Chocolate companies have long associated themselves with charitable initiatives. In the US, Hershey has a history of supporting educational and community initiatives. The UK confectioner Rowntree, now part of Switzerland’s Nestlé, was founded by a Quaker philanthropist who championed social reform, as were fellow British chocolatiers Cadbury (now owned by Mondelez International) and JS Fry.
Barry Callebaut is following a similar path. Just over half its shares are owned on behalf of the Jacobs Foundation, which promotes child and youth development and was set up in 1989 by Klaus Jacobs, a member of the German-Swiss coffee family. “Over 50 per cent of our dividend goes into education so, at the heart of the company, there is a sense of responsibility,” says Mr De Saint-Affrique.
Pressure on chocolate companies to eradicate child labour has been growing since at least the start of the century. In 2001, the industry agreed the so-called Harkin-Engel Protocol, named after two US politicians, with the aim of eradicating the worst forms of child labour in the production of cocoa. The International Cocoa Initiative was formed under the protocol’s auspices in 2002.
So far, however, such top-down approaches have not proved very effective. “Industry, governments, social partners, the UN — we all have unfortunately not got the traction that we need to really eliminate child labour,” says Benjamin Smith, a technical specialist on child labour at the International Labour Organization in Geneva. “The numbers are not going in the right direction.”
Part of the problem, Mr Smith says, was the initial focus by the industry on certification — labelling beans that were produced without child labour. “That was always a ‘mission impossible’,” he says. The certification process was hard to monitor and subject to manipulation. “A lot of energy and resources went into certification, which could have been more profitably invested in the root causes.”
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