Sub-Saharan Africa - Essay Example

Sub-Saharan Africa: Child Labor in African Cocoa Farming What factors contribute to the perpetuation of child slavery in the cocoa industry?The children and their families Approximately 1 million children in Côte dIvoire and Ghana have indulged themselves in child labor whereby some of them experience harsh pangs trafficking from the neighboring states. Besides, low wages given these families has significantly yielded to child servitude. In addition, cultural settings where the children find not issue in assisting in the fields also encourage possibility of child labor (Freely Give Truth, 2013).

Since, most them fail to regard difficult tasks as an issue infringing their privileges but as a way to aid their parents. The cocoa plantation owners Apart from the small cocoa farmers, there are also other plantation owners who owns huge plantation of cocoa. The owners see wanting poverty level of the involved families as an easy way to even exploit them by giving meager earnings, which does not even commensurate with what they do. Hence, prompt them even using children in harvesting period who act as cheap labor for they given them much less compared to their adult counterparts (Freely Give Truth, 2013).

Hence, prompting child labor statics augment instead of declining in these states.The companies buying the cocoa Many firms known to buy cocoa pressurize farmers into augmenting productivity without even minding their conditions for the crop’s demand globally is significantly high. The fact that they involve intermediaries who buy significant cocoa’s production from the farmers, make them have a huge influence on the farmers (Freely Give Truth, 2013). This way they create a monopoly and therefore they pay farmers as low as low as they want due to the great influence they have.

This has prompted farmers yield to procuring children’s services for they are aware they will pay them meager wages, which translates to augmenting of child servitude statistics.Côte dIvoire government There is no enough regulation to curb child labor since a child assisting in the farm is not legally wrong only if the child is involved in heavy work load. The government also has devised extremely low minimum pay, hence prompting the impoverished families to continuously wallow in poverty to the extent majority of them do not have any plan for future investments.

Because many work to ensure they are capable of affording only day’s upkeep, which ought to be the case especially what they are producing fetches much global market. Who can influence change towards ending the practice of child labor on the Plantations? The Côte dIvoire regime together with cocoa buyers can effectively influence declining of this menace. In this case, the regime through devising adequate and effective policies barring farmers from employing children would be a good platform meant to start with.

However, this will only work if the regime through judicial system devises harsh measures meant to sue those who seem not to comply with already set policies. Conversely, global buyers can impose sanctions in declining to procure their materials from the entire country. Hence, influence declining of the statistics indirectly that would act as an alert not only to the government that needs revenue from this crop but also compelling it to deal with cunning farmers. ReferencesFreely Give Truth. (2013, June 11Th).

The Dark Side of Chocolate: Child Trafficking and Illegal Child Labor in the Cocoa Industry. [Video File]. Retrieved from