Africa’s Youth Harvest Misery

Far from home, sweat streaming down his face, a 14-year-old hacks with a machete at the tangled weeds and bushes in a cocoa plantation. His young hands are blistered and his skinny legs crisscrossed with scars.

The surrounding fields in the tropical countryside on Ivory Coast’s southeastern border are full of boys like Amadou Kourago.

Up to 15,000 children from some of the world’s poorest countries are thought to be laboring on plantations across Ivory Coast, producer of 40% of the world’s cocoa and Africa’s largest coffee exporter.

It is a generations-old practice in West and Central Africa, where desperately poor families entrust their children to wealthier relatives or acquaintances to be educated or taught a trade.

Some would see it as simply a matter of survival. Others maintain that for at least some children, it has become a modern version of the slave trade.

“The blood of African children is in our bars of chocolate and cups of coffee,” said Mohammed Maiga, a government official in neighboring Mali, a leading supplier of child plantation labor.

Chocolate and coffee makers insist they cannot always tell where their cocoa and coffee beans come from.

“We buy from traders and processors, not from farmers,” said Francois Perroud, spokesman for Swiss food giant Nestle SA. The company has no knowledge of farming practices used in its cocoa, Perroud said.

UNICEF believes 200,000 children are trafficked across West and Central African borders every year by smuggling rings preying on poor rural families’ hopes of a better life for their kids.

Traffickers promise parents in countries like Mali, Benin and Burkina Faso that their children will get jobs and an education in richer nations like Ivory Coast and Gabon.

Many families are given a tiny “advance.” But that is usually the last money they receive, and many never see their children again.

Passed along through middlemen, the children eventually are sold to coffee, cocoa or cotton plantations for up to $340 a head. Others end up as domestic servants or market vendors. A few become prostitutes.

Children who have escaped from Ivory Coast plantations have described ferocious beatings, insufficient food and long hours in the fields for little or no money, UNICEF says.

Attention was drawn to the illicit trade in April by a frantic search for a ship in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea thought to be transporting child slaves. The ship docked in Benin with more than 30 unaccompanied children, most of whom investigators thought were victims of traffickers, though they stopped short of calling them slaves.

Fearing public uproar, Europe’s chocolate industry group, Caobisco, said it has asked international humanitarian groups to help investigate child exploitation on cocoa plantations.

A Trade That Has Endured for Years

The people of the tiny Ivory Coast border village of Saykro are all too familiar with the trade.

For years they have watched smugglers emerge from the bush with their human cargo and quietly canoe the children across the narrow river that separates Ghana from Ivory Coast.

Villagers say the traffickers come from Burkina Faso and Mali to the north, and pass through Ghana with up to 15 children at a time, bound for Ivory Coast plantations.

“We are God-fearing people, so no one has ever come here to offer us children,” said village chief Nogby Sai. “But we see people pass through with lots of children.”

Sai has two youths from Burkina Faso laboring in his coffee, cocoa and palm fields, but he says he found them the traditional way: by asking older workers to bring back extra help when they went home to visit.

He believes laborers ages 15 to 17 are the best.

“When you tell them something, they respect you,” he explained. “The older ones, they have lived their lives already, and they refuse.”

Abel Kora is 17 and earns about $100 a year working for Sai. Abrou Lanidjan is between 10 and 12--no one here speaks his language, so they aren’t sure--and earns $70.

“You can’t earn that kind of money” in Burkina Faso, Abel said, pausing to wipe the sweat from his face with a grimy T-shirt in the field he has been clearing.

But the boys don’t get the money. Sai pays it to the boys’ recruiter, who says he passes it on to their parents.

One of 29 children--his father has three wives--Abel was forced to leave school at 15 when his parents ran out of money. While pleased to be earning a wage, he misses his schooling.

“I like school,” he said. “If you have the means and you pass your exams, you can become a master.”

Sai, his employer, is a “master.” His 18 children are all in school, but he sees no reason to educate Abel and Abrou. “They’re not my children,” he said.

Roger Kabore, a Burkina Faso laborer who has been in Ivory Coast for almost 25 years, is regularly asked by local farmers to bring back workers for them.

He says there is no price--he asks only the cost of the child’s transportation, about $20. But if the farmer wishes, he can “express his appreciation with a gift” of, say, $30.

The children are not bought, Kabore says. But when approaching a family for their child, he generally gives them a “gift” of about $1.50 --a traditional gesture of respect.

He insists he would never bring a child to a farmer with a reputation for mistreating or not paying his laborers. “That would be like slavery,” he said.

The community’s unquestioning acceptance of underage child laborers--the minimum legal working age in Ivory Coast is 14--is common in a region where many subsist on less than $1 a day.

Western outrage over “chocolate slaves” is incomprehensible to many families who depend on their children’s labor to survive.

“It’s just something the whites made up to prevent children from working,” said Djeneba Diarra, a mother who lives in Sikasso, a Malian town near the Ivory Coast border. “If their children don’t work, it’s because their parents are rich.”

Chance of Better Life Is Hard to Resist

Ivory Coast and other governments say they recognize child trafficking is a problem. But many officials question the sincerity of Western countries, which protest child labor while paying some of the lowest prices in decades for coffee and cocoa.

“If the Ivorian planters’ coffee and cocoa was purchased at a better rate by the wealthy countries that fix the price of these products, maybe they would have the means to hire adults rather than buy Malian children,” Maiga said in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

For all the hardships, children continue to be lured by the possibility of a better life in Ivory Coast. Malian officials say even those who are sent back after suffering the worst abuse often return hoping to find a better employer.

Amadou, a shy boy in muddy trousers and plastic sandals, spent years working with his parents, subsistence farmers who barely eke out a living in his native Burkina Faso.

When Kabore, a family friend, came looking for people to work with him last year, Amadou told his parents he wanted to go.

“I came here to help my parents,” he said softly, twisting his hands. “I didn’t want my father to suffer.”

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UNICEF page on child trafficking: https://www.unicef.org/media/newsnotes/01nn01.htm