Child labour undermining sustainability in the cocoa industry

Sustainability means meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of future generations while ensuring a balance between economic growth, environmental care, and social well-being.

Producing sustainable cocoa begins with responsible land, fertiliser, and pesticide usage devoid of child labour and untrained labour, making the use of artificial insecticides the last resort to control insect pests and diseases.

This would lead to high crop production in terms of quality and quantity, better protection of the environment, natural pollinators, and the soil.

Organic fertilisers and insecticides which are less expensive and environmentally friendly should be used to reduce the burden on farmers and to protect the environment. Using organic insecticides and pesticides protect natural pollinators so there will be no need for artificial (hand) pollinators.

Organic fertiliser does not have any effects on human health, soil fauna and flora. In addition, it has no impact on water bodies. It rather helps regulate soil temperature, aeration and water infiltration into the soil and the pH. This helps the uptake of nutrients by plants thereby enhancing productivity.

Child labour is one of those activities that undermine sustainability in cocoa farming.

Child labour is mostly defined not by the activity, but by the impact this activity has on the child.

In this report, the focus would be to find out how child labour adversely impacts the quantity and quality of the cocoa produced over time and to propose solutions on how to have sustainable cocoa production without the use of child labourers.

Most of the cocoa in Ghana and other West African countries is grown by smallholder farmers. Studies show that most of the children who work on cocoa farms do so within their immediate or extended family.

The most common jobs children do on the farms include but not limited to;

weeding, planting of seedlings/seeds, application of weedicides/fungicides/herbicides/liquid fertiliser, harvesting of ripe cocoa pods, gathering of harvested pods, pruning of cocoa, carrying of pods to central point, breaking of pods, preparing mats for cocoa fermentation using banana leaves, carting of fermented beans to dry mats, and drying of cocoa.

All these activities that children do on the farm have impacts on the productivity of the cocoa, soil nutrients and the environment.

In several farmer meetings at Sefwi in the Western North Region of Ghana, farmers explained that, anytime they allowed their kids to harvest cocoa, gather harvested pods, or break cocoa pods, they noticed a slight reduction in their yield compared to when they hired adult labourers.

How then does child labour impact the productivity of the crops, the soil nutrients, and the environment?

Take, for instance, harvesting cocoa. Children have no proper training on how to harvest, and in the process, they damage the cushions (the very spot where the cocoa flowers are on the trunk). Also, ripe pods high in the branches are mostly left unharvested because they are beyond the reach of these children.

Some of the farmers confirmed that sometimes they had to redo the harvesting. During the gathering and carting of pods to the central point, children leave most of the pods on the ground. Farmers explained that they find some of these pods rotten on the ground when they walk through their farms.

According to ILO, Ghana and Ivory Coast have an estimated 1.56 million child labourers.

If each child labourer damages one cocoa tree during harvesting, an estimated total of 1.56 million trees would be damaged, an equivalent of 3466.67 acres of cocoa farms. If an acre produces 3 bags of cocoa, it means that an estimated 10400 bags (650 metric tonnes) would be lost the following year.

If the tree takes a year to heal, the industry will lose that amount of cocoa harvested that year. And because it is a continuous process, the industry will continue to lose year in and year out which increases the poverty of farmers and threatens the sustainability of the industry.

In 2021, Ivory Coast and Ghana had 10.75 million and 6.75 million acres of area respectively under cocoa cultivation ( satellite-based high-resolution maps of cocoa for Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana by N Kalischek, June 2022).

If child labourers worked on just a quarter of these acres of land, and each child labourer is causing a loss of 0.2Kg of beans to the farmer on each acre, that may seem insignificant but cumulatively the reality is that the whole cocoa industry of Ivory Coast and Ghana is losing 8600 bags (537.5 metric tonnes) and 2160 bags (135 metric tonnes) of beans respectively.

Most sustainability interventions are not yielding the expected results because of delays in the implementation of some of the components such as youth development and integration into the value chain as service providers, also community development which is being implemented as an independent component should be considered as main driver of youth, women development and child labour remediation in farming communities.

Also, lack of coordination amongst the components and false reportage are not helping the course. The attention of stakeholders has not gone to the fact that, child labour is undermining the sustainability of the cocoa industry because they get the volumes they want without difficulties and attribute any reductions to pests, diseases, old age of farms, environmental factors, etc. The focus has been on certification program standards with its generic processes and procedures.

Recommendation

• Stakeholders could redirect their focus on how child labour is impacting the quality and quantity of cocoa produced.

• Children should not be allowed to do any work on the farm because apart from having a negative impact on the children, it also undermines the sustainability of the cocoa industry as explained in this report.

Youth development which is a subset of community development should be properly fused into the supply chain to be service providers in the farming communities. This will serve as employment for the youth in the communities.

• There should also be a review of some of the interventions in the industry that can separate child labour and its related issues from the production and procurement of cocoa. Most child labour remediation is done independently even though it is a subset of community development. When communities are developed, child labour remediation improves.

Conclusion

The use of child labour in cocoa farming seems cheap at first sight but when we consider the impact of their activities on the farm, they are expensive and have dire economic impact on every stakeholder in the cocoa value chain.

Farmers will continue to live below the poverty line, and some may change to farm other alternative cash crops such as rubber and cashew or sell out their cocoa farms to illegal miners. When this happens the impact will hit every single stakeholder along the value chain.