Child labor in chocolate industry: 'It is worse than you may realize'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's a small company with poor global distribution because, well, it's a big planet and there are only so many chocolate bars. But if you look at the web site, and find "view, retail outlets" and then click on "Country" to reverse search, US is now visible for some reason and San Francisco has a lot of outlets and they are near the top of the results. New York also seems to have a lot of outlets. I'm 500 miles from the nearest outlet.
But, if you want more money to go to people closer to the dirt in the production chain, these are your guys.
As someone who immigrated from a country like that into 1st world I'm kind of torn about this. On one hand child labor is bad, on the other hand, starvation is worse. So now we block these kids from being able to make a living for themselves, or effectively force them to lie about their age.
The fact that things are that way currently, is not an argument that things should be that way. It's worth discussing what in the current system necessitates that children work or starve, and whether that's fixable.
That's been true for virtually all of human history. It was true even in the 20th century in agricultural parts of America.
> Why can't adults be paid a sufficient wage to avoid starvation, or why can't our society provide for these children without requiring them to work?
Those people don't live in our society, they live in some other society that doesn't generate the kind of surplus required to enable children not to have to work.
The "other" less equal children from another society, clearly not connected to our own.
As described in the article, companies that control supply chains can squeeze suppliers so that all the surplus accumulates in wealthier countries, instead of with the suppliers. That is not an inevitability, it is a choice made by “our society”.
My point was against the sense of inevitability in the parent reply. We can imagine and enact a more equitable distribution. We don’t even need to mess around with socialism for decades to do it
while you may have a point that in the current state, companies won't willingly reduce their profits to do that, and maybe the only way to get them to make this change right now would be force them and create a massive bureaucracy to make it happen, this is not the only way this can be addressed.
for one, our governments could support african countries in charging more for the product. this could be done through trade agreements that are more supportive and less exploitative as they currently are.
say for example the price of raw cocoa may have to triple to ensure that the producers at the end get double of what they are getting now. (i think that was what was needed to bring the income to minimum living standards)
how much governance is needed to make that happen? once the trade agreements are fixed, it should mostly be spot checking the market prices to make sure the money ends up in the right places. that can't be that hard.
Oh the magical things that could happen if we all only had “the will to do it.” I can’t think of a more naively destructive idea.
And what shall the people of these countries do while they wait for their white saviors to develop the “will to do it?”
public opinion on this topic continues to improve. the problem is not a lack of will in the individuals but a lack of awareness. and that is slowly changing, thanks to presentations like this one among others.
you see, just like you ridicule the belief that people can change and we can fix things, i could say:
ah, well, it is all hopeless. we will never be able to change the attitude of enough people for this to be ever successful. let's just give up. corporations will never change, and they will continue to exploit the world for their personal gain for the forseeable future.
HOW IS THAT ANY LESS DESTRUCTIVE?
nobody said anything about waiting. especially not for a savior. we all need to act. every one of us. to start holding corporations to account, and demand that they change their business practices.
that will does not come from nowhere. it comes from individual action.
i am talking to people almost every day to tell them what i am doing to improve lives of people in poverty, and what they could be doing as well.
you are free to choose to laugh at us, or you know, you could be doing something yourself as well.
the more of us become active, the sooner we can achieve a lasting change.
this is not an issue of white saviors rescuing africa. this is an issue of us colonialists cleaning up the mess that we created and are responsible for. that's why i am talking about change of trade agreements. we need to reign in our corporations and get them to stop their exploitative practices and we need to implement trade agreements that ensure that the resources we take out of africa are paid at a fair price. then it is up to african countries themselves to figure out how to invest that income to the benefit of their own people.
Because of capitalism, not wealth redistribution from white saviors.
> this is not an issue of white saviors rescuing africa. this is an issue of us colonialists cleaning up the mess that we created and are responsible for.
You won’t do that, and anyone who waits around for that to happen or wasted energy or political capital engaging with that is a moron. A dangerous moron. For example, Britain will not give India back a cent of the trillions it stole from them, nor will the Muslim empires who came before them. The only non-idiotic course of action for a country like India is to try and get rich on the same course of development Britain pursued. Not sitting around with their hand out.
It occurred to me the other day that if my home country of Bangladesh had pursued capitalism from the outset, instead of fucking around for decades with socialism, my family might still be together in Bangladesh instead of scattered around a bunch of white people’s countries. What happened before doesn’t matter. What matters is economic development, as fast as possible. The prospect of white saviorism meaningfully fixing anything is so remote—because the sacrifice that would be required in their part is so massive—that even talking about it is destructive in distracting from the urgency of economic development.
absolutely, yes!
but economic development also needs fair payment. and that is currently not happening.
fair trade is not wealth distribution.
do you think fast economic development is possible if we continue to exploit those countries?
Yes, and it has already happened in many places. In 1950, the GDP per capita of South Korea and Taiwan were under $900, not much more than the $600 of Pakistan. Those East Asian countries rapidly industrialized and became rich. Nobody wasted time talking about fairness. Pakistan fucked around with socialism and other leftist garbage and doomed its people to decades more of poverty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River
"The growth has been attributed to the hard work of the labor force. External factors include the enormous economic and technical assistance provided by foreign countries, particularly Japan (see: Treaty on Basic Relations Between Japan and the Republic of Korea) and the United States, access to Western and Japanese markets, and the acquisition of foreign currency by Korean migrant workers in the early stages of economic growth."
other east asian countries look similar. foreign investments and international trade play a large role in a countries economic development.
that doesn't look like continued exploitation that was and still is happening in africa.
sure, the countries need to do their part to develop on their own. but we can also contribute by actually trading fairly with them.
Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, all received extensive economic development support from the US from 1940's-1970's, which helped a lot with that rapid industrialization.
i am not talking about making up for past sins. i am talking about stopping the exploitative trading that still happens today.
it's not the only problem in this world, nor is it only white people who are causing problems, but it happens to be the problem that we are discussing here.
You're right, but capitalist ethics says that surplus must go to the owners and investors, not poor kids in Africa.
I think you are right in that it is worth discussing, but you must come at it from an honest standpoint. You can not pretend like this is some kind of aberration—it is the backbone of our capitalist society. You can not fix a systemic issue with small changes. A quarter of humans on this planet live in abject poverty. We accept this kind of inequality because "everyone is equal" is something we aspire to one day believe—currently we do not.
the problem is not the lying about the age. discovering that is not about saying those are bad parents, but instead this is proof that the price paid for cocoa is still to low.
there is really only one way to solve this: to stop exploiting labor and resources in those countries but actually pay them enough so that they can live a decent life.
and the way to make that happen is to create awareness in the consumer to make them demand from the chocolate producers that they actually make an effort to fix this.
Many child laborers are in extreme poverty, as are their families. This has been going on for decades in Ivory Coast and Ghana, so child labor clearly hasn’t allowed the younger generations to escape poverty. It has definitely made it harder for many children to go to school, though.
But instead of doing this, couldn't Cargill make a bit less profit to bring the standard of living up for the people farming?
It's easy to forget how good we have it sometimes
John Oliver might state some true facts, but his show is really about creating a weird mixture of outrage and humorous quips for entertainment. He wouldn't be doing is job if truth and accuracy weren't sacrificed for that goal.
There's a bit of double-think that goes on with these shows: they're are news but they're not news. People actually do treat them as news. And there are more ways to lie than telling bald-faced non-fact.
> I'm not sure what "weird mixture of outrage and humorous quips for entertainment" means in this context. It sounds like you're just describing a normal comedic news show in deceptively harsh terms.
It thought it was pretty clear: his episodes are engineered to get you mad and laugh. Which IMHO is weird combination of emotions. That may be typical of the comedic news show genre (which I don't think too highly of), but Oliver really cranks it up to 11.
The fact is no matter how much I know about child labor (put you impending disaster here) involved in chocolate, soccer balls, shoes etc there is very little I can do about it besides not buy that stuff. Yes I do want to know about it but it does not have to be part of my entertainment diet. Keeping my own child from getting into that situation is the best I can hope for and I worry about being able to do that sometimes.
Watching Jimmy Kimmel skewer Trump is priceless however:)
Isn't having this knowledge a core part of making ourselves educated voters, to be better-equipped to advocate among friends and relatives for things we believe in, and having a greater ability recognise dodgy business practises?
There are more slaves today than at any other time. Child labor is on the rise. It's not unique to chocolate at all. Chocolate, sulfur, bananas, cobalt, rubber, etc.. Modern capitalism requires a healthy base of slaves to mine, refine, and harvest base resources.
It's not that it isn't true. It's just not news in any significant way. This is just how things are. We all know that this is how things are, but we pretend like it's not so we can enjoy the feeling of being outraged. I know I do. John Oliver is great.
This seems both factually wrong (the first part) and kind of an unnecessarily hostile oversimplification of people's emotions/motivations. It's also another example of the very common fallacy that we should patently not be outraged by things that we already know, or are common, for which there are essentially infinite counter-examples in the realm of human behaviors that are common and known, yet still outrage-worthy and shocking every time (e.g. child abuse). Just because we can't solve every problem instantly doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to express our thoughts and feelings about them - that's part of a healthy society.
Outrage only for outrage's sake surely is a thing, but it's also an easy thing to use as a label in dismissing things one doesn't like for other reasons.
It is also the case that Outage Attracts Viewers (OAV). Social Media is built on this principle and it seems hypocritical that these shows attract viewers on a similar model.
"We all know..."
That's just not true. Besides being funny, this show presents a general audience with topics they won't be familiar with. I think one can expect some chocolate consumers to modify their buying habits after watching this infotainment.
Same is mentioned in the show.
> This is just how things are We all know that this is how things are, but we pretend like it's not so we can enjoy the feeling of being outraged.
Not sure what your point is. Is the 'outrage' bigger problem than the way that things actually are?
I've always heard that the best way to eat a whale is a bite at a time, not trying to shove the entire damned thing in ones mouth.
And, bad as those are, do they outweight the truths that would otherwise be ignored? Perfect is the enemy of good.
You're probably asking about the general trend but this is an example of the show refuting that these kids are just the farmers children. The call with the nestle exec also mentions this objection.
Everyone and his brother goes "you should not have children when you can't afford them" when people who fell into poverty need assistance or when someone can not provide own room to each kid or have trouble to pay for something. Guess what, having kids so that you have cheap labor for otherwise ineffective business is even worst.
It is different when they help an hour a day after school or during weekends etc. But, that us not what we are talking about here.
People have been doing that for several millennia.
Yes, animal welfare groups existed sooner then children protection groups, making it ok to heavily beat your kids or underwear them severely.
And that goes for Carlin and all the other comedians too.