Child labour or Cocoa

Out1 Cocoa
Meyta Nasetyowati
Transcript

1. Child labour and cocoa 141 International Journal of Sociology and Social
Policy Vol. 29 Nos. 3/4, 2009 pp. 141-151 # Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0144-333X DOI 10.1108/01443330910947516 Child labour and cocoa: whose
voices prevail? Amanda Berlan Said Business School, Oxford, UK Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide ethnographic data on the
livesof childrenworkingin cocoa-producing communities in Ghana and to
illustrate the importance of contextualisation in understanding the phenomenon
of child labour. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on
anthropological fieldwork carried out in Ghana using participant observation and

child-focused participatory research methods. It also includes an analysis of

media sources and policy documents. Findings It shows that the children
involved in this study worked freely and willingly on family cocoa farms. It also
shows that research and interventions must be context-based and child-centred
as forms of child labour in cocoa are not uniform across West Africa. Research
limitations/implications Unfortunately, the scope of the paper does not allow
for a discussion of recent interventions and progress relating to child labour in
the West African cocoa industry. Originality/value This paper challenges many
of the assumptions made about child labour in cocoa and offers new insights into
the lives of children in these communities. Keywords Ghana, Children (age
groups), Labour force, Cocoa Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction This
paper will discuss child labour in the context of the production of cocoa in West
Africa. Based on long-term fieldwork in Ghana, it will examine the narratives of
children working in this context before discussing the way child labour in cocoa
production has been represented in the UK media, and in research and policy
documents. The analysis is based on 15 months of fieldwork in Ghana which
was carried out in two stages between December 2001 and November 2003. The
subjects of my ethnography were children in a cluster of villages in the Ashanti
region of Ghana where the local economy revolves around the production of
cocoa. In total, 84 children were involved in the research, although to varying
degrees. Determining the exact ages of my respondents was difficult as many of
my informants did not know their age or have any form of birth registration. For
example, in the first form of the Junior Secondary School only 31 per cent of
children knew their ages. In spite of the difficulty of knowing the ages of all my
informants, I was able to ascertain using the few records available that the broad
range of ages of my informants was between 10 and 16 years old. In addition to
using the standard anthropological method of participant observation, childfocused participatory research methods based on Boyden and Ennew (1997b)
were used. This involved studying children as individuals and not merely as
members of the procession through childhood (Reynolds, 1990, p. 330, cited in
Boyden and Ennew, 1997b, p. 2). The childrens views were elicited through
participant observation and through informal interviews, drawings, competitions
and simple surveys. Access was obtained by being involved in the local school,
visiting cocoa farms and simply being in the village. As most children and
farmers were illiterate and were not familiar with academic research, written
consent was not sought. Instead ethical clearance was The current issue and full
text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0144333X.htm

2. IJSSP 29,3/4 142 obtained by explaining research aims and individual

exercises on an ongoing basis to the relevant parties and the village authorities
and securing their verbal consent. A more comprehensive breakdown of
methods, ethics and findings can be found in Berlan (2005). 2. Research findings
My informants worked on small-scale and family-owned cocoa farms and most

of them also attended school, as is the common pattern in rural Ghana. Heady
(2000) states that of Ghanaian children who work on the household farm,
almost three in four boys and girls are at the same time in school. The children
in my study readily described themselves as poor and for some of them, just like
for many other children in the developing world, it was work which [made]
schooling possible ( James et al., 1998, p. 107). Woodhead (1999, p. 43) states
that in a study carried out with working children in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the
Philippines and Central America, 77 per cent of children even preferred going to
work and attending school, when asked if only going to work, only going to
school, or doing both, was the best for them in their present circumstances.
Paradoxically, the school environment was not free from child labour. The pupils
were frequently sent by their teachers to go and weed using machetes during
school hours and additionally they were required to do farm work for the school
at least once a week. The pupils had to clear the plot of land owned by the
school so that it could be used as farmland, where produce such as yams and
plantain could be grown and sold to generate revenue for the school. Clearing
the school plot was arduous manual work. The children had to cut down thick
vegetation using machetes and then gather the weeds that had been cut, and the
work was sometimes carried out on very hot days. While the pupils did not
complain about this work and were keen to show off their competence, farm
work for the school was arduous and potentially more dangerous that working
on the family cocoa farm. On the family farm, the children worked under the
supervision and guidance of their families and what was expected of them was
determined by their level of experience and ability. This mirrors Fortes
description of child socialization among the Tallensi of Ghana: A child is never
forced beyond its capacity. This is seen most clearly in relation to the pivotal
economic activity, agriculture. [. . .] That skill comes with practice is realized by
all (1970, p. 23). When working on the school plot, the pupils were less closely
supervised. They worked in closer proximity to each other than they did on
family farms, so the broad machete sweeps with which they cleared the land
could more easily have resulted in injury. Weeding the family farm involved
maintaining rather than clearing land as the family- owned cocoa farms that the
pupils were working on were well-established. Work on a cocoa farm also
offered shade and protection from the sun and this was absent when the children
were clearing the school plot. The childrens work on the school farm illustrates
that child labour and education are not always mutually exclusive, as is often
assumed (White, 1999, p. 134) and while there are some risks attached to cocoa
farming, the work carried out by my informants on family-owned cocoa farms
was both safer and less strenuous than clearing the school plot as they were more
likely to be working in shaded areas, less likely to be clearing thorns, and were
more closely supervised.

3. Child labour and cocoa 143 Schooling was also problematic for other reasons.
The school was under-resourced and overcrowded, and since it had no electricity

to provide ventilation and the teachers were frequently absent, it was not an
environment conducive to learning. Some children had only acquired basic
literacy skills despite having attended school for years. The children often
complained about hunger and the stomach cramps this gave them. As working
on the family farm meant they could pick fruit from trees and gave them the
opportunity to catch wild animals which would provide meat, many of my
informants said they preferred to work on the family farm than go to school,
even though they were keen to receive an education. More broadly, the children
frequently complained about malaria, bilharzias, exposure to snakes and
scorpions, teenage pregnancy, family breakdown and poverty-related problems
(such as inability to pay for basic goods). However, the children showed
enormous resilience and ingenuity in dealing with their situation (Berlan, 2005)
and did not see themselves as victims. They fitted Woodheads broader
description of child labourers as social actors, trying to make sense of their
physical and social world, [negotiating] with parents and peers [. . .] and making
the best of the oppressive and difficult circumstances in which they [found]
themselves (Woodhead, 1999, p. 29) and were not simply passive victims,
physically and psychologically damaged by their work (Woodhead, 1999, p.
29). The childrens acceptance of work also reflected a broader pattern of child
socialization. Laziness is widely abhorred in Ghanaian society (Berlan, 2004, p.
168) and parents told me that involving children in cocoa-farming was important
as it would help them to become productive and hard-working individuals. To a
large extent, the inculcation of these values had been successful. The children
admitted farm work could be hard but they saw this as a good thing. They often
asked me to follow them to the farm and were keen and proud to show off what
they could do, such as weeding, cutting down cocoa pods or bringing heavy
produce home. 2.1 Child labour and child work The cultural model of childhood
in which my informants grew up conflicted with the ILOs broader goal of
eliminating child labour. The ILO places considerable emphasis on excluding
children from the workplace, using age and the harm (physical and/or
psychological) that they may be exposed to as the criteria for exclusion (Myers,
1999, p. 22; White, 1999, p. 134), as reflected in ILO Convention 138 Minimum
Age for Admission to Employment and ILO Convention 182 on the Worst
Forms of Child Labour. By these standards, the involvement of children on
cocoa farms in Ghana could be categorised as hazardous based on a number of
criteria. My informants used machetes while working on the cocoa farm, carried
heavy loads and wore no protective clothing thereby meeting the criteria of
carrying out work which by its nature could harm the safety of a child and result
in injury (ILO Convention 182 and 138). Although in the absence of birth
records the ages of my informants were difficult to ascertain, many of them were
under the minimum age for admission of a child to light work (defined under the
Ghanaian legal system as 13 years of age) and under the minimum age for
engagement of a person in hazardous work (defined by the Ghana Childrens Act
of 1998 as 18 years). However, as argued by Woodhead (1999): Whether young

people are affected positively or negatively by their work experiences depends

on their personal vulnerability, which is in turn mediated by the economic, social
and cultural context of their work, especially the value placed on their economic
activity and the expectations for their development and social adjustment
(Woodhead, 1999, p. 29).

4. IJSSP 29,3/4 144 Indeed, children all over Ghana are socialized from a young
age into using machetes daily to accomplish a variety of tasks such as preparing
food (Berlan, 2004, p. 170) and as a result, they are very skilled in using them.
Irrespective of skill, the widespread use of machetes means that focusing
interventions solely on the cocoa industry is misplaced and it is ironic that the
use of machetes has been condemned on cocoa farms[1] but not in schools.
More broadly, the ILO campaign to end child labour in part bears the marks of a
Western conceptualisation of childhood which assumes labour to be detrimental
and is at odds with the views the children in Ghana expressed. The 2002 edition
of the ILO Bitter Harvest: Child Labour in Agriculture report states: Rural
children [. . .] tend to become economically active at an early age. These
children are not only exposed to health risks associated with rural poverty but
also those associated with agricultural work. Overall, the effects for children are:
denial of their human rights and well- being; deprivation of their right to health,
safety, education and overall childhood; and denial of a decent future (ILO,
2002, p. 39). The 2006 report from the International Labour Conference The
end of child labour: within reach explicitly links family labour and
exploitation: . . . the family farm element in agriculture, which is universal
and bound up with culture and tradition, often makes it difficult to acknowledge
that children can be systematically exploited in such a setting. The fact that
children work on family farms can be perceived as family solidarity.
Although this can be the case, it is important to take a closer look and examine
working conditions (which may well be hazardous) and the amount of time that
may be devoted to work and thereby lost to education (ILO, 2006, p. 38). While
many policy documents on child labour refer to the need to promote education
and school attendance, few of them mention child labour in school or the need to
improve rural schools. 3. Cocoa and child labour in the media UK media reports
on cocoa production in West Africa presented a very different picture of
childrens lives to what I had experienced. Two media stories were particularly
instrumental in sparking global interest in the subject of children in the cocoa
industry. The first one was a documentary broadcast on Channel 4 television in
September 2000 which alleged that young people were being taken by human
traffickers to cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, where they worked in conditions
akin to slavery. Much attention was focused on Drissa, a young man from Mali
who had been tricked into working on a farm in the Ivory Coast, where he was
beaten and forced to work long hours for no remuneration. Secondly, a ship, the
Etireno, found in the Gulf of Guinea in April 2001, was reported to be carrying
up to 250 child slaves, which some sources claimed were going to work on West

African cocoa plantations, and which received considerable media coverage:

The Observer 15 April 2001, The Guardian 16 April 2001, The Daily Telegraph
15 April 2001, 16 April 2001, 17 April 2001, The Sun 17 April 2001, The Daily
Mail 16 April 2001, The Independent 16 April 2001 and 17 April 2001. The
media accounts of the case of Drissa and of the Etireno depicted horrific
scenarios of abuse. For example, The Guardian stated: No one knows how many
children die as they are shipped to the cocoa plantations of West Africa. What is
known are the appalling conditions on many of the boats. Those who have lived
to tell of such things say they were left with a tiny amount of food and only
filthy

5. Child labour and cocoa 145 drinking water for a journey that lasts days [. . .]
The dilapidated Nigerian ship [the Etireno] has been plying the west coast for
years, transporting its cargoes of children to labour in the sprawling cocoa
plantations, or to work as servants, and de facto sex slaves, in the homes of the
rich (The Guardian, 16 April 2001 ). The titles of articles about the Etireno were
also instrumental in forging a starkly bleak picture: Voyage of the Damned
(The Sun, 17 April 2001), Aboard the slave ship of despair (The Guardian, 16
April 2001), Every time we eat a bar of chocolate, we condone slavery (The
Independent, 22 April 2001), Breaking the child slave trade (The Guardian,
19 April 2001), After 300 years, the trade in human misery is still a way of
life (The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2001). However, many of the media reports
were contentious. Firstly, some of the allegations rested on questionable
evidence. When the Etireno finally docked after many days at sea and was
searched by the authorities only a small number of children were found on board
and their circumstances were unclear. The outcry turned into an enigma as the
initial allegations were at odds with the authorities findings: The Guardian 18
April 2001, 21 April 2001, The Daily Mail 17 April 2001, The Daily Telegraph
18 April 2001, The Economist 21 April 2001, The Independent 18 April 2001.
When the children who had been on board the ship were interviewed the
authorities and aid workers were able to ascertain that a majority of them had
been trying to reach Gabon in search of work. As very little cocoa is grown in
Gabon, the initial concerns that the children were being taken to work on large
cocoa plantations were soon dismissed. Furthermore, some of the media reports
on child slavery which appeared in 2000 and 2001 following these two big news
stories were based on desk research carried out in the UK rather than field
research in the countries in question (Berlan, 2004, p. 164). More worryingly,
certain allegations were said to have been exaggerated[2] or even fabricated. For
example, a journalist working for The New York Times Magazine, Michael
Finkel, was dismissed when it emerged that the article he had written on child
slavery on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast was, in his own words, a deceptive
blend of fact and fiction (Finkel, quoted in Vanity Fair, 2005). Secondly, many
articles were emotive and provided only a partial picture of the cocoa industry.
The Daily Telegraph printed a picture of a crying child allegedly rescued from a

plantation in Gabon next to a picture of a plate of luxury chocolates featuring the

caption: One more: Britons ate 550,000 tons of chocolate last year. The
article accompanying the picture stated: British children love chocolate. Each
year they spend 1.2 billion of their pocket money to buy it, about a third of the
total amount spent nationally on the product. [. . .] Drissa is a child but does not
care for chocolate so much. He still carries the marks of his time working on a
cocoa plantation in the Ivory Coast. Numerous wounds from beatings adorn his
back. Some are down to the bone (Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2001). Such
images, together with the emphasis on contrasting poor producers and rich
consumers, were widely used to educate the public about the cocoa industry.
However, the alleged abuses need to be placed in a broader perspective. As a
crop, cocoa provides a livelihood for millions of farmers and their families, and
the majority of children who work on cocoa farms freely, voluntarily and in a
family context, at least in Ghana (currently the worlds second largest producer
of cocoa) were largely overlooked in these accounts. While the uncovering of
labour abuses in the Ivory Coast was important and these abuses have hopefully
been addressed, the assumption made by many that they were representative of
an entire industry was highly questionable.

6. IJSSP 29,3/4 146 Even though some of the initial claims have been shown to
be ill-founded, a link between cocoa and slavery is still frequently made in
debates about ethical trade[3]. Rather unfairly, it seems that the indiscriminate
labelling of the involvement of children on cocoa farms in West Africa as cruel
and exploitative will not easily be shaken off. Thirdly, and at a deeper level,
most of the media accounts, like certain ILO reports, appeared to be based on an
idealised Western concept of childhood. This model of childhood presents
children as being innocent and vulnerable, and as being robbed of their
childhood if their circumstances are at odds with popular Western expectations
(Boyden, 1997a; Kitzinger, 1997; Montgomery, 2001). Irrespective of the
childrens individual circumstances, media reports on their lives used fatalistic
language emphasising injustice and helplessness. For example, The Daily Mail
published an article stating: At least 300 children are facing an agonising death
on an overcrowded slave ship, aid agencies fear. They say scores may already
have died in atrocious conditions aboard the small, rusting Etireno. [. . .] Those
who are not killed by lack of food and water may simply be thrown overboard
alive. [. . .] The voyage of the Etireno and its pitiful human cargo demonstrates
the failure of international efforts to stamp out child slavery in West and Central
Africa. The children on board would have joined thousands of others working
12-hour days carrying heavy sacks of cocoa beans or toiling in the fields. More
than half the worlds chocolate is produced in this way (Daily Mail, 16 April
2001). Montgomery (2001), writing about media accounts of child prostitution
in Thailand, pointed to the formulaic nature of such media accounts and to the
way in which: There is a neatness and coherence to [the] story which is
compelling; no loose ends and a predictable outcome. The reader is invited to be

outraged at the story and to pity the victims but, ultimately, there is no escape
from the plot and nothing can be done to help these children. Once the story
begins, it can only end, unhappily ever after, with the childs death. Anything
else is too complex, too difficult to deal with, or too much like academic
voyeurism (Montgomery, 2001, p. 23). 4. Child labour initiatives Following the
media allegations, a wide range of initiatives were put in place to tackle abusive
labour practices in the West African cocoa industry. Among these, the Harkin
Engel Protocol, which was passed in the USA in September 2001, emerged as
having the most wide-ranging and long-term scope. This agreement initially set
out a four year timetable (which has since been extended) for the cocoa industry
to comply with the standards set by the International Labour Organisation
Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour. Its aim was to
liberate, rehabilitate and possibly repatriate, children and enslaved adults from
cocoa farms (Anti-Slavery International, 2004, p. 56). The Protocol was signed
by the chocolate industry and witnessed by representatives from the IPEC
Programme of the ILO, the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel,
Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Associations, the Child
Labor Coalition, the National Consumers League and Free the Slaves. The
Protocol was a useful and important framework for progress as it brought
together key stakeholders, although it had little direct engagement with cocoa
producers in Ghana. Local community representatives or child workers from
Ghana were not involved in shaping its constitution and chocolate
manufacturers, rather than cocoa producers, by virtue of being signatories, were
the ones deemed to be in control of child labour issues. As in Foucaults
panopticon prison, the objectified target group

7. Child labour and cocoa 147 is seen but does not see; he is the object of
information, never a subject in communication (Foucault, 1977, p. 200). The
language of rights codified norms and values, rather than facilitated a range of
perspectives, thereby illustrating Shore and Wrights (1997, p. 7) claim that
policies can act as narratives that serve to justify or condemn the present, or as
rhetorical devices and discursive formations that function to empower some
people and silence others. The notion of agency seemed far removed from the
child workers or cocoa farmers concerned, even though the Protocol purported
to make direct changes to the running of cocoa farms, to change working
conditions and to give child workers their rights. As stated by Williams (1986):
Policy makers, experts, and officials cannot think how things might improve
except through their own agency (Williams, 1986, p. 7, quoted in Ferguson,
1990, p. 260). More broadly, journalists, policymakers and other interested
parties, by taking up this cause, became the de facto representatives of children
in the cocoa industry in the public arena although the only narratives they
represented were the ones which reiterated a worldview where children were
forced to work and had no choices. In doing so, they exemplified broader
paternalistic tendencies within movements for child rights. Indeed, according to

Thery: Post-modern paternalism no longer says Shut up kids, I know what is

good for you but prefers to say Speak up kids, I am your voice (Thery,
quoted in Ennew, 2000, p. 7). As there is insufficient space in this paper to
provide a full discussion of all the initiatives relating to the HarkinEngel
Protocol since its inception, it considers only the first stages of implementation.
One of the first tasks following the establishment of the Protocol was to carry
out research to ascertain the extent of child labour abuses on cocoa farms in
West Africa. Therefore, with funding from the global chocolate industry, the US
Agency for International Development, and the US Department of Labour and
with technical support from the ILO, the International Institute for Tropical
Agriculture (IITA), through the Sustainable Tree Crops Programme (STCP),
carried out research on this subject in Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Ghana and
Nigeria. In practical terms, the study sought to achieve three key goals, defined
by the STCP and the IITA as: (1) To determine the extent and incidence of
child labor and its worst forms in cocoa production; childrens working
conditions; the tasks performed and their physical effects; hours of work; child
workers relation to the employer/family, living and pay conditions, etc. (2) To
establish the characteristics of the working children, their families and
communities, their migration and work histories, and the reasons for working;
determine what recruitment methods were used; and assess whether the working
children also go to school, as well as the attitudes of children/parents towards
education. (3) To establish the extent of hazardous, unhealthy, morally
unsound or illicit conditions faced by working children; the estimated number of
children affected by such working conditions; the reasons for working; and the
chances of either improving those conditions or removing the children from the
conditions (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Sustainable Tree
Crops Programme, 2002, p. 6). A Technical Advisory Committee was set up in
order to ensure that the methodology used was suited to the project and would
help achieve its aims. According to

8. IJSSP 29,3/4 148 Anti-Slavery International (2004, p. 57), this committee was
made up of sixteen independent experts from international research institutes,
the World Bank, UN agencies, national research organisations, trade unions, and
the NGO community. However, in spite of the expert and wide-ranging
composition of the committee, the research methodology contained significant
flaws when put into practice. Even though the research claimed to investigate
and focus on the lives of working children, the research methods, at least in the
case of Ghana, did not involve any direct contact with children. Attempts were
made to ensure an appropriate sample of respondents to the survey, but this only
included adult farmers, and relied on using a formula which proved to be
unworkable in this particular context. Furthermore, although the research aimed
to obtain qualitative data, such as personal histories, reasons for working, or
attitudes towards education, no in-depth qualitative research methods were used.
Instead, findings were based on responses to a 13-page questionnaire, which

included over 80 questions, only six of which directly related to child labour,
while the rest concerned practical issues such as rural credit, agronomic
practices and post-harvest handling. Moreover, the same questionnaire was used
in all the countries where research was carried out, and this overlooked key
socio-cultural factors which could affect labour patterns. The research findings
were also open to question as the data which was gathered was not entirely
consistent with the conclusions reached. In spite of the fact that the research
found no incidence of permanent workers under the age of 18 in Ghana and
Cameroon, the conclusion of the report states that: The picture that emerges is of
a sector with stagnant technology, low yields, and an increasing demand for
unskilled workers trapped in a circle of poverty. Salaried child workers were
most clearly trapped in a vicious circle. The majority of these children had never
been to school and were earning subsistence wages, forced into this labour by
economic circumstances. Most of these children are from the drier Savanna
areas of West Africa, where family livelihoods are inherently uncertain and
households are forced into risk-reducing livelihood strategies, including sending
adolescents to cocoa plantations to work (International Institute of Tropical
Agriculture and Sustainable Tree Crops Programme, 2002, p. 22). Although the
research aimed to provide evidence on the lives of children, it followed a topdown agenda rather than a grassroots perspective and provided only a partial
picture of labour practices. In relying so heavily on a construction of child work
laden with ideas of abuse and exploitation, the policy discourse was guided by a
broader set of socio-moral assumptions rather than by the experiences of
children. Such research often reveals the highly moralised priorities,
assumptions and concerns of the classifiers, rather than help explain the
phenomenon of child work itself ( James et al., 1998, p. 105) and illustrates
that while policy language presents policy as being data- driven, complaining
at times therefore about lack of data, this masks the extent to which it is datadriving (lack of appropriate data), choosing the data it prefers (Apthorpe,
1997, p. 55). 5. Conclusion This article has argued that the voices which
prevailed in many early debates concerning child labour or child slavery in the
production of cocoa in West Africa were not the voices of the children in
question, or even of their communities. Although the welfare of children was
construed as being the central factor behind the frenzy of stories of abuse in the
West African cocoa industry, this was undermined by the failure

9. Child labour and cocoa 149 to conceive of child rights holistically, the lack of
sensitive research in the form of in- depth field investigations, and an insistence
on pre-conceived moral judgements. Any claims of intervention in the best
interest of children, when the children themselves are not consulted, or their
situation fully known, must be treated with caution (Montgomery, 2001).
Anthropologically, the representation of children among cocoa producers in
West Africa as a single undifferentiated mass of oppressed victims (in spite of
them having different ethnic origins and living in different regions in four

different countries, each of which have distinct social dynamics, production

patterns and marketing arrangements), is deeply problematic for any practitioner
of the discipline with field experience in this area. The famous downtrodden
masses are popular figures in development ideology (Ferguson, 1990) and it is
no surprise that they are also a recognisable entity in other public discourses. In
this article, I have argued that they are biased and simplistic representations,
which are not supported by long-term and field-based qualitative research. By
building and reaffirming a stock of erroneous ideas, they do not serve the needs
of those they claim to represent and even detract attention from more serious and
widespread cases of child labour. They also mask the practical realities of the
political and financial decisions shaping relief and development aid today, and
[help] to shape the structural political realities of tomorrow ( James, 1999, p.
14). Web sites www-ilomirror.cornell.edu/public/english/standards/ipec/publ/download/factsheets/fs_co
coa_0304. pdf (accessed 14 November 2007). www.laborrights.org/ (accessed
14 November 2007). www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/cgi/news/news.cgi?
ttemplate&a1187 (accessed 14 November 2007).
www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/cocoa/IITACocoaResearch.pdf(ac
cessed14November 2007). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2205741.stm
(accessed 14 November 2007). Notes 1. The use of cutting tools is listed as a
major safety and health hazard in the ILO/IPEC Safety and Health factsheet
on cocoa and hazardous child labour in agriculture. Available at: www-ilomirror.cornell.edu/public/english/standards/ipec/publ/download/
factsheets/fs_cocoa_0304.pdf (accessed 14 November 2007). 2. Available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2205741.stm 3. For example, in the 2007
William Wilberforce Memorial Lecture by the Archbishop of York, he called on
consumers to buy only chocolate certified as Fair Trade in order to play a part in
ending child labour and slavery. See www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/cgi/news/
news.cgi?ttemplate&a1187 References Anti-Slavery International (2004),
The Cocoa Industry in West Africa: A History of Exploitation, Anti-Slavery
International, London, available at: www.antislavery.org/homepage/
resources/cocoa%20report%202004.pdf (accessed 14 November 2007).
Apthorpe, R. (1997), Writing development policy and policy analysis plain or
clear: on language, genre and power, in Shore, C. and Wright, S. (Eds), The
Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power,
Routledge, London, pp. 43-58.

10. IJSSP 29,3/4 150 Berlan, A. (2004), Child labour, education and child
rights among cocoa producers in Ghana, in Van Den Anker, C. (Ed.), The
Political Economy of New Slavery, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 15878. Berlan, A. (2005), Education and child labour among cocoa producers in
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University of Oxford, Oxford. Boyden, J. (1997a), Childhood and the policy
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A. and Prout, A. (Eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood:

Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, Falmer Press,
London, pp.190-229. Boyden, J. and Ennew, J. (1997b), Children in Focus A
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Children Sweden), Stockholm. (The) Daily Mail (2001), Concerns grow for
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Mystery over child slaves, The Daily Mail, 17 April. (The) Daily Telegraph
(2001), Health fears grow for slave ships cargo of children, The Daily
Telegraph, 15 April. (The) Daily Telegraph (2001), 250 slave children could
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Education, The Natural History Press, New York, NY, pp. 14-74. Corresponding
author Amanda Berlan can be contacted at: amanda.berlan@sbs.ox.ac.uk To
purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com Or
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