Cocoa

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,
child-focused 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 children’s 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
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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 children’s 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.

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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 Woodhead’s 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
children’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 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
ILO’s 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 Children’s 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).

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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 children’s 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
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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 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 world’s 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.

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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 children’s
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 world’s
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 child’s 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 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 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
Wright’s (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 Harkin–Engel 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; children’s 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

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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
‘‘top-down’’ 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 data-driving (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

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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. 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-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(accessed14November
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-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 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?t¼template&a¼1187
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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.

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Basingstoke, pp. 158-78.
Berlan, A. (2005), ‘‘Education and child labour among cocoa producers in Ghana: the
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Further reading
Fortes (1970), ‘‘Education in Taleland’’, in Middleton, J. (Ed.), From Child to Adult: Studies in the
Anthropology of 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
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