Always Left Holding the Bag: The Economic Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Cocoa Farmers and Children in Côte d’Ivoire
December 2021
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended global trade as people “sheltered in place.” Suddenly, cocoa farmers’ livelihoods, already precarious in normal times, became even more uncertain. For decades, multinational companies have reaped massive profits while cocoa farmers have lived on poverty wages. Farmers are often unable to support their families on such low incomes, much less pay adult workers fair wages. As a result, farmers generally hire migrant workers at very low wages, rely on their children to help on the farms, or, in some cases, buy trafficked children. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated many of these challenges. This report examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cocoa farmers and their communities, focusing on the impact on the price of cocoa and the cocoa supply chain; the impact on farmer poverty; and the impact on child trafficking into Cote d’Ivoire and child labor.
So many of these challenges result from companies paying too little for cocoa and pushing the risk of a bad harvest – or a global pandemic – onto cocoa farmers who already live under the World Bank’s poverty line. To address the issues of a volatile cocoa market, farmer poverty, forced child labor, and hazardous child labor, companies must take on the risk and responsibility themselves by providing transparency in their supply chains down to the farm level, paying a living income, and committing to long-term contracts.
This report is a joint publication by Corporate Accountability Lab and the Mouvement Ivoirien des Droits Humains. The report is available in both English and French.