Bitter Chocolate (18 page)

Developing countries whose leaders had attempted to stave off ruin by accumulating massive debts—which often served to cover up their own greed—now turned to the World Bank for salvation. Côte d'Ivoire had become one of the most indebted countries in the world, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny lined up with the others for financial assistance.

The World Bank and the IMF had only one prescription for all the debtor nations that showed up in their waiting rooms: the shock therapy of liberalization. The bankrupted countries would have to dismantle their agricultural boards, cease to provide any subsidies to industry and desist from anything but the most nominal role in their own economic affairs. The directives insisted that all government programs be slashed or eliminated; that civil service be cut to the bone; and that health care, education and public infrastructure be reduced to a minimum. People were told to expect to pay user fees even to see a doctor. Currencies had to be devalued. Debtor nations found themselves growing crops for export while importing most of their food (mainly from the U.S.).
State enterprises were privatized and sold (usually to foreign multinational corporations), and commodities floated on the open market, where they would usually sell for the lowest price possible. These were called Structural Adjustment Programs—SAPs—an acronym that perfectly described what SAPs do to the lifeblood of suffering societies.

Houphouët-Boigny took his medicine—or, rather, his citizens did. Côte d'Ivoire turned itself over to the two institutions in 1989, just as the basilica reached completion, taking six World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans over the next five years and attempting to absorb the excruciating pain of the SAPs. The World Bank zeroed in on agriculture, and in particular the cocoa industry. Houphouët-Boigny had established an agency called CAISTAB—Le Caisse de Stabilization—to guarantee a base price for cacao farmers no matter what the unpredictable commodities markets were doing. Under the shock therapy of liberalization, CAISTAB had to go.

Farmers, many of whom were uneducated, with no access to stock market figures, found themselves stranded, tossed rudderless onto the sea of Reaganomics liberalism. The cocoa market became a free-for-all, and the farmers, without CAISTAB's subsidies, started to lose large amounts of money. Small-business loans had been available in the past, but under the SAPs these no longer existed. The purchasing power of the producers and the small businesses they depended on began to collapse as the Côte d'Ivoire currency lost value on the foreign exchange markets. And to top it all off, the international market price for cocoa beans dipped to its lowest in decades.

None of this had any effect on the chocolate companies and multinational food exporters—quite the contrary. The prices were low, and farmers were increasing their yields in a desperate attempt to generate more income. Cocoa exports from Côte d'Ivoire increased as the price sank. At the same time, more countries, mostly in Asia, were now producing cocoa with the
encouragement of the World Bank and the IMF, flooding the market with beans and driving down prices even further.

Liberalization triumphed all through the 1980s and '90s, while cocoa values rode the market roller coaster with little regard for economic reality. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) listed cocoa among the most volatile and unpredictable commodities in the world. It declared, in one of its otherwise cautious reviews, that the ideology of liberalization was the direct cause of the freefall in the price of cocoa.

Commodities exchanges in London and New York became the custodians of the lives of Ivorian cocoa producers thousands of miles away. Speculators played the hedge market, guessing what price cocoa beans might fetch in the future and basing their predictions on myriad factors such as weather, disease and pestilence, world stock supplies and war. A rumour of a possible
coup d'état
could send prices soaring, while wild speculation about a bumper crop could push prices in the other direction. By purchasing futures, a company with accurate information can lock down prices that turn into bonanzas when predictable circumstances come to pass. But only people with money to spare can play these odds. And when the commodity is as vulnerable to caprice as cocoa, competent speculators can—and do—make a lot of money quickly.

Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, Côte d'Ivoire lost its miracle. Multinational corporations took control of the industry through the leverage of SAPs, and by the end of the 1990s a small handful of foreign firms controlled almost all of Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa production. The Belgian and Swiss giants Barry Callebaut and Nestlé and the American food conglomerates Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland cornered world markets, becoming suppliers to the European and U.S. manufacturers that had run the business since the previous century.

Félix Houphouët-Boigny continued to lose strength over the two and a half decades of his presidency. Near the end, he belatedly
offered his people some elements of democracy, including open elections to assuage their other woes. But with the jobless rate soaring, along with inflation, a free vote was little comfort. As an octogenarian, he retreated to his artificial capital and his Vatican in the jungle. He passed away in 1993, just a few years after Pope John Paul II consecrated Our Lady of Peace Basilica. Houphouët-Boigny wouldn't see Côte d'Ivoire descend into war and chaos, nor would he know that his precious cocoa sector would fall victim to some of the most corrupt and criminal exploitation in Africa.

By the end of the millennium, Côte d'Ivoire was one of the most indebted nations on earth, even as it supplied almost half of the world's cocoa to the multi-billion-dollar industry and helped to satisfy the world's addiction to chocolate. Cocoa farmers slid deeper and deeper into poverty, and they began to look for cheaper ways to produce their beans. They turned to the same old scourge that has plagued cocoa growing since its inception—slavery.

A
BDOULAYE
M
ACKO SETTLES HIS LARGE FRAME INTO
an armchair at the Grand Hotel in Mali's capital city of Bamako and looks about to see if he knows anyone in the lobby. His caftan robes are fraying, and his once elegant white shoes are worn through in several places. He has the appearance and demeanour one would expect from an out-of-work diplomat in the Republic of Mali who is trying to keep his place in society. It has been five years since he had to suspend what came to be his driving mission in life: liberating conscripted child workers from the cocoa farms of Côte d'Ivoire.

Macko orders a plate of buttery croissants and a big bowl of café au lait, consumes everything with zeal and orders more. I was warned by a local aid worker who knows Macko that he is a freeloader and would probably ask me for money. But aside from the obvious fact that he's famished—he had left at dawn and travelled two hours on public transportation to keep our appointment—the unemployed civil servant seems to want little more than a patient listener for a long and disturbing story. And I am more than willing to oblige.

Macko had been the Malian consul general in Bouaké, in central Côte d'Ivoire, until his government recalled him in 2000. He never really learned why he was withdrawn and then “retired,” but he can guess that it was because, in the eyes of his political masters, he had caused too much trouble. I had confirmed this much prior to our conversation.

Macko is a classic whistle-blower. In the late 1990s, he began to hear stories that disturbed him greatly. Bouaké is in the heart of the cocoa-producing sector of Côte d'Ivoire, where thousands of Malians—tens of thousands at peak season—live and work on the farms. In addition to the large numbers of people who came to Côte d'Ivoire from Mali and other poor West African countries under the benevolent eye of Félix Houphouët-Boigny and who have farmed their own plots of land for as many as four decades, a small army of Malian men and older boys descend into the fertile cocoa belt each season to earn extra money as hired labourers. It has been a mutually beneficial arrangement for decades.

But Macko learned of another category of labour that he couldn't quite fathom. What his informers described sounded a lot like slavery, and what made the stories even more horrifying was that it seemed the slaves were children. Surely it wasn't possible! Slavery and all the euphemisms for it—bonded labour, conscript, coolie—had, supposedly, ended long ago. There had been laws against that type of thing for years.

The tribes of what is now called Mali have a long, even ancient, history of itinerant labour, and stories of migration are embedded in their history and their mythology. At the end of each domestic harvest period, after new seed is planted on their own farms, it's traditionally time to leave home and look for work elsewhere for a period of a few months. Malians often call the workers “sequoias,” referring to a migrant bird that heads south at the same time. It's so common for people to move around looking for work that most families are not surprised when even the
youngest declare they are leaving in order to make some money. People presume that other Malians will keep an eye on them. It's the Malian way to look after one other, whether they are travelling to the next village or a neighbouring country or, in modern times, seeking new lives in Europe or North America. Children and teenagers have, for ages, commuted safely within this custom-sanctioned system, often watched by uncles, aunts and cousins of their extended families

But Macko heard about child labour that didn't fit this traditional pattern. It certainly had similarities, but these were stories of boys, some as young as nine, who were working on farms where they had no relatives. This information alone was enough to trigger alarm bells for a Malian. Macko also heard they weren't being paid. The witnesses, Malian men employed as transporters for the cocoa beans, came to tell the diplomat they were witnessing situations in which very young boys worked at gunpoint. It was difficult to obtain details—they weren't encouraged to pry into what seemed to be a clandestine system. But the
pisteurs
managed to talk to some of the young people and learned details of their plight.

The farmers, or their supervisors, were working the young people almost to death. The boys had little to eat, slept in bunkhouses that were locked during the night, and were frequently beaten. They had horrible sores on their backs and shoulders, some as a result of carrying the heavy bags of cocoa, but some likely the effects of physical abuse.

There was also evidence of more sinister activity. The
pisteurs
were convinced that the farmers were paying organized groups of smugglers to deliver the children to their cocoa groves, and they told Macko that the Côte d'Ivoire police were being bribed to look the other way. The child traffickers worked in teams: a Malian man along with one from Côte d'Ivoire, and often a third from Burkina Faso, a country that was also a source of child workers.

Macko could have ignored what he heard, or passed on the information to the authorities and washed his hands of the whole affair. After all, it was probably only a small number of boys. Malians are survivors. Eventually, they'd solve this on their own. And most of the complaints were likely just exaggerations. Who would dare use slave children in the 1990s? Instead, Macko became deeply preoccupied with what he heard and, in time, obsessed with rescuing the boys.

As a diplomat, his own activities were circumscribed, so he commissioned Malians in the region to investigate the allegations and eventually he had a network of spies that included
pisteurs
, shepherds, sharecroppers and farmers, some Malian, others Burkinabè. From his network, Macko learned that many people were aware of what was going on; some of his informants had even seen the abuse first-hand. As the investigation deepened, more and more people came forward with distressing stories. Macko was convinced there was a substantial contingent of child labourers, all working under horrendous conditions.

He invented reasons to visit cocoa farmers and, while among them, made casual inquiries about the itinerant Malian workers. How were they performing? Were they well? All normal concerns of their government's representative. Some of the farmers told the consul general that the child workers on their farms were members of their own families, or that they were relatives. It was plausible, since children of extended families in agricultural communities frequently work alongside the adults. Then there were farmers who admitted openly that they had paid money for the children—and what of it? The farmer would compensate whoever delivered the labour force. He'd get his money back through their labour. He'd pay them wages once those original costs were recovered—if there was enough money to go around after the harvest and the systemic manipulations of cocoa traders. But Macko knew that, without family members looking after
their interests, the children were at the mercy of the farmers. Given what he knew of human nature and the cocoa business, it was highly probable that few of the young workers, if any, were being paid at all.

Macko asked if he could visit with the children. When permission was denied, he invoked diplomatic privilege and asked the Côte d'Ivoire police for an escort. At first, the authorities were reluctant. Macko suspected that many of the cops were on the take, but after a few unannounced visits to the farms, even the police were seeing the sordid picture. Sometimes the children ran away when they saw the police arriving. They'd been warned in advance that the police might show up to arrest them and that they should flee to avoid the terrors of detention. Eventually word spread among the children that there was a brave Malian official who was trying to help them. Gradually, the children started talking.