Child slaves can sue Nestlé for cocoa plantation abuses, court rules

The U.S. Supreme Court this month refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Nestlé and two other companies claiming they knew of child slavery at cocoa plantations in West Africa.

Three anonymous former child slaves from Mali first filed the lawsuit in 2005. They said they carried 100-pound bags of cocoa and were exposed to dangerous working conditions on plantations. They worked 12-14 hours per day, six days a week without pay, and received only scraps of food to eat. Their masters severely beat them with whips and tree branches for attempting to flee. At night, the children slept on the floor in a small, locked room with a tin can as their toilet. One slave, known as John Doe II, witnessed the guards cutting open the feet of other small children who tried to escape. Another slave, “John Doe III,” knew of guards who forced children to drink their own urine.

West Africa produces most of the global cocoa supply, much of it heading to the United States. Child trafficking has plagued the industry for years. In 2001, several corporations halted a congressional bill that would have created a consumer label on cocoa products certifying the ingredients were not grown or harvested using child labor. Instead, Congress adopted a voluntary agreement with corporations to work toward ending the practice.

Meanwhile, child slavery in West Africa continued to grow. In July 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor reported there were 2.12 million child slaves in Ivory Coast and Ghana working in cocoa production, more than double the number in 2014.

“Every time you eat their chocolate you are benefitting from child slavery,” said Patti Rundall, policy director at International Baby Food Action Network. “There is very little cocoa production that isn’t sourced in a bad way, and it will take a long time to change that due to the nature of large corporations.”

Nestlé claims it has made efforts to curb child trafficking. “The use of child labor is unacceptable and goes against everything Nestlé stands for,” the company said in a statement. It created a website describing its anti-trafficking efforts such as making sure farming communities have schools for children and helping farmers increase their productivity so they won’t rely on child labor.

The lawsuit stated Nestlé knew child slavery occurred on the farms where they purchased cocoa. Nestlé provided training and quality-control visits to these farms several times per year and “due to these visits, they have firsthand knowledge of the child slave labor problems on the farms,” the lawsuit stated.

A report in September by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) found growing awareness of the child-labor issue in Ivory Coast in response to Nestlé’s efforts, but their campaign did not go far enough to end the practice, the FLA said. Visiting a sampling of farms used by Nestlé, the FLA found dozens of slaves under age 18, many of them younger than 15.

For more than 10 years, requests for dismissal of the lawsuit, followed by appeals, have prevented the case from going to trial. Last fall, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned the latest dismissal of the case.

“The allegations suggest that a myopic focus on profit over human welfare drove the defendants to act with the purpose of obtaining the cheapest cocoa possible, even if it meant facilitating child slavery,” the appeals court judges stated in a ruling. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined to review the 9th Circuit’s decision, meaning the case still against Nestlé still stands.

Nestlé joins fellow chocolate maker Hershey as the latest to get into legal trouble for cocoa harvested by child slaves. In March 2014, a court ordered Hershey Co., the largest chocolate maker in the U.S., to face a lawsuit by investors seeking access to records about cocoa from African farms that may use illegal child labor.