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Analyze the issues from a utilitarianism perspective and Human rights perspective on the case study about slavery in the chocolate industry?

Case Study 1.1: Slavery in the Chocolate Industry In 2012, CNN published a series of investigations as part of its "Freedom Project," which found that "child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife" in the chocolate industry. The CNN investigations revealed that large numbers of children were being held as slaves on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast, a small nation on the western coast of Africa Forty-five percent of the chocolate we consume in the United States and in the rest of the world is made from cocoa beans grown and harvested on farms in Ivory Coast. Few realize that a portion of Ivory Coast cocoa beans that goes into most of the chocolate we eat was grown and harvested by children who work as slaves. The slaves are boys between 12 and 16-but sometimes as young as 9-kidnapped from villages in surround- ing nations and sold to the cocoa farmers by traffickers. The farmers whip, beat, and starve the boys to force them to do the hot, difficult work of clearing the fields, harvesting the beans, and drying them in the sun. The boys work from sunrise to sunset. Some are locked in at night in windowless rooms where they sleep on bare wooden planks. Far from home, unsure of their location, unable to speak the language, isolated in rural areas, and threatened with harsh beatings if they try to get away, the boys rarely attempt to escape their nightmare situation. Those who try are usually caught, severely beaten as an example to oth- ers, and then locked in solitary confinement. Every year unknown numbers of these boys die or are killed on the cocoa farms that supply our chocolate The plight of the enslaved children was first widely publi- cized at the tum of the twenty-first century when True Vision, a British television company, took videos of slave boys working on Ivory Coast farms and made a documentary depicting the sufferings of the boys. In September 2000, the documentary was broadcast in Great Britain, the United States, and other parts of the world. The U.S. State Department, in its Year 2001 Human Rights Report, estimated that about 15,000 children from the neighboring nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Togo had been sold into slavery to labor on Ivory Coast cocoa farms Although slavery is illegal in Ivory Coast and the minimum age of employment is 14, the laws are poorly enforced. Open borders, a shortage of enforcement officers, widespread poverty, and the willingness of local officials to accept bribes from people trafficking in slaves al contribute to the problem. In addition, prices for cocoa beans in global markets have been depressed most years since 1996. As prices decined, the already impoverished cocoa farm- ers-who earn less than $2 per day on average-tumed to slavery to cut their labor costs. Although prions began to improve during the early years of the twenty-first century, cocon prices fell again in 2004 and remained low until the summer of 2010, when they again began to rise. The poverty that motivated many Ivory Coast cocon farmers to buy children trafficked as slaves was aggravated by other factors besides low cocon prices. Working on small iso- lated farms of one to three acres, cocon farmers cannot communi- cate among themselves nor with the outside world to leam what cocoa is selling for. Consequently, they are at the mercy of a local middeman, a "traitant" or "pisteur," who drives out to the farms, buys the farmers' cocoa for half of its current market price, and hauls it away in his truck. Unable to afford trucks themselves, the farmers must rely on the middlemen to get their cocoa to market. The traitant takes the cocoa beans to a warehouse in a nearby large town where they are combined with the beans harvested on other farms, and where the major exporters, such as Archer Dan- iels Midland (ADM) and Cargill, purchase the cocoa beans to export to their processing plants. Chocolate is a $13 billion industry in the United States, where Americans consume over 3 billion pounds each year. The names of the four largest U.S. chocolate manufacturers-all of whom use the morally "tainted" cocoa beans from Ivory Coast in their products-are well known: Hershey Foods Corp. (maker of Hershey's milk chocolate, Reeses, and Almond Joy), Mars, Inc. (maker of M&Ms, Mars, Twix, Dove, and Milky Ways). Nestl USA, (maker of Nestle Crunch, KitKat, Baby Ruth, and Butterfin- gers), and Kraft Foods (which also uses chocolate in its baking and breakfast products). Less well known, but a key part of the industry, are the names of ADM Co., Barry Callebaut, and Cargil Inc., all of whom serve as middlemen who buy the cocoa beans from Ivory Coast, grind and process them, and then sell the pro- cessed cocoa to the chocolate manufacturers. Pressure Leads to Action That many farmers in Ivory Coast use slave boys to farm their cocoa beans was already known to American chocolate- makers when media reports first began publicizing the issue at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2001, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a trade group of U.S. chocolate manufacturers (whose members include Hershey, Mars, Nestl, and others) admitted to newspapers that they had been aware of the use of slave boys on Ivory Coast cocoa farms for some time. Pressured by various antislavery groups, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association stated on June 22, 2001, that it "condemned these practices" and agreed to fund a "study of the situation. On June 28, 2001, U.S. Representative Elot Engel spon- sored a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that aimed at setting up a labeling system that would inform consumers whether the chocolate they were buying was "slave-free" (.e.. guaranteed not to have been produced by slave children). The measure passed the House by a vote of 291 to 115. However, when U.S. Senator Tom Harkin introduced the same bil in the Senate, it met resistance. The U.S. chocolate industry-led by Mars, Hershey, Kraft Foods and ADM and with the help of lob- byists Bob Dole and George Mitchel-mounted a major lobby- ing effort to fight the "slave-free" labeling system. The companies argued that a labeling system would not only hurt their own sales, but in the long run could hurt poor African cocoa farmers by reducing their sales and lowering the price of cocoa, which would add to the very pressures that led them to use slave labor in the first place. As a result of the industry's lobbying, the "slave-free" labeling bill was never approved by the Senate and so never became law. Nevertheless, Representative Engeland Senator Harkin threatened to introduce a new bil that would prohibit the import of cocoa produced by slave labor, unless the growing techniques, while explaining the importance of avoiding chocolate companies voluntarily eliminated slave labor from their the use of slave labor. The members of the Chocolate Manufac- production chains. turers Association also agreed to investigate" conditions on the The members of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association cocoa farms and establish an international foundation that and the World Cocoa Foundation, caught in the spotlight of could oversee and sustain efforts to eliminate child slavery media attention, announced on October 1, 2001, that they on cocoa farms. In July 2002, the first survey sponsored by the intended to put in place a system that would eliminate the Chocolate Manufacturers Association concluded that some worst forms of child labor, including slavery. In spring 2002, the 200,000 children, not all of them slaves-were working in haz- Chocolate Manufacturers Association and the World Cocoa ardous conditions on cocoa farms and that most of them did Foundation as well as the major chocolate producers- not attend school Hershey's, M&M Mars, Nestl, and World's Finest Chocolate- Unfortunately, in 2002, Ivory Coast became embrolled in a and the major cocoa processors - Blommer Chocolate, Guittard civil war that continued until an uneasy peace was established in Chocolate, Barry Callebaut, and ADM-all signed an agreement 2005 and finalized in 2007. Rebel forces, however, continued to to establish a system of certification that would verify and certify control the northern half of the country. Reports claimed that that the cocoa beans they used were not produced by the use much of the money funding the violence of both the government of child slaves. Known as the "Harkin-Engel Protocol," the and rebel groups during these years came from sales of cocoa, agreement also said the chocolate companies would fund train and that buyers of "blood chocolate from Ivory Coast were sup- ing programs for cocoa bean farmers to educate them about porting this violence Far from Achieving Goals The 2005 deadline the major chocolate companies and their associations had set came and passed without the promised establishment of a certification system to ensure cocoa beans were not being produced by slave children. At this point, the chocolate companies amended the protocol to give themselves more time by extending their own deadline to July 2008, saying that the certification process had turned out to be more difficult than they thought it would, particularly with the outbreak of a civil war. Although the companies did not establish a certification sys- tem while the civil war raged, they did manage to secure enough cocoa beans to keep their chocolate factories going at ful speed throughout the war. By early 2008, the companies had still not started work on establishing a certification system or any other method of ensuring that slave labor was not used to produce the cocoa beans they used. On February 15, 2006, Fortune magazine reported that child slavery in Ivory Coast was still a continuing problem and that the chocolate companies were doing virtually nothing to eliminate it. The companies issued a new statement in which they extended to 2010 their deadline for complying with their promise to estab lish a certification system. According to the companies, they had been investing several million dollars a year into a foundation that was working on the problem of child labor. However, the investi- gative reporter who wrote the 2008 Fortune article stated that the foundation had only one staff member working in Ivory Coast. Moreover, the activities of that lone staff member were limited to giving 'sensitization workshops to local people, during which he would explain that child labor is a bad thing. The foundation was also helping a shelter that provided housing and education to homeless street children. The Fortune reporter found no evidence that anything was being done to develop the promised certifica- tion system. By now monitoring and certification systems had been developed and were being used on fair trade and organic cocoa farms in other parts of the world. Although some of these systems had been functioning for several years, the chocolate companies who sourced their cocoa from Ivory Coast seemed unable or uninterested in learning from their example. On September 30, 2010, the Payson Center at Tulane Uni- versity issued a report on the progress that had been made on the certification system the chocolate industry had promised to establish, as well as on the progress the industry had made regarding its promise to eliminate the worst forms of child labor" from Ivory Coast cocoa farms. The report was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor, which had been asked by Con- gress to assess progress on the "Harkin-Engel Protocol," and which gave Tulane University an initial grant of $4.3 million in 2006 and an additional $1.2 million in 2009 to compile the report. According to the report, "Industry is still far from achieving its tar- get to have a sector-wide independently verified certification pro- cessfully in place ... by the end of 2010." The report found that between 2002-the date of the original agreement-and Sep- tember 2010, the industry had managed to contact only about 95 (2.3 percent) of Ivory Coast's cocoa farming communities. and that to complete its "remediation efforts," it would have to contact an additional 3,655 farm communities. While the Tulane group confirmed that forced child labor was being used on the cocoa farms, it also found that no industry efforts to "remediate the use of forced labor are in place."Two video documentaries - The Dark Side of Chocolate and Chocolate: The Bitter Truth - reported on the continuing use of enslaved children on Ivory Coast farms in 2010. Representatives of the chocolate compa- nies interviewed in the films denied the problem or claimed they did not know anything about it. By the middle of 2010, it was clear that the companies would again fail to meet their deadline. So on September 13, 2010, they signed yet another agreement promising now to reduce the worst forms of child labor in the cocoa sectors of Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast and Ghana... by 70 percent in aggre- gate" by the year 2020. This time, they agreed to work with the U.S. Department of Labor, Senator Harkin's Office, and the Gov- ernment of Ghana to achieve this goal. The problem of certification remained unresolved as 2011 began. The manufacturers and distributors buying Ivory Coast cocoa beans seemed unable to find a way to 'certify" that slavery was not used to harvest the cocoa beans they purchased. Rep- resentatives of the chocolate companies argued that the problem of certification was difficult because there are more than 600,000 cocoa farms in Ivory Coast, most of them small family farms located in remote rural regions that are difficult to reach and that lack good roads and other infrastructure. Critics, however, pointed out that these difficulties did not seem to pose any obsta- cles to obtaining cocoa beans from those same farms. In February 2011, fighting between the rebels in the north and the Ivory Coast government in the south broke out again for a brief period in a dispute over who was the legitimate winner of the 2010 presidential election. The fighting ended in April 2011, when one of the candidates finally conceded the election, allow- ing the other candidate, Alassane Ouattara, to be declared the legitimate president. The fighting, however, provided the choco- late companies with another reason for being unable to imple- ment a certification system. Mixed Responses Although the industry still seemed to be dragging its feet, some companies had begun to develop their own responses to the call for a certification system. Hershey, for example, announced in 2012 that it had asked the Rainforest Alliance (an NGO head- quartered in New York with offices around the world to imple- ment a certification system for its Dagoba and Bliss lines of chocolate products. In 2013 Hershey announced that by 2020 its entire cocoa supply would come from certified farms, and in 2014 it reported that 18% of its cocoa supply was certified by the Rainforest Alliance or other NGOs. Nestle announced that by 2014 the cocoa used in its kit Kat candy would be certified by UTZ Certified (an NGO headquartered in Amsterdam that pro- vides traceability services for palm oil, tea, and cocoa). Kraft/ Cadbury announced that, like Hershey, it was working to have the Rainforest Aliance certify its cocoa. With the new presidency of Alassane Ouattara, the govern- ment of Ivory Coast also began to try to deal with the problem of child slavery and child labor. In 2012, the government launched a "National Action Plan Against Trafficking, Exploitation, and Child Labor" and created a Joint Ministerial Committee for "the Fight against Trafficking, Exploitation, and Child Labor." But the Com- mittee lacked resources. Only 25 government labor inspectors worked on child labor, and total funds budgeted to fight child labor were only the equivalent of US$588,566. Because of the lack of funds and vehicles, no labor inspections were carried out in the agricultural sector. The national police of the Ministry of Justice was charged with enforcing criminal laws against child trafficking and forced child labor, but in 2012 only five police offi- cers were assigned to the anti-trafficking unit, and they had to share one vehicle and only investigated seven cases that year; five additional officers were hired in 2013. In the United States, three former child slaves sued Nestl, ADM, and Cargil, claiming that the companies knew that the farm- ers supplying their cocoa were using child slaves, yet the compa- nies continued to support the farmers by buying their cocoa; although they controlled the Ivory Coast cocoa market, the suit claimed, the companies had failed to use their control to stop slav- ery and instead facilitated it. The three former slaves based their lawsuit on the Alen Tort Statute, a federal law that allows foreigners to sue companies that participate in violations of their human rights. Although a district court initially dismissed the case, in 2014, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the district court and allowed the case to proceed. The three former slaves charged that they were trafficked as children into Ivory Coast and forced to work for 14 hours a day on cocoa farms. According to the lawsuit, they were fed scraps and frequently whipped and beaten. One said he saw guards cut open the feet of children who tried to escape. While some cocoa is now being certified as "slave-free," the great majority of the cocoa sourced from Ivory Coast is not. The cocoa beans tainted by the labor of slave boys are, therefore, stil being quietly mixed together in bins and warehouses with cocoa beans harvested by free paid workers, so that the two are indis- tinguishable. From there, they still make their way into the now tainted chocolate candies that Hershey's, M&M Mars, Nestl, and Kraft Foods make and that we buy here and in Europe. With- out an effective system of certification, much of the chocolate we eat that is made from West African (Ivory Coast and Ghana) cocoa probably contains a portion of tainted chocolate made from beans harvested by enslaved children