Child Labor Suffers in West Africa

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.