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Article

1 Oct 2017

Author:
Barry Callebaut (Switzerland)

Forever Chocolate - Our plan to make sustainable chocolate the norm

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As a direct result of cocoa farmer poverty, it is estimated that there are morethan 2 million children working on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.Despite investments in education and awareness raising in the past years, and despite higher school attendance, the cocoa industry and cocoa origin countries have not succeeded in structurally eradicating child labor. Tackling poverty is a long term solution to child labor, but in the short term we need to put in place solid monitoring and remediation systems, in order to identify and forever eliminate child labor. In addition we need to work with governments, community leaders and the development community in origin countries to enforce existing laws and regulations against child labor, to provide an adequate school infrastructure, ensuring school attendance and availability of financial support in cocoa farmer families to send children to school. We need to support awareness raising and a change in the perception in the communities themselves...Together with the International Cocoa Initiative, we piloted a Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation System (CLMRS) with more than 5000 farmers in Côte d’Ivoire in 2016. Facilitators on the ground work with communities to track and remediate child labor, as well as pinpoint the factors that contribute to it.

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