Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation | Hacker News Reader

Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation

cbsnews.com

111 pointshammock134 comments

Open articleView on HN

Tony’s Chocolate entire business is about ending slave sourced chocolate [1] and IMO tastes the best

I think they are most likely going to go out of business because CR showed they had the highest lead content [2]

It’s always something

[1] https://tonyschocolonely.com/uk/en/why-we-still-wont-say-wer...

[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

Wow I had no idea. How is it that we can have such high levels of heavy metals in such common food items? Is there no government monitoring?

>Is there no government monitoring?

There is, but it depends on how the food is classified whether it falls under the purview of the heavily funded or the poorly funded regulatory bodies.

Well that sucks. My wife is a chocolate fiend and she recently went all-in on Toney's due to their cruelty-free thing. It tastes better than most other stuff you can find at the grocery store, to boot.

The way the different chocolates are laid out, it does look like Tony's is the highest (it's ordered first), but it's actually the lowest of the "high in lead" category.

Still high, but not the highest, which goes to Hershey's Special Dark Mildly Sweet chocolate and has just under twice as much lead as Tony's, according to the report.

> Munira, 15, is one of those children. She has worked in the cocoa fields since she was 5 years old. Education is a luxury, with her school an hour-long walk away and transportation options expensive. Last year, her family harvested only one bag of decent-quality cocoa. A 140-pound bag of the product fetches only about $115.

I think child labor is actually a symptom of a deeper problem and cracking down on child labor without providing better financial support for the families will actually lead to worse problems.

Reading this, it doesn’t sound like if the child wasn’t working harvesting cocoa, she would be in school studying. Likely, either her family would starve or she would be be doing more dangerous work (perhaps even prostitution).

150 years ago child labour in the West was common. If you can barely afford food then everyone needs to work to earn money.

I'm kind of in two minds, from their point of view there's probably nothing wrong, but that's incompatible with our morals. But then we obviously aren't willing to pay for those morals.

Child labor is still not uncommon in agricultural communities in the USA. I believe the federal law is age 12 and up for farm work. And de facto if not de jure there is no age limit on children working their own family’s farm. Granted one might call that chores rather than labor.

And the minimum age to babysit is as low as 8 based on a quick search.

Yes. I was thinking more, chimney sweeping and factory work.

My point was we were poor then and had different standards. They probably have those same standards as we had for the same reasons. We have different standards now, so it's on us to do something if we want to.

It depends what you mean by child labor. My experience is that the children help on the farm but for the most part do school full time until at least their latter teenage years. It's pretty different than the child labor in the article.

I recommend you watch John Oliver’s episode linked above. It is just as bad.

lets not weaken the term 'child labor' in that manner.

There's a world of difference between growing up on a farm and 'child labor'. What you're doing is the equivalent of calling someone a pedophile for sleeping with a 17 y/o. It may or may not be appropriate but it sure as shit isn't the same as sleeping with a 10 y/o so lets use different words for them.

Child labor was only outlawed in the 1930s. The exception that still stands today is farm labor. Many states will even let you get a restricted drivers license as early as 15 if you work on a farm.

Also, ` They gave her a backpack and schoolbooks with the slogan "I am a child, I play, I go to school."' is one of the most neo-colonial statements I've read in a long time.

This.

We would all benefit from more cause and effect analysis in our media.

- Let's say we increase prices that we pay cocoa farmers, even double the price

- Is this extra enough to send the girl to school an hour away, pay for her books, etc.? If you pay the family more, how do you know they would spend it on the girl's education? Maybe fixing the water well or building a sturdier house is more important. Or paying off debt.

- The school is an hour away, the girl might not feel safe being away from home for so long without any adults. She might prefer being with her family. So... boarding school? Are the teachers qualified? (Go read about absentee teachers in Indian schools.)

- Also, if cocoa farming becomes more profitable, it might encourage _more_ child labor as parents pull their kids from school to work "on the family farm".

- If cocoa farming is profitable enough, it might invite a protection racket. Go Google for Mexican cartels and avocados.

Ironically, here in the U.S., we kinda glorify "working on the family farm", expecting kids to help on their parents' farms. Isn't that family doing something similar?

I am in no way glorifying child labor. I think it's sad and I wish I could adopt all these children and give them the quality of life I enjoy.

But complex problems require complex solutions. Unfortunately, we--humanity as a whole--have not found a universal solution to end human suffering as a whole, even the small subset of misery like child labor.

Historically, almost every country that has "developed" into an "industrialized" nation has had a very difficult, dangerous, violent learning curve. Kids in coal mines in the U.S., 18th century Dickensian English was a hellhole...

This not.

> - Also, if cocoa farming becomes more profitable, it might encourage _more_ child labor as parents pull their kids from school to work "on the family farm".

Wtf. No? Do you pull your kids from school so they can help you at work?

> Wtf. No? Do you pull your kids from school so they can help you at work?

If I were in a position of "family eats or family doesn't eat" I would be sorely tempted to tap my kids as extra income earners. This isn't a particularly new problem in the world. The West has only gotten stringent on child labor in the last century, and you're seeing other countries coming up that are also struggling with the issue at hand: enough money to feed the family.

We're rather privileged in the West in that we don't really struggle for necessities. Even our impoverished have clothing, shelter, and food. We don't really understand what it means to be truly impoverished. Nor do we understand the kinds of decisions a father or mother must make in order to ensure their survival and the survival of their children.

Many of the child slaves in Ghana are trafficked. They're not working on the family farm to help grow food for their next family dinner, they're being forced into slavery and made to work for farms that sell their product to billion dollar multinational corporations.

The solution to ending slavery is to make laws which ban the practice and then strictly enforcing those laws. Once that's done it won't matter how profitable farming is because anyone who uses child slaves will suffer instead of profiting. Exceptions can be made for people farming their own food for their own tables which would still prevent the trafficking of children just so that Mars Incorporated and The Hershey Company can stuff their pockets with more money.

The countries that have "developed" have increased pressures on less developed nations, and caused or exacerbated problemsin the areas they have exploited in order to develop.

> - If cocoa farming is profitable enough, it might invite a protection racket. Go Google for Mexican cartels and avocados.

Ah yes, then also:

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/19/936567302/planet-money-the-le...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36900201

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16148110

> Historically, almost every country that has "developed" into an "industrialized" nation has had a very difficult, dangerous, violent learning curve.

Historically, countries that industrialized didn't have an extensive history of examples to learn from and they had to figure it out for themselves. Every currently developing country doesn't get their own turn at being horrible to people or the environment.

The developed world should expect developing nations to learn from history and avoid the errors made in the past just as we'd expect them to take advantage of the advances in science and technology that have been reached.

Are you saying rich countries should force poor countries to adopt to their ethical and moral codes? Should they adopt all of them, like our stringent building codes? What about minimum wages? Vehicle safety standards?

I'm being supercilious, but hopefully you can see the problem.

I'm saying that rich countries shouldn't enable or accept poor countries exploiting child slaves and polluting the planet we all share because "it's their turn now". That's flawed logic.

We certainly shouldn't force other countries to follow our morals, but we shouldn't give them our money and support or make excuses for them while they act like monsters either. We should encourage them to do better, help them when we can, and lead by example. At a minimum we should be holding our own nation's corporations accountable when they're knowingly profiting from children being trafficked and enslaved.

Ok, but the article this discussion is about didn't show examples of child slavery, but of child labour, with a coverup being performed by locals, and suggestions of a large corp not doing enough to verify things independently.

Rich countries should help poorer countries lift themselves out of poverty, but let's not pretend everything is clear cut and simple. How do you deal with corruption? What is an acceptable level of violations is acceptable? How do you measure the good you do vs the harm you're causing?

I feel for the kid, but to be realistic it doesn't take several people all year to grow 140 lbs of something.

This is just a small portion of all the farming they do, including for themselves to eat.

This is exactly the same argument that was often used to justify slavery in the US and after all these years it's still not compelling. Ending slavery in the US didn't "lead to worse problems", it was a massive improvement.

People who are free may thrive or struggle, but they'll do it without a master which is always an improvement. There are no solutions to those deeper problems that impact people in poverty which would be prevented by freeing them from exploitation. If you want people's situation to improve, why not do both?

This really is the most salient point in this entire thread, there are piles of people commenting about this article with literally the same argument that was used to try to kick the can about ending slavery down the road.

> child labor is actually a symptom of a deeper problem

It is. But we should see it as a symptom of a problem to be cured.

Simply banning procurement would be a mistake, as you observe. But an NGO could be put in place that e.g. pays parents picking cocoa a stipend if they can verify their kids went to school.

Put another way, we can use the global consensus that child labour is bad as activation energy to spur and focus the wider reforms that are needed.

Also, to be clear, do we know if it is acceptable for the mother or father bringing the child to work? Was the child helping or actually working (being on a list tells me they were probably employed)? And at what age in a country is it acceptable to begin work?

We should not treat all countries and cultures the same through our western perspective.

This article is about Mars. But in 2021, Nestle and Cargill were involved in a Supreme Court case, where it was decided that the Alien Torts act could not used to bring suit by plaintiff who allege they were child slaves, trafficked from Mali to the Ivory Coast, forced to work, beaten, threatened, and not paid. The legal argument was not "we don't have child slave labor in our supply chain, even in areas where we are the only buyers" but just "irrespective of whether we're buying the products of child slave labor, we cannot be sued for it." My belief now is that most cocoa from the large, cheap sources is not produced with ethical labor.

>My belief now is that most cocoa from the large, cheap sources is not produced with ethical labor.

Your comment unhelpfully frames the issue as a dichotomy between "100% ethical labor" and "everything else", where "everything else" could mean anywhere between 0.01% unethical labor to 100% unethical labor. As a chocolate maker that's inevitably going to have unethical labor in the supply chain, the best legal strategy is to head off all claims by establishing a precedent that you're not responsible, rather than trying to quash each individual accusation of unethical labor.

Sure, there's a spectrum. Maybe you think union busting or the tipped minimum wage are also ethical concerns. But forced labor with trafficked children has to be at one end of the spectrum that has to fall into any definition of unethical labor. And yeah I think even a little child slavery is a problem.

Wait, you mean kids in developing countries work in order to help their families survive poverty. Oh my word, we should stop buying chocolate. Or wait, then nobody is making any money. Seriously, haven't we learned from the "Chinese sweatshop" hysteria throughout the 2000s that if people want to work they are often digging themselves out of a whole rather than being forced into one?

What if we, I don't know, did something to fix the poverty?

Easier said than done.

Antiunion aggression must be ruthless in these places. You can only grow some of these crops in certain regions of the world, yet despite this rare geographically granted monopoly, labor is paid perhaps the worst in these places, certainly much worse than in the western world that does nothing particularly unique in any one place. Nothing quite like coffee or chocolate or even the opium poppy. Unfortunately often when labor organizes, these movements are liable to be taken over by authoritarians who have no one’s collective interest in mind, because the power of being able to command a centrally planned economic force is just too great to not make such an attempt for the morally bankrupt charlatans among us.

Somehow, you think that a child is digging themselves out of a hole and that working instead of schooling is not them being forced into one?

Is there even schooling available in those areas? People in rich countries fail to appreciate how bad the situation is in truly poor countries.

the story literally spoke of children that longed for school, but poverty keeps them from it.

So yes, there is schooling.

The response here isn't to give money to child enslavers because the alternative is more poverty.

The response here is to demand legislation from your own country that makes it unprofitable to companies that employ child labor to continue to do so. Then they will fold up shop or (way more likely) pay adults more. It's not like Nestle barely makes a profit.

It's funny you cite China as evidence supporting your position, when in fact there /was/ a problem with child labor, American companies stopped doing business with those subs, and now wages are higher, the Chinese economy is stronger, and there's a lot less child labor.

Your argument also implies open borders so factory owners can hire low-wage undocumented immigrants under the table is a good thing.

For every child who earns a low wage, that's an adult not earning a wage at all.

And, to be quite honest, it's not great for your reputation to enshrine in writing your opinion that concern over children getting fingers chopped off in factories is "hysteria."

> The response here is to demand legislation from your own country that makes it unprofitable to companies that employ child labor to continue to do so.

You can start with a democracy: US. Just a couple of days ago, child labor in US made headlines.

John Oliver did a segment on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwHMDjc7qJ8

He went into the whole child labor thing.

It's a phase that countries go through eg Britain's chimney sweeps.

Britain left the "chimney sweep" phase, in part, by extracting extraordinary amounts of value from its colonial holdings.

Ghana was formed out of the remnants of four separate British colonies.

"in part".

How much would Britain need to pay Ghana to get them over the child labor hump?

At this point the only things I can eat ethically are sawdust and cockroaches

Is that FSC certified sawdust, or are you destroying an old-growth rainforest?

Free-range, grassfed roaches?

Grass requires too much water sorry

Ok now just sawdust

>cockroaches

They're just one enterprising rebrand away from being Urban Wall Shrimp.

ghanaian here:

it’s not the business of mars (m&m makers) to ensure that no children are exploited during the production of the cocoa beans. and americans shouldn’t eat their chocolate with some trepidation that they might be eating the body and blood of a 5-yo.

we, not they, commit these boys and girls to these activities, of our own volition. it’s a fucked up society that looks to hold an external party responsible for ills within itself. if child labor is bad, we don’t need mars and the rest of the world to tell us so. we should be civilized enough to get ourselves out of the ongoing era of barbarism and brutishness that has plagued the continent. fuck!

> it’s a fucked up society that looks to hold an external party responsible for ills within itself.

I agree with you there, however Mars knowingly exploits children so that they can stuff their own pockets with cash. That too is sick and the US should hold them accountable for that for our own sake.

We've spent a long time profiting from slavery in this country and more recently we've patted ourselves on the back for ending slavery while in reality we simply outsourced it and moved the slave plantations out of sight. We should absolutely think about what it is we're supporting while we buy or eat chocolate.

West African here too. This is too simplistic, and a problem can have multiple guilty parties. There is enough blame to go around.

> we, not they, commit these boys and girls to these activities, of our own volition.

We can judge people's choices without taking in consideration the context and the options that they have. The alternative to not sending those young people to work is them starving, or not going to school.

> if child labor is bad, we don’t need mars and the rest of the world to tell us so. we should be civilized enough to get ourselves out of the ongoing era of barbarism and brutishness that has plagued the continent. fuck!

Child labor is the best solution within a see of worst solutions to a complex problem. Having talked and knowing people in similar conditions, every parent naturally wants they kids to have an easy and better life. That's not being civilized it's just being human. Saddly those parent can not afford the luxury of giving that to their parent.

> it’s a fucked up society that looks to hold an external party responsible for ills within itself.

The economical situation in African countries is complex and multivariate. And yes the governments are usually corrupt and ineffective. But the failed policies of international bodies such as the IMF or world banks, the complicity of european banks in money laundering. The meddling of international companies that are happy to support which ever dictatorship du-jour suit their needs best are definitely not helping.

> it’s not the business of mars (m&m makers) to ensure that no children are exploited during the production of the cocoa beans

They made it their business by participating in it.

> americans shouldn’t eat their chocolate with some trepidation that they might be eating the body and blood of a 5-yo.

No... It's a personal choice. If some people can become vegan out of compassion of animals, we should be able to avoid chocolate out of compassion our fellow human beings even if they happen to not be from the same country.

so maybe a little more context will help here. i've been in the situation described as child labor here—been involved in hard labor since i was about 6-yo, mainly working on the farm, carrying heavy load of produce and firewood on my head for long walk home. all these along with other kids—so i'm mainly speaking from experience.

it's a complex problem, of course, but nothing to do with all the entities you have invoked. bear in mind that these abused kids don't live in cities, nor do they belong to middle class families: they're village dwellers, not poor by the standards of the village but by the standards of world bank. their families and communities need their labor because that's all they have known. people in these communities barely speak english. their whole lives all they've known is tilling the land and dutifully committing the next generations to the same task. if you don't want munira working the farm, you don't accost mars. rather you systematically educate and civilize her community so that they become self-aware of the benefits of education and the perils of denying their children this opportunity.

without any systematic effort to transform the elders of the community, you can't stop child labor. mars may decide to stop buying from munira's community. but that will never take munira and other kids her age away from the farm: it's their fate, according to the beliefs of their elders.

They've been aware for a long time now and are content to exploit the situation and now definitely share culpability. There's more than enough blame to pass some of it around.

The fact that they pay people wages where they work and still live in abject poverty while raking in a literally obscene amount of wealth is not right.

Charge the CEOs of companies that buy cocoa with child abuse.

They were charged, but the Supreme Court ruled in their favor.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/supreme-court-rules-in-favor...

> were charged

They were sued. That's reasonable. (SCOTUS overturned it. I don't know the relevant law well enough to comment on it.)

Criminally charging executives would be tantamount to putting Ghana's cocoa sector under U.S. sanctions.

Yep thanks for clarifying/correcting.

It'll be a cold day in hell before a CEO gets charged for any crimes that they oversee (at least without seriously defrauding another corporation or rich person). Not a single Sackler is in jail for causing the opioid crisis.

> Munira, 15, is one of those children. [...] Last year, her family harvested only one bag of decent-quality cocoa. A 140-pound bag of the product fetches only about $115.

Sounds like "child labor" is downstream of the actual problem.

Call me a bleeding heart but child labor is an 'actual' problem. You can keep destructing societal issues until you reinvent the universe from scratch. It may be difficult to solve global poverty but it's not a lot to ask extremely profitable companies to enforce the supply chain checks they've committed to.

Child labor tends to go away with the increase in GDP.

Children go away when women are empowered. To starve the world of child labor, empower women.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#empowerment-of-wom...

So your solution to not treating children baddly is to not have children? Seems a bit strange instead of just ... you know pay people a descent wage so they don't have to put they children in arms way

As my uncouth grandfather used to say: “Wishes in one hand, shit in the other, which will fill first?” These children work because they have no choice. They are paid these wages because they can’t make more.

I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them. If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.

Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.

By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage. I’ll even help you bootstrap the direct cash transfer mechanisms via mobile payments if you have deep pockets. But that is unlikely to happen. Hope is not a strategy.

https://www.unicef.org/protection/child-labour ("Nearly 1 in 10 children are subjected to child labour worldwide, with some forced into hazardous work through trafficking.")

https://ourworldindata.org/child-labor ("The International Labour Organisation states in its latest World Report on Child Labour (2013) that there are around 265 million working children in the world—almost 17 per cent of the worldwide child population. According to the publicly available data discussed in more detail below, Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where child labour is most prevalent.")

https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-... ("You can’t even pay people to have more kids")

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6198592/ ("Challenges and perspectives of child labor")

I am gonna venture to guess that you never really either interacted with people from those populations.

> I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them.

Let's first get this out of the way. The men don't want children at equal rate. No need for grand plan about empowering women (what ever that means beside just increasing everyone, both men and women economical outlooks) : just make contraceptive and sexual education available.

> If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.

Correlation and causation etc...etc... I might introduce you to orthodox jews, some Mormons and Muslim communities which don't really follow those models.

> By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage.

ahah yes, personal solution to systemic problems... Following this logic, we should all be silent about everything.

> Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.

I don't buy the premise and this sounds like a false dichotomy to me. Just treat people decently and don't participate in system which involve children doing back breaking jobs.

> Hope is not a strategy.

And whatever you are proposing is ? The idea that it's easier to somehow curb the population growth a whole group of nations instead of just having proper international laws to regulate child labour seems both crazy and reversed.

Polution control won't solve child labor, instead child labour, women right and polution growth will be solve by better economical outlooks. And that start by having people actually make living wages...

In the final anlysis the problem is not that deep. To paraphrase Gates, those conditions continue because the market wants it, and the public opinions doesnt particularly care. You are wellcome not to care, but to invent poorly constructed argument to make you sleep better at night.

The US still has laws protecting child labor in agriculture.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181472559/child-labor-farms-...

(And slavery in prison. But one problem at a time)

> child labor is an 'actual' problem

I think they meant root, not actual. Fixing the child labor problem on its own is unlikely to improve these kids' lives.

If (as the article states) the total value of the cocoa that Murina's entire family managed to harvest, in an entire year, was $115 - that sounds like destitute, desperate poverty to me. If actually living in such circumstances, ~all humans put their kids to work, and lie as needed to survive.

And if the "child labor certification" inspectors you send are anything resembling decent human beings, then they will send back endless lies in their reports, saying "no child labor here" - because they prefer lying to seeing yet more farm family members die of starvation, because the families could not afford luxuries like food.

Yeah, exactly. Under these types of conditions most kids will be starving and living in dangerous conditions. Not working doesn't mean they get to go to school or to a playground, it means their family is even more starving.

I would agree with this sentiment if they this was voluntary labor. Others have pointed out that trafficking, beatings, and forced labor are also components.

Reaction: If I read that $Company's supply chain features trafficked / beaten / forced labor, then I'll be reaching for the big red "REJECT" stamp before I even get to the part about the ages of the victims.

So if child labor was banned, it is your contention that chocolatiers would just shutter their doors because they can't find labor anymore?

You can't conceive of the possibility that they'd hire adults at a higher wage? Or raise prices for consumers in the developed world?

You're basically saying it's OK for American companies to hire undocumented workers because the alternative is everyone starves.

> ...they'd hire adults at a higher wage..."

> "...American companies to hire undocumented..."

Please re-read at least the first paragraph of the article. There is no "hire". There is no "wage". The child labor is on subsistence farms. In Ghana.

In Europe and the US, it wasn't too long ago either when families could only afford to send some of their children to school. Others had to work from a very early age to support the family. If you ban child labor without offering anything to supplement the lost income, then you're just harming them more.

I think it would be better to frame the issue as why so little of the profit made from their work reaches them. It's insane to see cocoa farmers so poor that they've never tasted chocolate, as can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEN4hcZutO0

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sacrificing their children to increase labor availability.

Everyone is better off if children don’t work, but if everyone else has their children work and you don’t, you lose. Sounds like moloch!

(I’m ignoring corporate profits and consumer prices for simplicity-but I think most of us would be happy if child labor was banned even if it meant higher prices)

They're only "better off" if there's better things for those children to be doing. If schools are not available, then what? If there's no adults available to supervise the children (because they're doing labor themselves), then what?

For most of human history, child labor was common practice. It's purely a first world, modern thing that you can truly dial back child labor.

Yes thank you good lord. IDK if it's the ritual contrarianism or what but HN consensus is extremely tolerant of or even flat out pro- child labor. Unreal.

Small-l "libertarianism" has convinced many otherwise reasonable people that if you raise wages, giant corporations with huge profit margins will elect to shut down.

Another point of view - road to hell is paved with good intentions. Policies pushed by idealists often hurt the people they are supposed to help. Even policies pushed by cynics often have unforeseen second order effects that bite the people in the ass. People writing here don't share the risk of any solution going downhill with the people actually in Ghana.

A pressure on the big companies to clean up their supply chain of child labor (noble effort) - do you know which segments of Ghana laborer will be hurt and how. If you don't know (or at least have very good guesstimate) - then be prepared to be surprised unpleasantly from some of the results.

This isn't a novel point of view this is the point of view repeated over and over on HN every time this comes up, including today. I have considered it and I still think we should not have child labor!

>If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages.

Sounds good, until you realize that doesn't do much for the starving family with kids to feed. Even though there might be some knock on effect to increase the adults' earnings, there's no way that it'll match the lost income from the kids not working.

Why are the families starving? Is the only option in that area growing cocoa for export to the West? Why can't those people work for themselves, to grow their own food, to feed themselves?

Is it because some wealthy landlord owns all the land? Is it because we dump subsidized food on the global markets, making local agriculture non-competitive? Could either of those have anything to do with it?

There seems to be a very obvious economic solution somewhere between 'grow cocoa for other people for a pittance' and 'starve'. These people are poor, not helpless.

Without knowing too much about Ghana specifically, I have been to third world countries and seen some of the conditions that prevent an economy from flourishing. It is usually a lack of property rights altogether (autocratic governments that take from individuals at will, which you can only avoid by being too small to cut down), deep corruption in the government that basically runs on bribes (whereby the highest bidders thrive), endless violence or war preventing an area from being able to benefit from long-term investment (either public or private), a broken currency system, a broken or nonexistent legal system to settle property disputes. A lack of skilled labor in the country itself, due to brain drain, war, and nonexistent infrastructure.

There clearly are property rights, since the landowners seem to be reaping the lion's share of the bounty, year after year.

Perhaps they are not property rights that serve the people doing the work, but that's a separate problem.

>since the landowners seem to be reaping the lion's share of the bounty, year after year.

Where does it say that? It's not mentioned in the CBS article nor the youtube video.

This. You can literally read the history of China since the 1990s and witness this exact phenomenon! Child labor goes down, wages go up, adult employment goes up, poverty goes down...

No, it's the other way around: wages go up, then child labor goes down. Also, China is not a great example as it had a One Child policy for most of the last 50 years. In Ghana, for example, there is an average of 4 children per woman.

That's a good point about the OCP. I hadn't considered that.

Is this an issue with the price of sugar? From the video, it seems like they have already fermented the beans, turning it into some basic dark chocolate after that shouldn't be too hard especially if you're not after a smooth texture.

From the ages from about 5 to 18 American children are forced to do office work for 7 hours a day five days a week in conditions that approximate a minimum security prison followed by often several hours of more work to do at home.

Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Plenty of kids would argue picking fruit was more valuable than algebra homework.

Having kids working a little isn't necessarily bad, it is the conditions under which they work which is important but more subtle issue. In regions of extreme poverty it isn't even the conditions that are often the root problem but the foreign exploiters of the extreme poverty failing to pay a fair wage for human work.

>"I feel sad. I want to be, like, a medical doctor," Munira said. "But my family doesn't have money for school."

It's much easier for corporate overlords to focus on cheap issues like child labor and then make the appearances of trying to do something about it... when the causes of child labor are more like "you pay my family so little I can't afford to go to school and nobody else either so the nearest school is an hour away". If you give people the opportunity to barely stay alive they'll fix these things themselves.

I am sorry you had such a horrible experience at school. I’m not denying that what you say can happen, but for contrast, my 7yo son enjoys his school greatly and even misses it during holidays.

Is there something to suggest that school was a horrible experience for him? My only takeaway is that it is work that is pushed upon children, which is undeniably true.

In a similar vein to your anecdote, and pertinent the larger topic, I greatly enjoyed harvest when I was 7 and always missed it when it was over. That's why I became a farmer in adulthood – and I still feel the same way about it. Work (even paid work) doesn't mean unenjoyable.

> Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"?

Yes, these are very significant differences. Children are also given time off with holidays, time to play, etc.

School disgusts me, personally, but it's not even close to child labor.

> Children are also given time off with holidays, time to play, etc.

Is that not also the case for the kids in the article harvesting cocoa? According to the article, they harvested a total of 140 pounds of cocoa for the year. According to Wikipedia, a typical worker can harvest around 150-175 pounds of cocoa in one day.

Even if they are horribly inefficient compared to a typical worker, perhaps in large part because they are having fun and playing at the same time, we're still only talking a handful of days of work each year. You can only drag out the harvest for so long. What do they do the rest of the time?

Are you likening child labor to the public education system? That is absolutely preposterous and I’m not sorry if you’re offended.

Not OP but I'd rather work than attend school.

It's utterly wild that you would equate back-breaking manual labor with doing multiplication tables. It speaks to how very little back-breaking manual labor you've done in your life.

Are you suggesting the workers unite and take over the means of production, comrade bell-cot?

Worth a try.

I believe it has, indeed, been tried

Where? In former communist countries the workers didn't have any power after the seizing of the means of production, as now they were ruled by brutal dictatorships with powerful militaries who'd send you to the gulag for $REASON.

Hardly the envisioned "seizing the means of production" and more like "being seized for production".

Well said! Rarely do you see the description of Soviet state demand production vs anarchist syndicalism as concise and precise as this.

The idea of self governance in semi autonomous groups has been derided as primitive so thoroughly that the mere concept evokes fear and disgust

Truly we have centuries to undo these tropes of domination and competition as the only way to organize society

I've yet to see evidence that outcomes would ever be different

Where would you see that evidence if it was nevere done? Because it can't really be done.

Because the workers themselves don't have power to seize anything. The military is the one with the power to seize stuff come a revolution because they're the ones with a lot of big guns, not the workers. But now the workers themselves become part of the things being seized, to serve the military leadership, not the workers.

Workers get screwed either way.

With a couple of notable exceptions (Cambodia, and mid-90s North Korea) that still sounds like an improvement in their material conditions.

Seems like a good idea

I don't understand what the child was doing if the entire family only harvested one bag of cocoa? Was the child working trying to find cocoa?

Wikipedia suggests that a typical person can harvest 175 pounds of cocoa in one day. Costs are an unknown here, but grossing $115 for less than a day of work is more than many in the USA can achieve.

It's not clear that there is a problem. It seems the family just has a once-a-year afternoon hobby and a privileged busybody with no sense of reality got arbitrarily upset that harvest took place on a school day.

There may be some kind of problem, but the article is missing all of the details we would need to determine that. All we get is: "There is a problem! But I'm not really going to tell you what it is beyond some meaningless fluff. Instead, here is a story about a family who likes to spend time together. But know that they spent that time during school hours, so you should be outraged!"

If you think that's bad, wait until you find out who's mining the metals for the solar panels. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/03/child-la...

They are talking about cobalt from coltan - cobalt-tanatalum - ore, 70% of which is used in vehicle and device batteries. Not solar panels. Your article you linked contained the word "solar" and none of them were related to child mining of coltan for solar panels.

They did allude to energy storage in batteries for wind and solar sources, and if you look there are a number of research projects to reduce cobalt consumption in grid scale storage and other battery cathode applications.

Your summary of the article is misleading and incorrect.

So it turns out that the enslaved Oompa-Loompas in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory were just truth in advertising. There's quite a bit of irony to that particular controversy.

For those who don't get OP's reference, in the original version of the book, Oompa-Loompas were literal slaves form Africa. The publisher made Roald Dahl change them to mythical creatures.

> Oompa-Loompas were literal slaves form Africa

I can find a lot of stuff written online about this, but none of it quotes the original text.

The original oompa-loompas were pygmies from Africa, written in a pretty racist way, and with wonka being a type of white-messiah-savior for them. I can definitely see an argument that wonka was a shitty employer, violating all sorts of legal and moral rules. But we're they actual slaves? From what I have been able to find they were paid, but chose to take payments in cocoa. Were they forced to work and imprisoned?

I guess I would like to see the original text, as all the articles written on the subject make proclamations of them being actual slaves, but don't show anything from the original text (or make the argument) to demonstrate they were actually slaves.

One such article: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170755

We might both be right. It appears the original version was a fantasy where the Oompa-Loompa's were happy to be taken from their homeland to an underground factory to work for free. This is from "Jeremy Treglown’s Roald Dahl: A Biography"

"In the version first published, [the Oompa-Loompas were] a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’ Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, ‘and the bark of the bong-bong tree.'"

Is this technically slavery? Maybe not, by the fairy tale logic of the book. But this is a troublesome, to say the least, trope of oppressed people who are perversely grateful to be exploited by (invariably) white men. To each their own bong-bong tree.

https://groovyhistory.com/oompa-loompas-the-original-ones/4

It's all good. I'm a bit of a pendant for word definitions people are using. I think loose definitions lead to all sorts of subtle miscommunications. Most of the time it's not a big deal, but I do have a soft spot for Ronald Dahl, so would like to verify when claims.

For all of the articles I can find written about Dahl's oompa-loompa slaves, not one of them puts together an argument as to why they are slaves. They just make the claim, and surround it with statements of the opmpa-loompas being originally black native inhabitants of Africa, and they worked for a white-man Wonka. I can see how people's minds go to slavery when describing a unbalanced power dynamic between an exclusively black workforce and a white boss man, but innuendo does not make for a compelling argument IMHO.

If the book doesn't mention them being imprisoned, doesn't mention being forced to work, talks about them being paid a wage, and given the choice on how to be paid, then they are not slaves. We can make lots of assumptions about what is happening behind the scenes of the factory, but we could do that just as easily to suggest the Oompa-loompas are actually the masterminds behind everything, and secretly control the governments of the world.

Personally, I think Dahl's original depiction was racist, but not describing slavery. The fact all these articles don't provide anything from the original text* showing that they are slaves makes me think this is a case of people wanting to inflate someones misdeads in order to generate clicks. It's easy enough to find real things to criticize the man for, but they should stick to the facts, or make an actual argument.

*The biographer was doing the same thing as the articles.

I mean this is nothing new? If you bought an iPhone you were part of exploiting child labor. Will you stop buying an iPhone? Of course not. We should ideally stop showing such fake interest in these things and focus on other things.

https://www.thefp.com/p/your-iphone-was-built-with-child

> should ideally stop showing such fake interest in these things

Perfect is the enemy of good [1]. We don't have to completely solve a problem to make discussing it worthwhile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

Sure we can keep discussing it and feeling good about ourselves.

> we can keep discussing it and feeling good about ourselves

Contemplating the exploitation of children makes you feel good about yourself? To the extent anyone is virtue signalling, it's the comment arguing we should throw this under the rug because everyone isn't sufficiently morally invested.

There isn't nearly enough information in the article to know if there is exploitation taking place or not. A child doing some chores is not considered exploitation by any reasonable measure.

According to the internet, a typical person can harvest 150-175 pounds of cocoa per day[1]. The family in question harvested 140 pounds that year. It is not like this is some kind of full time job. It is barely a hobby. With the whole family pitching in, it struggles to even make for an afternoon outing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_bean

All I see these days is kids watching mindless youtube/tik-tok videos all day. Perhaps sending them to a farm for some movement might actually be good for them & give them a sense of accomplishment. Seize their phones before they go.

Younger me would have laughed (or even wanted to insult you) over this comment. Older me just gave you an upvote for it. I think you're on to something.

Thanks! Looks like I got downvoted to hell anyways, now at -2. But that's OK, I've got points to burn on challenging views ;-)

Gotta spend fake internet points to make fake internet points.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com