Gates Foundation grant for cocoa group raises a rights issue (child labor)

[Omaha Steve]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008771365_gates22m.html

Originally published Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 12:00 AM

Gates Foundation grant for cocoa group raises a rights issue
When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation granted $48 million last week to help West African cocoa and cashew farmers, it stepped into...

By Kristi Heim

Seattle Times business reporter

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation granted $48 million last week to help West African cocoa and cashew farmers, it stepped into an industry that has a bitter history with child-labor problems.

Its $23 million grant to a cocoa-industry group is raising questions about labor rights.

The foundation said it will give $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation and $25 million to a German development agency, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit, to help farmers in West Africa improve production and obtain higher prices for their products.

The nonprofit World Cocoa Foundation represents 70 chocolate companies, and many have not lived up to an agreement they signed to stop the worst forms of child labor in their cocoa-supply chains, the International Labor Rights Forum contends.

West African farmers, including young children, supply 70 percent of the world's cocoa, earning just $30 to $110 a year, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

Almost eight years after the major chocolate companies signed an agreement called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, they have not instituted programs to ensure that they are complying with international labor standards, says Tim Newman, the labor forum's campaigns assistant in Washington, D.C.

FULL story at link.