers and am not sure when they will have the capacity to cater for the Fijian market.
I do however, know that it is their dream. For that dream to become a reality, many of us will seriously need to commit to supporting our local cottage industries.
Most of us do support our cottage industries, and not just because of the Buy Fiji Made campaign (although I'm sure it helps). We buy bubu's jam, bahaini's chutney, roti parcels, fried fish and cassava lunch packs, sasa-brooms, patchwork quilts and floormats made from cast-off rags because they are affordable.
We buy them because we are supporting the people (mainly our mothers and sisters) who make them as often the only source of income for the family. At the same time we are choosing our local products over the imports.
I am sure that one day, our Tailevuan chocolate will be promoted locally and regionally like the products from FRIEND Fiji or internationally demanded like those of Pure Fiji, both who combine support for locally made products with international standards.
Martin Luther King once remarked, "Before you've finished your breakfast this morning, you'll have relied on half the world". This may be true of western countries. It does not have to be the case in Fiji.
Maybe our sila can be made into corn flakes, our Labasa rice can become the bubbles that children love.
Who knows, maybe next year you will be able to give your Valentine Fiji chocolate. At least knowing where it came from and who made it won't leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
* Reverend James Bhagwan is currently a student of the Methodist Theological University's International Graduate School of Theology in Seoul, South Korea. Email: padrejames@gmail.com or visit http://thejournalofaspiritualwonderer.blogspot.com.
Tim Newman
is a campaigns assistant at the International Labor Rights Forum. He also works on the Stop Firestone campaign.
 Photo: Nicholas Reader/IRIN Child labour is common in Guinea (file photo) |
The film explores the myriad ways criminals exploit other people, primarily children, for their own profit.
The scope and brutality of human trafficking, as well as ways in which I have unwittingly contributed to it, made me squirm more than once.
I was awake well into the night, trying to think of ways I could play some small part in combating it — such as learning more and writing letters to the editor, for starters.
The film spotlights some of the victims of human trafficking, including the fishing boys of Ghana, street beggars of Senegal and girls and women trapped in the brothels of Mumbai, India, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.The film even includes a segment on a Wichita teenager who was tricked and coerced into prostitution at truck stops in Oklahoma and Kansas.
Among the things I learned:
■Human trafficking is the world’s third largest crime industry, behind only drugs and guns, and it is the fastest growing criminal activity.
■About 80 percent of human trafficking is sex trafficking, the rest is labor.
■In some instances there is a direct relationship to the low price I pay for many of my favorite items and human trafficking.
After the film, Christine Ladner, a Kansas assistant attorney general, talked about some steps the state is taking to combat human trafficking, including recent legislation.
The program was one in a series sponsored by the Topeka Center for Peace and Justice and WU that focuses on the problem of human trafficking.
The next program will include the film, “The Dark Side of Chocolate,” a documentary that investigates the use of child labor in the cocoa fields of West Africa.
The film will be shown in mid October, when many of us will be purchasing chocolate to hand out to our neighborhood children for Halloween.
DUANE JOHNSON, TOPEKA
Valentine's Day is an opportunity for many people to learn more about how their chocolate is produced. That impulse is what motivated Leigh Vickery to write an article about the well-documented and continued use of forced, trafficked and child labor in the cocoa industry in West Africa. The article was published by Tyler Paper in Texas, but soon after it was posted, the management made the decision to remove Leigh's piece.
Tim Newman is a campaigns assistant at the International Labor Rights Forum. He also works on the Stop Firestone campaign. 
The bedroom at 169 South Clinton Street where some of the victims, who were smuggled and forced to work in hair salons, lived. 
Workers are powerless against the contractors used by multinationals who relocate to wherever production is cheapest
The re-emergence of slavery on ships off West Africa is profoundly shocking but it is not a surprise. Last week slavery its modern form came to light in cases of forced labour uncovered on trawlers fishing for the European market. In a haunting echo of the 18th century triangular trade, west African workers were found off the coast of Sierra Leone on board boats where they lived and worked in ships' holds with less than a metre of head height, sometimes for 18 hours a day for no pay, packed like sardines to sleep in spaces too small to stand up, with their documents taken from them and no means of escape.
It is no accident that globalisation has seen the reemergence of slavery. The human degradation off West Africa is replicated elsewhere. I first came across modern slavery when investigating the UK chicken supply chain in Thailand in 2002. UK retailers and manufacturers now source much of their cheap commodity chicken from Asian factories. On the subcontracted farms around Bangkok that supply the international poultry processing factories I found illegal Burmese migrants trapped in debt bondage and forced labour. Fifteen Burmese refugees, interviewed for me by the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity, described sleeping in one room on the floor working whatever hours their Thai boss required of them, without pay and without a day off for two months. They had been kept in order by violence and by the threat of deportation if they complained.
In Brazil, investigating the explosion in soya production in the Amazon region for my book Eat Your Heart Out, I heard of the slaves found on farms being cleared in the rainforest. A Dominican priest, Xavier Plassat, who campaigns to free them told me how he had just returned with government swat squads from a farm 60km off the road where 200 workers were being kept in slavery, labouring without pay, deprived of freedom of movement and controlled by debt bondage. They had no clean water and little food and were living 30 to a room. Plassat believed slavery and agribusiness were inextricably linked. Monoculture for export, the large-scale intensive farming dominated by transnational corporations (TNC), and favoured by trade rules and international financial institutions, had created the conditions for slavery by eliminating the traditional small scale farming that provided food for 60% of the Brazilian population. He is not alone. Kevin Bales, the great expert on modern slavery, has shown how driving peasant farmers off the land has created a new supply of dispossessed workers who can be pressed into this condition.
Expansionist agriculture and empires have always depended on slave labour, as Latin authors of the Roman empire complained centuries ago. Today, we live in an era when the dominant powers don't officially "do" empire, so economic control takes a new privatised form in the TNC. Modern slavery has evolved to match. The straightforward ownership of chattel slavery is gone, replaced instead by an outsourced, subcontracted kind of control over people, which can be terminated when they have served their purpose. The transnationals universally abhor any idea of slavery or forced labour and yet it is found in their supply chains. Slaves and exploited migrants, often driven into migration by the squeeze on family agriculture, are what make the economics of today's agribusiness work.
In a globalised world, footloose corporations have relocated to wherever labour and resources are cheapest. And then in order to compete, companies in the developed world have reimported the labour conditions of the least developed countries with the fewest protections back to Europe and the US. So even in rural England I have found examples of debt-bonded South African workers and Anti-Slavery International finds itself taking up the plight of Mexican farm workers suffering extreme exploitation in California.
It was in part revulsion among consumers of the products of slavery in the 19th century that led to the movement to abolish it.
The sugar trade of the 17th and 18th centuries unlocked the power of mass consumption in England. Slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean laboured to produce it, creating wealth that mostly returned to Britain, and for others to accumulate capital. They paid with their lives. But it was also the sugar trade that threw up one of the earliest examples of ethical shopping.
An early 19th century sugar bowl in London's Museum of Docklands is inscribed with the message: "East India Sugar not made by Slaves. By Six Families using East India instead of West India sugar, one less slave is required." Like so much ethical shopping it exposes its own limitations. Abolishing slavery in the 19th century required reform of a whole political and economic system.
How should we respond to news of slavery re-emerging today? Stamping it out needs as big an overhaul of prevailing power structures as previously. And yet, it was on small tokens of concern that a political movement against slavery was originally built. It's time we made our revulsion clear again.
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This photo essay was selected by Photo Philanthropy as a finalist for their 2010 Activist Awards in the amateur category. To see all the award winners and finalists, go to www.PhotoPhilanthropy.org.