The revelations that saw the light of day from her create disgust Ivory Coast, on illegal activities carried out on cocoa plantations. In particular, as a police official told AFP, 22 people were sentenced yesterday to prison sentences for child trafficking.
Five people were sentenced to 20 years in prison and 17 others to five years in prison by the Supreme Court in the western part of the country, said Inspector Lik Zaka, who is deputy director of the forensic directorate.
These convictions following a large-scale operation launched in early May against child trafficking in the Subre area.
For this operation, the fifth of its kind since 2009, about 100 men of the order forces (Police, Gendarmerie, officials of the Water Service and the Forest Service) were mobilized for two days. The number of children removed from plantations is 68.
Ivory Coast is the world’s first cocoa producer, accounting for more than 40% of the market. Five to six million people live on “brown gold”, but more than half of its inhabitants remain below the poverty line, which results in children working on the plantations.
According to the NORC research of the University of Chicago in 2018-19 and as reported by APE-MPE, almost 800,000 children work in cocoa production in Ivory Coast.
Child trafficking cases, mostly from neighboring Burkina Faso or Mali, affect less than 2,000 children, according to another 2018 study by the Walk Free Foundation and the non-governmental organization Vérité.
About 300 people were convicted of child trafficking by Ivory Coast Justice between 2012 and 2020, according to the National Oversight Committee for Combating Trafficking, Exploitation and Child Labor (CNS).
Around 2,000 children have been removed from cocoa plantations since 2019, according to the CNS.
Cocoa-producing countries, including C Αte d’Ivoire, and multinational chocolate companies are under pressure over child labor as consumers in the West increasingly demand that ethical standards be observed on plantations.
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