ABIDJAN (AFP) — US lawmakers are to demand strict adherence to a July deadline for plantations in the cocoa-rich Ivory Coast under plans to eradicate forced child labour, Congressman Eliot Engel said Tuesday.
"We now have a deadline of July 1, 2008, for the implementation of an effective (...) monitoring system (...) supposed to eliminate child slave-labour from 50 percent of Ivory Coast cocoa production regions," he said.
"We are going to insist on the deadline (being met), this involves the cocoa industry" he added after a two-hour meeting with Prime Minister Guillaume Soro and other government members.
"We hope that soon afterwards, 100 percent of the local industry can be 'certified' free of all child slave-labour."
Engel, along with Senators Bernard Sanders and Thomas Harkin, is in the west African nation, the world's largest cocoa-producer, on a three-day trip characterised as 'non-judgmental'.
Harkin and Engel are the authors of a 2005 protocol established between the American government, the chocolate industry and cocoa-producing countries that obliges them to show child labour has not been used in any stage of production.
Non-governmental organisations have accused Ivory Coast of abusive use of children in the country's plantations.
One 2005 study said as many as 200,000 children worked in Ivorian plantations, with three-quarters of them handling pesticides. Still, the study noted most of the children worked for their families.
The fact most children were offspring of cocoa producers proved "this is not about slavery but about transmitting know-how," although possibly under adverse conditions, a government spokeswoman has previously countered.
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