International Journal of Sociology and Social PolicyEmerald Article: Child labour and cocoa: whose voices prevail?Amanda Berlan

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To cite this document: Amanda Berlan, (2009),"Child labour and cocoa: whose voices prevail?", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 29 Iss: 3 pp. 141 - 151

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International Journal of Sociologyand Social Policy

Vol. 29 Nos. 3/4, 2009pp. 141-151

# Emerald Group Publishing Limited0144-333X

DOI 10.1108/01443330910947516

Child labour and cocoa: whosevoices prevail?

Amanda BerlanSaid Business School, Oxford, UK

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide ethnographic data on the lives of children working incocoa-producing communities in Ghana and to illustrate the importance of contextualisation inunderstanding the phenomenon of child labour.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on anthropological fieldwork carried out inGhana using participant observation and child-focused participatory research methods. It alsoincludes an analysis of media sources and policy documents.Findings – It shows that the children involved in this study worked freely and willingly on familycocoa farms. It also shows that research and interventions must be context-based and child-centred asforms of child labour in cocoa are not uniform across West Africa.Research limitations/implications – Unfortunately, the scope of the paper does not allow for adiscussion of recent interventions and progress relating to child labour in the West African cocoaindustry.Originality/value – This paper challenges many of the assumptions made about child labour incocoa 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. IntroductionThis paper will discuss child labour in the context of the production of cocoa in WestAfrica. Based on long-term fieldwork in Ghana, it will examine the narratives ofchildren working in this context before discussing the way child labour in cocoaproduction has been represented in the UK media, and in research and policydocuments.

The analysis is based on 15 months of fieldwork in Ghana which was carried out intwo stages between December 2001 and November 2003. The subjects of myethnography were children in a cluster of villages in the Ashanti region of Ghanawhere the local economy revolves around the production of cocoa. In total, 84 childrenwere involved in the research, although to varying degrees. Determining the exact agesof my respondents was difficult as many of my informants did not know their age orhave any form of birth registration. For example, in the first form of the JuniorSecondary School only 31 per cent of children knew their ages. In spite of the difficultyof knowing the ages of all my informants, I was able to ascertain using the few recordsavailable that the broad range of ages of my informants was between 10 and 16 yearsold.

In addition to using the standard anthropological method of participant observation,child-focused participatory research methods based on Boyden and Ennew (1997b)were used. This involved studying children ‘‘as individuals and not merely as membersof the procession through childhood’’ (Reynolds, 1990, p. 330, cited in Boyden andEnnew, 1997b, p. 2). The children’s views were elicited through participant observationand through informal interviews, drawings, competitions and simple surveys. Accesswas obtained by being involved in the local school, visiting cocoa farms and simplybeing in the village. As most children and farmers were illiterate and were not familiarwith academic research, written consent was not sought. Instead ethical clearance was

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obtained by explaining research aims and individual exercises on an ongoing basis tothe relevant parties and the village authorities and securing their verbal consent. Amore comprehensive breakdown of methods, ethics and findings can be found inBerlan (2005).

2. Research findingsMy informants worked on small-scale and family-owned cocoa farms and most of themalso 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 andgirls are at the same time in school’’. The children in my study readily describedthemselves as poor and for some of them, just like for many other children in thedeveloping 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 childrenin Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Philippines and Central America, 77 per cent of childreneven preferred going to work and attending school, when asked if only going towork, only going to school, or doing both, was the best for them in their presentcircumstances.

Paradoxically, the school environment was not free from child labour. The pupilswere frequently sent by their teachers to go and weed using machetes during schoolhours and additionally they were required to do farm work for the school at least oncea week. The pupils had to clear the plot of land owned by the school so that it could beused as farmland, where produce such as yams and plantain could be grown and soldto 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 theweeds 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 theircompetence, farm work for the school was arduous and potentially more dangerousthat working on the family cocoa farm. On the family farm, the children worked underthe supervision and guidance of their families and what was expected of them wasdetermined by their level of experience and ability. This mirrors Fortes’ description ofchild socialization among the Tallensi of Ghana:

A child is never forced beyond its capacity. This is seen most clearly in relation to the pivotaleconomic 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 workedin closer proximity to each other than they did on family farms, so the broad machetesweeps 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 acocoa farm also offered shade and protection from the sun and this was absent whenthe children were clearing the school plot. The children’s work on the school farmillustrates that child labour and education are not always mutually exclusive, as isoften assumed (White, 1999, p. 134) and while there are some risks attached to cocoafarming, the work carried out by my informants on family-owned cocoa farms wasboth safer and less strenuous than clearing the school plot as they were more likely tobe working in shaded areas, less likely to be clearing thorns, and were more closelysupervised.

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Schooling was also problematic for other reasons. The school was under-resourcedand overcrowded, and since it had no electricity to provide ventilation and the teacherswere frequently absent, it was not an environment conducive to learning. Somechildren had only acquired basic literacy skills despite having attended school foryears. The children often complained about hunger and the stomach cramps this gavethem. As working on the family farm meant they could pick fruit from trees and gavethem the opportunity to catch wild animals which would provide meat, many of myinformants said they preferred to work on the family farm than go to school, eventhough they were keen to receive an education. More broadly, the children frequentlycomplained about malaria, bilharzias, exposure to snakes and scorpions, teenagepregnancy, family breakdown and poverty-related problems (such as inability to payfor basic goods). However, the children showed enormous resilience and ingenuity indealing with their situation (Berlan, 2005) and did not see themselves as victims. Theyfitted Woodhead’s broader description of child labourers as ‘‘social actors, trying tomake 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). Thechildren’s acceptance of work also reflected a broader pattern of child socialization.Laziness is widely abhorred in Ghanaian society (Berlan, 2004, p. 168) and parents toldme that involving children in cocoa-farming was important as it would help them tobecome productive and hard-working individuals. To a large extent, the inculcation ofthese values had been successful. The children admitted farm work could be hard butthey saw this as a good thing. They often asked me to follow them to the farm and werekeen and proud to show off what they could do, such as weeding, cutting down cocoapods or bringing heavy produce home.

2.1 Child labour and child workThe cultural model of childhood in which my informants grew up conflicted with theILO’s broader goal of eliminating child labour. The ILO places considerable emphasison excluding children from the workplace, using age and the harm (physical and/orpsychological) 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 forAdmission to Employment and ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of ChildLabour.

By these standards, the involvement of children on cocoa farms in Ghana could becategorised as hazardous based on a number of criteria. My informants used macheteswhile 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 thesafety of a child and result in injury (ILO Convention 182 and 138). Although in theabsence of birth records the ages of my informants were difficult to ascertain, many ofthem were under the minimum age for admission of a child to light work (definedunder the Ghanaian legal system as 13 years of age) and under the minimum age forengagement of a person in hazardous work (defined by the Ghana Children’s Act of1998 as 18 years). However, as argued by Woodhead (1999):

Whether young people are affected positively or negatively by their work experiencesdepends on their personal vulnerability, which is in turn mediated by the economic, social andcultural context of their work, especially the value placed on their economic activity and theexpectations for their development and social adjustment (Woodhead, 1999, p. 29).

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Indeed, children all over Ghana are socialized from a young age into using machetesdaily to accomplish a variety of tasks such as preparing food (Berlan, 2004, p. 170) andas a result, they are very skilled in using them. Irrespective of skill, the widespread useof machetes means that focusing interventions solely on the cocoa industry ismisplaced and it is ironic that the use of machetes has been condemned on cocoafarms[1] but not in schools.

More broadly, the ILO campaign to end child labour in part bears the marks of aWestern conceptualisation of childhood which assumes labour to be detrimental and isat odds with the views the children in Ghana expressed. The 2002 edition of the ILOBitter Harvest: Child Labour in Agriculture report states:

Rural children [. . .] tend to become economically active at an early age. These children are notonly exposed to health risks associated with rural poverty but also those associated withagricultural 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 denialof 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 cultureand tradition, often makes it difficult to acknowledge that children can be systematicallyexploited 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 andexamine working conditions (which may well be hazardous) and the amount of time that maybe 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 educationand school attendance, few of them mention child labour in school or the need toimprove rural schools.

3. Cocoa and child labour in the mediaUK media reports on cocoa production in West Africa presented a very different pictureof children’s lives to what I had experienced. Two media stories were particularlyinstrumental 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 2000which alleged that young people were being taken by human traffickers to cocoa farmsin the Ivory Coast, where they worked in conditions akin to slavery. Much attentionwas focused on Drissa, a young man from Mali who had been tricked into working on afarm in the Ivory Coast, where he was beaten and forced to work long hours for noremuneration. 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 weregoing to work on West African cocoa plantations, and which received considerablemedia coverage: The Observer 15 April 2001, The Guardian 16 April 2001, The DailyTelegraph 15 April 2001, 16 April 2001, 17 April 2001, The Sun 17 April 2001, TheDaily 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 horrificscenarios of abuse. For example, The Guardian stated:

No one knows how many children die as they are shipped to the cocoa plantations of WestAfrica. What is known are the appalling conditions on many of the boats. Those who havelived to tell of such things say they were left with a tiny amount of food and only filthy

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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 thesprawling cocoa plantations, or to work as servants, and de facto sex slaves, in the homes ofthe rich (The Guardian, 16 April 2001 ).

The titles of articles about the Etireno were also instrumental in forging a starkly bleakpicture: ‘‘Voyage of the Damned’’ (The Sun, 17 April 2001), ‘‘Aboard the slave ship ofdespair’’ (The Guardian, 16 April 2001), ‘‘Every time we eat a bar of chocolate, wecondone 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 away of life’’ (The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2001).

However, many of the media reports were contentious. Firstly, some of theallegations rested on questionable evidence. When the Etireno finally docked aftermany days at sea and was searched by the authorities only a small number of childrenwere found on board and their circumstances were unclear. The outcry turned into anenigma as the initial allegations were at odds with the authorities’ findings: TheGuardian 18 April 2001, 21 April 2001, The Daily Mail 17 April 2001, The DailyTelegraph 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 authoritiesand aid workers were able to ascertain that a majority of them had been trying to reachGabon in search of work. As very little cocoa is grown in Gabon, the initial concernsthat the children were being taken to work on large cocoa plantations were soondismissed. Furthermore, some of the media reports on child slavery which appeared in2000 and 2001 following these two big news stories were based on desk researchcarried 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 beenexaggerated[2] or even fabricated. For example, a journalist working for The New YorkTimes Magazine, Michael Finkel, was dismissed when it emerged that the article hehad 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 thecocoa industry. The Daily Telegraph printed a picture of a crying child allegedlyrescued from a plantation in Gabon next to a picture of a plate of luxury chocolatesfeaturing the caption: ‘‘One more: Britons ate 550,000 tons of chocolate last year’’. Thearticle accompanying the picture stated:

British children love chocolate. Each year they spend £1.2 billion of their pocket money tobuy it, about a third of the total amount spent nationally on the product. [. . .] Drissa is a childbut does not care for chocolate so much. He still carries the marks of his time working on acocoa plantation in the Ivory Coast. Numerous wounds from beatings adorn his back. Someare down to the bone (Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2001).

Such images, together with the emphasis on contrasting poor producers and richconsumers, 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 majorityof children who work on cocoa farms freely, voluntarily and in a family context, at leastin Ghana (currently the world’s second largest producer of cocoa) were largelyoverlooked in these accounts. While the uncovering of labour abuses in the Ivory Coastwas important and these abuses have hopefully been addressed, the assumption madeby many that they were representative of an entire industry was highly questionable.

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Even though some of the initial claims have been shown to be ill-founded, a linkbetween cocoa and slavery is still frequently made in debates about ethical trade[3].Rather unfairly, it seems that the indiscriminate labelling of the involvement ofchildren on cocoa farms in West Africa as cruel and exploitative will not easily beshaken 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 ofchildhood presents children as being innocent and vulnerable, and as being robbed oftheir childhood if their circumstances are at odds with popular Western expectations(Boyden, 1997a; Kitzinger, 1997; Montgomery, 2001). Irrespective of the children’sindividual circumstances, media reports on their lives used fatalistic languageemphasising injustice and helplessness. For example, The Daily Mail published anarticle stating:

At least 300 children are facing an agonising death on an overcrowded ‘‘slave ship’’, aidagencies fear. They say scores may already have died in atrocious conditions aboard thesmall, rusting Etireno. [. . .] Those who are not killed by lack of food and water may simply bethrown overboard alive. [. . .] The voyage of the Etireno and its pitiful human cargodemonstrates the failure of international efforts to stamp out child slavery in West andCentral Africa. The children on board would have joined thousands of others working 12-hourdays carrying heavy sacks of cocoa beans or toiling in the fields. More than half the world’schocolate 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 apredictable outcome. The reader is invited to be outraged at the story and to pity the victimsbut, ultimately, there is no escape from the plot and nothing can be done to help thesechildren. Once the story begins, it can only end, unhappily ever after, with the child’s death.Anything else is too complex, too difficult to deal with, or too much like ‘‘academicvoyeurism’’ (Montgomery, 2001, p. 23).

4. Child labour initiativesFollowing the media allegations, a wide range of initiatives were put in place to tackleabusive 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 havingthe most wide-ranging and long-term scope. This agreement initially set out a fouryear timetable (which has since been extended) for the cocoa industry to comply withthe standards set by the International Labour Organisation Convention No. 182 on theWorst Forms of Child Labour. Its aim was to ‘‘liberate, rehabilitate and possiblyrepatriate, children and enslaved adults from cocoa farms’’ (Anti-Slavery International,2004, p. 56). The Protocol was signed by the chocolate industry and witnessed byrepresentatives 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 broughttogether key stakeholders, although it had little direct engagement with cocoaproducers in Ghana. Local community representatives or child workers from Ghanawere not involved in shaping its constitution and chocolate manufacturers, rather thancocoa producers, by virtue of being signatories, were the ones deemed to be in controlof child labour issues. As in Foucault’s panopticon prison, the objectified target group

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‘‘is seen but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject incommunication’’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 200). The language of rights codified norms andvalues, rather than facilitated a range of perspectives, thereby illustrating Shore andWright’s (1997, p. 7) claim that policies can act ‘‘as narratives that serve to justify orcondemn the present, or as rhetorical devices and discursive formations that functionto empower some people and silence others’’. The notion of agency seemed far removedfrom the child workers or cocoa farmers concerned, even though the Protocolpurported to make direct changes to the running of cocoa farms, to change workingconditions and to give child workers their rights. As stated by Williams (1986): ‘‘Policymakers, experts, and officials cannot think how things might improve except throughtheir own agency’’ (Williams, 1986, p. 7, quoted in Ferguson, 1990, p. 260). Morebroadly, journalists, policymakers and other interested parties, by taking up this cause,became the de facto representatives of children in the cocoa industry in the publicarena although the only narratives they represented were the ones which reiterated aworldview where children were forced to work and had no choices. In doing so, theyexemplified broader paternalistic tendencies within movements for child rights.Indeed, according to Thery: ‘‘Post-modern paternalism no longer says ‘‘Shut up kids, Iknow 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 theinitiatives relating to the Harkin–Engel Protocol since its inception, it considers onlythe first stages of implementation. One of the first tasks following the establishment ofthe Protocol was to carry out research to ascertain the extent of child labour abuses oncocoa farms in West Africa. Therefore, with funding from the global chocolateindustry, the US Agency for International Development, and the US Department ofLabour and with technical support from the ILO, the International Institute forTropical 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 STCPand the IITA as:

(1) To ‘‘determine the extent and incidence of child labor and its worst forms incocoa production; children’s working conditions; the tasks performed and theirphysical 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 andcommunities, their migration and work histories, and the reasons for working;determine what recruitment methods were used; and assess whether theworking children also go to school, as well as the attitudes of children/parentstowards education’’.

(3) To ‘‘establish the extent of hazardous, unhealthy, morally unsound or illicitconditions faced by working children; the estimated number of childrenaffected by such working conditions; the reasons for working; and the chancesof either improving those conditions or removing the children from theconditions’’ (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and SustainableTree Crops Programme, 2002, p. 6).

A Technical Advisory Committee was set up in order to ensure that the methodologyused was suited to the project and would help achieve its aims. According to

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Anti-Slavery International (2004, p. 57), this committee was ‘‘made up of sixteenindependent experts from international research institutes, the World Bank, UNagencies, national research organisations, trade unions, and the NGO community’’.However, in spite of the expert and wide-ranging composition of the committee, theresearch methodology contained significant flaws when put into practice. Even thoughthe research claimed to investigate and focus on the lives of working children, theresearch methods, at least in the case of Ghana, did not involve any direct contact withchildren. Attempts were made to ensure an appropriate sample of respondents to thesurvey, but this only included adult farmers, and relied on using a formula whichproved to be unworkable in this particular context. Furthermore, although the researchaimed to obtain qualitative data, such as personal histories, reasons for working, orattitudes towards education, no in-depth qualitative research methods were used.Instead, findings were based on responses to a 13-page questionnaire, which includedover 80 questions, only six of which directly related to child labour, while the restconcerned practical issues such as rural credit, agronomic practices and post-harvesthandling. Moreover, the same questionnaire was used in all the countries whereresearch was carried out, and this overlooked key socio-cultural factors which couldaffect labour patterns.

The research findings were also open to question as the data which was gatheredwas not entirely consistent with the conclusions reached. In spite of the fact that theresearch found no incidence of permanent workers under the age of 18 in Ghana andCameroon, the conclusion of the report states that:

The picture that emerges is of a sector with stagnant technology, low yields, and anincreasing demand for unskilled workers trapped in a circle of poverty. Salaried child workerswere most clearly trapped in a vicious circle. The majority of these children had never been toschool and were earning subsistence wages, forced into this labour by economiccircumstances. Most of these children are from the drier Savanna areas of West Africa, wherefamily livelihoods are inherently uncertain and households are forced into risk-reducinglivelihood 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‘‘top-down’’ agenda rather than a grassroots perspective and provided only a partialpicture of labour practices. In relying so heavily on a construction of child work ladenwith ideas of abuse and exploitation, the policy discourse was guided by a broader setof socio-moral assumptions rather than by the experiences of children. Such researchoften reveals the ‘‘highly moralised priorities, assumptions and concerns of theclassifiers, 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 towhich it is data-driving (lack of ‘appropriate’ data), choosing the data it prefers’’(Apthorpe, 1997, p. 55).

5. ConclusionThis article has argued that the voices which prevailed in many early debatesconcerning child labour or child slavery in the production of cocoa in West Africa werenot the voices of the children in question, or even of their communities. Although thewelfare of children was construed as being the central factor behind the frenzy ofstories of abuse in the West African cocoa industry, this was undermined by the failure

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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. Anyclaims of intervention in the best interest of children, when the children themselves arenot consulted, or their situation fully known, must be treated with caution(Montgomery, 2001).

Anthropologically, the representation of children among cocoa producers in WestAfrica as a single undifferentiated mass of oppressed victims (in spite of them havingdifferent ethnic origins and living in different regions in four different countries, each ofwhich have distinct social dynamics, production patterns and marketingarrangements), is deeply problematic for any practitioner of the discipline with fieldexperience in this area. The famous downtrodden masses are popular figures indevelopment ideology (Ferguson, 1990) and it is no surprise that they are also arecognisable entity in other public discourses. In this article, I have argued that theyare biased and simplistic representations, which are not supported by long-term andfield-based qualitative research. By building and reaffirming a stock of erroneousideas, they do not serve the needs of those they claim to represent and even detractattention from more serious and widespread cases of child labour. They also ‘‘mask thepractical realities of the political and financial decisions shaping relief anddevelopment aid today, and [help] to shape the structural political realities oftomorrow’’ ( James, 1999, p. 14).

Web siteswww-ilo-mirror.cornell.edu/public/english/standards/ipec/publ/download/factsheets/fs_cocoa_0304.pdf (accessed 14 November 2007).www.laborrights.org/ (accessed 14 November 2007).www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/cgi/news/news.cgi?t¼template&a¼1187 (accessed 14 November 2007).www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/cocoa/IITACocoaResearch.pdf (accessed 14 November2007).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-ilo-mirror.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 ofYork, he called on consumers to buy only chocolate certified as Fair Trade in order toplay a part in ending child labour and slavery. See www.dioceseofyork.org.uk/cgi/news/news.cgi?t¼template&a¼1187

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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: CriticalPerspectives on Governance and Power, Routledge, London, pp. 43-58.

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Berlan, A. (2004), ‘‘Child labour, education and child rights among cocoa producers in Ghana’’, inVan Den Anker, C. (Ed.), The Political Economy of New Slavery, Palgrave Macmillan,Basingstoke, pp. 158-78.

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Further reading

Fortes (1970), ‘‘Education in Taleland’’, in Middleton, J. (Ed.), From Child to Adult: Studies in theAnthropology of Education, The Natural History Press, New York, NY, pp. 14-74.

Corresponding authorAmanda Berlan can be contacted at: amanda.berlan@sbs.ox.ac.uk

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