3071-The political economy of new slavery

170 Child Labour, Education and Child Rights Among Cocoa Producers in Ghana
productive occupation. In keeping with their strong work ethos, most
farmers believe inactivity leads to frustration and laziness, or could lead
a child to move to the city in search of a job and end up involved in
crime or prostitution.
The need to understand global and local factors, and the need for
policy-makers and activists to be knowledgeable about specific cases,
is not solely an issue in advocacy or policy, but also in research.
In Chapter 3 of this volume, Nizan already draws attention to the difficulties
of analyzing data on child labour due to practical problems
such as lack of comparable statistics or of appropriate methodology.
The complex case of child work in the cocoa industry in Ghana provides
a good illustration of the need for research to be carried out in
a qualitative and holistic manner rather than based on strict, pre-defined
global criteria. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)
report, published under the auspices of USAID/USDOL/ILO, was commissioned
in 2001 to determine the extent of child labour and slavery
on cocoa farms in Ghana, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and Nigeria.
In the case of Ghana, the initial findings were compiled on the basis
of interviews with heads of households only; no children were interviewed.
Perhaps not surprisingly, none of the farmers interviewed
reported employing children to work full-time on their farms. However,
they did concede that children were involved in weeding of the farm
and breaking pods (and used cutlasses for both these tasks) and 0.96 per
cent of farmers reported using children in pesticide application (although
this may just involve fetching water to mix chemicals). These activities
were deemed to be potentially dangerous by the researchers and thus
fitting the description of hazardous work given in ILO Convention 182.
However, tasks such as farm clearing and using cutlasses are not
exclusive to cocoa farming and are performed daily by children all over
Ghana. Weeding can even form part of school duties. Using a cutlass to
break pods is much more efficient and less physically exhausting for
a child than alternative methods, especially as the children are very
accustomed to using them. I am not arguing that there are no significant
dangers inherent to cocoa farming or that children do not suffer as
a result of their work on the farm, as there are, of course, always risks
associated with using cutlasses or farm clearance. However, tasks common
in cocoa farming have largely been taken out of context and labelled
abusive without sufficient understanding of the local context. For the
purpose of comparison, a child working in a stone quarry in Accra
would be much more likely to injure themselves with a hammer used
to break stones, especially as the children in stone quarries are recruited