Nestle's cocoa supplier in Ivory Coast continues to have children working under dangerous conditions on cocoa farms. Steps are being taken by Nestle to end the practice, reports said Friday.
The Fair Labor Association, an international group that came out of Bill Clinton's task force, said that efforts to stop child labor in the Ivory Coast have been slowed due to the country's recent civil war.
There are "challenges to eliminating child labor on cocoa farms in a nation still recovering from a divisive civil war, which left rural areas with devastated infrastructure and few alternatives for Ivorian children," the report says.
Earlier this year, Nestle and the FLA partnered up to investigate the cocoa fields that supply its products. This was the first time a food company worked alongside the FLA for this purpose. However, the FLA has worked with clothing manufacturers that wanted to use the same approach in regards to children working in sweatshops overseas.
"Our investigation of Nestle's cocoa supply chain represents the first time a multinational chocolate producer has allowed its procurement system to be completely traced and assessed. For too long child labor in cocoa production has been everybody's problem and therefore nobody's responsibility," said association President Auret van Heerden to Fox News.
According to the FLA, there are no laws within the country that mandate safe working conditions on Ivory Coast's cocoa farms and as a result, 73 percent of reported injuries come from use of machetes.
Close to 600,000 children in the Ivory Coast are cocoa farm laborers from a population of 2 million farmers, according to U.N. figures.
Geneva-based International Cocoa Initiative said Friday that Ivory Coast is slowly making efforts to change child labor legislation, including the introduction of a new national plan to end child labor.
Nestle has developed an action plan with benchmarks to be completed by the end of this year, 2013, and 2016.
"Now that we know where the risks are highest, Nestle can begin to hold participants accountable throughout the supply chain," said van Heerden.
