Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This motion essentially has two elements: recognition of the 10th anniversary of the Harkin-Engel protocol and a list of suggestions as to how this country can be more active on the broader question of slavery internationally. It calls for Australia to raise the issue in international fora, to be more effective on tracing products and to be mindful of these issues in regard to government purchasing policy. The main element is the legislation of the United States, and I also want to congratulate the Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans group—it is often around this parliament, dealing with the question, more specifically, of sexual slavery—for raising this matter with me and the seconder.

Global sales of chocolate were in the order of $100 billion as of 2009. Predominantly, the production is in West Africa—more particularly, in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. There was a pledge by companies that they would adhere to ILO convention 182 on the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. There was much fanfare and I certainly congratulate those people who tried to do something within the US Congress. However, a report by Tulane University has indicated that the large chocolate manufacturers have not really adhered to their commitments. The university noted that in a survey of the results of the protocol in the period of 12 months from 2007-08, for instance, there were 820,000 children working in cocoa related activities in Ivory Coast and just under a million in Ghana.

The industry is characterised by some endemic problems that are difficult to overcome. There is a lack of farmer power and impoverishment of farmers, and one of the realities in this issue in Africa is the fact that it is often the parents, the uncles and the other relatives who are employing these children under abominable conditions. There is also environmental deterioration and price instability caused by the power of the large companies. Internationally, 10 companies dominate half of the international cocoa bean and liquid chocolate industry. That means that there is an imbalance in regard to negotiations. Of course, in Ivory Coast over the last few years the internal struggle over the presidential elections has affected the ability to do anything about it.

I indicate that we are seeing some progress. Cadbury, in particular, has announced that its Dairy Milk chocolate will be sourced from Fairtrade cocoa, and other companies are starting to move in this direction. However, there is still a need for international campaigns around this issue, and World Vision, amongst others, has called for a guarantee to farmers of a fair price for their cocoa and the elimination of exploitable labour for cocoa production by 2018. There is a need for independent oversight of what actually occurs and a public standard certification process. One of the problems in the field is that there are a number of rival certification codes. Whilst there are claims that a larger amount of cocoa is under Fairtrade conditions, significant parts of that claim by the major corporations are not actually certified by any of the three main operations.

The Stop the Traffik coalition is a group of 100 member organisations in 50 countries, established in 2006, which has manifestly been very strong in regard to this matter. I recommend this motion to note the need for continued international activity, respect the efforts that have been made by a significant number of non-government organisations and make sure that there is activity in the marketplace in this country. In a broader sense there are also a number of requirements put to the Australian government in regard to it playing a more frontline position on the broader issue of child slavery.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have great pleasure in seconding this motion, which notes that it is the 10th anniversary of the Harkin-Engel Protocol, which aimed to help bring an end to the use of forced child labour in cocoa production. The protocol drew attention to the plight of trafficked children in the cocoa plantations of West Africa, notably in Cote D'Ivoire and Ghana. West Africa produces some 70 per cent of the world's cocoa.

Australia, of course, is no stranger to the use of forced child labour in our developing regional economies. It is part of our history. I am not referring to the convict children, who were perhaps a special case, but in particular to enslaved Aboriginal children from the turn of the 19th century to the early 20th century when the Royal Commission on the Administration of Aborigines and the Condition of the Natives, an inquiry of the Western Australian parliament tabled in 1905, detailed the uses and abuses of children in some industry sectors. Evidence of one resident magistrate who appeared before Commissioner Roth at the royal commission said:

The child is bound and can be reached by law and punished, but the person to whom the child is bound is apparently responsible to nobody. Even the Chief Protector is obliged to admit the injustice of the system where, taking a concrete case, a child of tender years may be indentured to a mistress as a domestic up to 21 years of age, and receives neither education or payment in return for the services rendered.

Commissioner Roth also found that:

At Broome … quite half the children from ten years and upwards [were] indentured to the pearling industry and taken out in the boats.

Children were enslaved usually from the age of six into the remote pearling industry, prostitution, the pastoral industry and as domestics in early Australia. The 1904 royal commission did recommend that indentured children be sent to schools, when they were available, and that some should even be paid. But decades later British migrant children were forced to work in Australia for little education and no pay, usually on farms, as part of various post-war empire orphan resettlement programs. So, we are no strangers to the horrors of exploitation of children in our own great nation. We must therefore double our efforts to ensure that the lessons from our own history and the legacy of damage and suffering for those once forced to labour are not wasted when it comes to our commitment to international efforts to stop child labour abuse wherever it occurs.

There have been various estimates of the numbers of children exploited in the production of cocoa, a $100 billion industry. It is calculated that there are more than 100,000 children in the Cote D'Ivoire's cocoa industry alone who work under the worst forms of child labour and some 10,000 of them were trafficked as slaves. Ten years ago in 2001 in the United States, the world's biggest consumer of chocolate, two politicians, Tom Harkin a US senator from Iowa and US Congressman Eliot Engel from New York, developed a protocol, which set out a voluntary code with six actions, which was signed by representatives of the World Cocoa Foundation and the then Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a bevy of other large manufacturers and a representative of the Cote D'Ivoire. The protocol required acknowledgement of the child labour problems by cocoa producer nations, the formation of multi-sectoral advisory groups, joint statements witnessed by the ILO, a memorandum of cooperation and the establishment of a joint foundation.

The Harkin-Engel Protocol drew on the International Labour Organisation Convention No. 182 adopted in June 1999, which Australia has ratified, and which focuses on the elimination of all of the so-called worst forms of child labour. The ILO convention definition of 'the worst forms of child labour' include:

(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;

(b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;

(c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties;

…   …   …

Ten years on it seems that the industry has failed to fully implement any of these six steps to eliminate the worst labour abuses in the cocoa industry. Not much has changed on the ground. Unfortunately the Harkin-Engel Protocol was always voluntary with no enforcement mechanisms, and agreement of an effective guarantee that could be used to assure customers that their cocoa was free of the worst forms of child abuse was never agreed. Independent oversight of standards was dismantled and the industry failed to establish a credible certification system in any form. So-called ethically certified chocolate, defined as product that has not used 'forced, child or trafficked labour', makes up only some five per cent of the global market today. According to the World Vision report called Our guilty pleasure: exploitation of child labourin thechocolate industry10 years on from the Harkin-Engel cocoa protocol, published in April 2011, has found that some well-known chocolate and cocoa product brands in Australia, like ALDI, Mars and Cadbury, acknowledge the problem of the use of child labour in the industry, and all of them claim to invest in local farmers in the industry. But, with the exception of Coca-Cola, none of these companies sell an entire product range in Australia that is from ethical sources. Obviously, the lower prices paid for non-conforming product means that there are many chocolate manufacturers who do not find it economical or convenient to identify or talk about their product labour sources and conditions.

Researchers have found that few cocoa farmers are aware of child-trafficking conventions and the fact that it is illegal to employ and abuse children in that way. Neither the West African governments nor the chocolate industry internationally have done much to inform farmers of the children's rights or domestic laws concerning forced and abusive child labour. The child trafficking that takes place in the cocoa plantations and factories is of children from Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and from within Ivory Coast. It is driven by poverty, little access to education, little official supervision and non-existent punishment for traffickers.

In the Netherlands, one of the global hubs in the world's cocoa supply chain and home to the world's largest chocolate factories, the Dutch government has now determined that it will have transitioned 50 per cent of its chocolate or cocoa consumption to ethically and sustainably sourced plantations by 2015, and all of it, 100 per cent, by 2025. That is commendable.

Australia is doing a great job supporting schools in the slums of Accra, in Ghana, and I have had the privilege of visiting some of these; little girls can now go to school because the Australian aid program has built them some toilets. We have to make sure that those little girls do not end up working in situations where they are not paid or where they are denied future education.

We need to acknowledge that in Australia there is trafficking of women for exploitation in the sex industry, and we know there have been some rescues of people found trafficked into or enslaved as immigrant labour in some of our restaurants. Australia has an old history of child exploitation. We need to make sure that in this new, modern era the Australian government is proactive about measures to counter people-trafficking or slavery wherever it is found. We have to actively engage in international fora to ensure greater priority for the consideration of measures against child slavery and trafficking. We must work cooperatively. Like the mover of this motion, the member for Werriwa, I commend the women from the Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans group who brought this particular problem and the issue of this convention to my attention. I hope that, in the future, Australia is one of the global leaders in making sure that no child is abused or exploited and that every child has an opportunity to grow, to be educated and to work as an adult—but not be exploited as a child.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Werriwa on moving this motion, as I know he has been having a bit of a hard time in his electorate with the carbon tax and pokies debates. I welcome the opportunity that he has given me to contribute to his motion on the Harkin-Engel Protocol and the practice of forced child labour.

Chocolate is the final product in the manufacturing process that begins with cocoa beans, the seeds of a tree that only thrives within 10 degrees on either side of the equator. Some 70 to 75 per cent of the world's cocoa beans are grown on small farms in West Africa, including in Ivory Coast, which is the world's leading supplier of cocoa. However, the production of chocolate has a dark side.

In 2001, following various media stories of trafficked children and forced labour in cocoa production in West Africa, US Congressman Eliot Engel introduced a bill requiring the US Food and Drug Administration to develop 'slave-free' labelling requirements for all cocoa products. Although the bill passed the US House of Representatives, it never made it through the Senate, and a compromise known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol was reached that required chocolate companies to voluntarily certify that they had stopped the practice of child labour. But, 10 years on, the effectiveness of this protocol is questionable. The US Department of State recently estimated that more than 109,000 children in the Ivory Coast cocoa industry work under 'the worst forms of child labour' and that another 10,000 or more are victims of human trafficking and enslavement. This evidence demonstrates that the original intent of the protocol has not been achieved.

It is poverty that is the root cause of child labour, and it is the low cocoa prices received by farmers that causes this poverty and drives farmers to employ children as a means of survival. Although there has been a recent modest increase in cocoa prices, today the price of cocoa is only marginally higher than it was 25 years ago, despite increasing costs. Therefore, to tackle the problem of child labour in the chocolate supply chain it is necessary to tackle the reasons that cocoa prices received by farmers are depressed. As US congressman Wright Patman once famously noted:

The farmer must have competition in the marketplace. If he has to deal with giant monopolies either buying or selling, he perforce becomes an economic slave.

That appears to be the problem in the chocolate supply chain. A United Nations publication titled Cocoa Study: Industry Structures and Competition recently noted that the cocoa-chocolate supply chain is marked by significant concentration at various stages along the chain and the market has become increasingly concentrated over time following a series of mergers between large multinationals. For example, the three largest purchasers of cocoa produced by Cameroon are reported to control some 95 per cent of that country's production, and following a series of mergers and acquisitions in the chocolate industry five companies alone—Nestle, Ferrero, Mars, Kraft and Cadbury—have come to control more than half of the European market for consumer chocolate. This aggregate figure masks a high degree of concentration in specific national markets and for specific product categories.

The UN study further noted that, at origin, producers do not have bargaining power vis-a-vis a handful of large and major exporters, and that there seems to be a structural imbalance, upstream in the cocoa supply chain, between cocoa producers, with a structure of production characterised by the predominance of small-scale producers, and large buyers with monopsony power. Everywhere that we see excessive market concentration, it is the consumer that pays more and more while the producer receives less and less. Exactly the same applies to chocolate. The UN report concluded that legislation may well need to be considered by commodity-producing countries in designing competition laws and in developing rules to deal with abuse of market power in the cocoa sector.

In conclusion, the extreme poverty in East Africa means that simply boycotting all non-Fairtrade labelled products could have the opposite of the intended effect. If we are to tackle the problems identified by the Harkin-Engel Protocol where that protocol has failed, competition authorities worldwide need a greater understanding of the link between increased poverty, child labour and monopsony or buyer power arising from increased market concentration.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I first spoke on this issue of child exploitation in the production of cocoa and chocolate back on 20 October 2008. That was a debate on a motion moved by the member for Sturt, and on that occasion he spoke very strongly about the need to act now to stop the exploitation of children in West Africa, or the Ivory Coast. When I spoke on that occasion I highlighted the fact that West Africa supplies nearly 80 per cent of the world's cocoa. Large producers such as Cadbury, Nestle and Hershey buy cocoa from the Ivory Coast and then mix it with other cocoas. Thirty per cent of children in sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in child labour, mostly in agricultural activities including cocoa farming. They are very disturbing figures.

Since I made that speech and since the signing of the Harkin-Engel Protocol, all the available evidence suggests that child exploitation remains rife in cocoa plantations despite the protocol and the best actions of many countries. Over a 12-month period in 2007-08, 819,920 children were working on cocoa related activities on the Ivory Coast and 997,357 were doing so in Ghana. Fifteen per cent of the children surveyed reported being forced into working involuntarily over the 12-month period. Nearly 50 per cent of the children working on cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast and over 50 per cent in Ghana reported injuries from their work over the year. Thousands of children travel from really impoverished neighbourhoods and from impoverished countries to cocoa plantations on the Ivory Coast. Some of them are living in substandard conditions and receive little or no pay. This emphasises the need for this protocol and for the protocol to be made more effective.

The Harkin-Engel Protocol resulted from an agreement in 2001 on voluntary action by cocoa processors and the chocolate industry to collaborate on eliminating the worst forms of child labour from their supply chain. It has not happened. The protocol set out time-bound steps to be taken so that the world could enjoy chocolate with a clear conscience. Many of my friends and staff members really enjoy chocolate, but it is hard to do so when you know about the misery and suffering that is associated with its production. The voluntary nature of the protocol, plus the fact that there are no enforcement mechanisms, meant that this was never really going to work. As the industry worked together to establish and fund a new foundation to attack the worst forms of child labour, critics watched and could see that it was not going to work. Here we are 10 years later, and things have not changed very much.

I would like to emphasise to the parliament that three of the five leading chocolate companies in the Australian market have either launched or will be launching this year their No. 1 selling brand under an ethical certification for their cocoa sourcing. Cadbury, now owned by Kraft, is sourcing Fairtrade certified cocoa for their Dairy Milk chocolate range. I encourage all members to be very mindful when they are buying chocolate, to read the label and to encourage their constituents to purchase Fairtrade chocolate and to emphasise the importance of buying chocolate that is produced ethically. (Time expired)

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This parliament strongly opposes the use of forced child labour or other forms of child exploitation. The Harkin-Engel Protocol has been an important stepping stone in bringing the matter into the public arena and encouraging chocolate companies to open their eyes to the practices in West Africa. This protocol is an international agreement aimed at ending child labour in the production of cocoa.

The protocol laid out a series of data-specific actions working to eliminate the worst forms of child labour. Key actions included the development of a public certification system for cocoa farming, a credible, mutually acceptable voluntary process which would give a public accounting of labour practices in this type of farming. It also gave a commitment to establish a joint international foundation to serve as a clearing house on best practices to eliminate child labour and drive remediation efforts on the ground.

Consumers now have the opportunity to play an active role in discouraging child labour practices by choosing not to purchase chocolate from companies which fail to certify their product free from the use of forced child labour. Public pressure resulted in the decision last year by Cadbury to use the Fairtrade logo on its Dairy Milk bars, which requires it to certify that the cocoa was sourced from farmers in Africa with ethical practices. Similarly, Arnott's announced in 2010 that the chocolate used to make Tim Tams would be sourced from farmers certified by the Fairtrade scheme. All too often we are flooded with foods we know to have been grown using cheap labour, with workers paid a mere fraction of our stringent minimum pay, and some foods which have been subjected to sprays and contaminants our farmers are not allowed to use and would not use. Our quarantine procedures are tight, but little more than a week ago I observed in New Zealand apples ready for shipment to Australia being washed in the same water which had been used on apples sprayed with streptomycin destined for other markets in other countries. If we are going to be fair dinkum about spurning chocolates for one reason or another, we should also be just as consistent about targeting apples, whether they be from China, New Zealand or wherever.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 9 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 41. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed on a future day