Judgment day for Chocolate
On a cocoa farm, deep in the Kassangoro region of Ivory Coast, a boy, no more than 12, lay writhing in pain on a dirt floor.
First, his captors used a knife — with edges as sharp as the machete he used to hack cocoa beans from the trees. Then came the chili pepper, which they smeared on his cut-up feet to embalm his mistake of trying to run away.
The cocoa farm he lived on had ramshackle wooden huts with small holes for a window. It was worlds away from his home in the Sahelian desert plains of Mali, a neighboring country. He had left in search of a job with the intention of coming back. But he never did.
Armed guards breathed down his neck as he toiled 12 to 14 hours every day, harvesting cocoa that would be processed and foiled in bright, glossy wrappers to fuel the appetites of consumers continents away. So he would try running, again. Fail, again.
Twenty years later, the ordeal has resurfaced. But this time in a court complaint in an unlikely legal forum. Gone are the thickets of trees, the ridges of the cocoa beans. Instead, the boy’s forced labor is now an issue facing the highest court in the United States.
The boy, whose name his lawyers fought to keep anonymous, is now known as Doe IV. In 2005, he and five other Malian boys who were trafficked into slavery sued Nestle and Cargill, two U.S. corporations on whose affiliate farms they were allegedly enslaved.
The boys’ lawyers argued that these companies, which dominate the cocoa supply chain, knowingly made financial decisions that worsened their abuse.
The companies deny this.
Instead, they question why the six are not suing the traffickers who enslaved them in the first place. “Purchasing cocoa from Ivory Coast” and making “high-level corporate decisions concerning those purchases in the U.S.” are not nearly enough to fit this case in a law that was “never intended to be used this way,” their brief said.
At issue is an obscure 1789 law, the Alien Tort Statute, or ATS, which gives foreign plaintiffs an avenue to challenge human rights abuses in a U.S. federal court and demand reparations.
But the law, vague in its language, has been a bit of a problem child for the U.S. Supreme Court. In the past two decades, the high court has tried assessing how far the law can stretch its geographic boundaries, and who can rely on it to seek remedies. But time and again, the justices have split.
In 2013, the court ruled that only cases that touched the United States with “sufficient force” could be heard in U.S. courts.
Six years later, in 2019, a second corporate liability case would appear. The court then, though not unanimously, ruled that ATS couldn’t apply to foreign corporations, since doing so would have implications on U.S. foreign relations with other countries.
While the court majority did not want to extend liability on corporations, four dissenting judges said that the United States should not become a “safe harbor for human rights violators” and indicated their openness to the possibility of individuals suing corporations under this law.
The case against Nestle and Cargill is the third ATS corporate liability case to reach the Supreme Court within a decade. The court, experts said, will want to use its decision to set the record straight on the scope of the law. Do federal courts have the right to hold domestic corporations liable for claims by non-Americans under this law? That is a question at the center of the debate.
Ivory Coast, a country in West Africa, is the world’s largest producer of cocoa in a billion-dollar industry. Bales of cocoa leave the two major cities of Abidjan and San Pedro, bound for their biggest markets in Europe and the United States.
To the typical Ivorian farmer, cocoa is an inextricable part of their lives. It is a major source of the country’s income so much so that years of cultivating the land to grow cocoa has led to widespread deforestation in West Africa, often in protected lands, where small farmlands and settlements have sprouted illegally and endangered the ecological balance.
The push to produce more in conditions where farmers earn less than $1 a day is supplemented by traditional familial structures where able-bodied children, a source of cheap labor, are widely expected to help out in farms.
Hundreds of children among the 1.56 million children engaged in cocoa farming in Ivory Coast and Ghana are suspected to be victims of forced labor. What’s more, experts estimate that child trafficking is dwarfed in scale by traditional cultures in agrarian households that use “light work” by children to help out the family. They also fear that the data might not cover the scope of the issue.
Decades of investigations by journalists, advocates and researchers have also uncovered a grim reality: sometimes it’s hard to verify whether a child has been forced to work, because they often lie about their age, their places of origin and their circumstances out of fear.
Nevertheless, a recent study managed to verify that children were increasingly working in hazardous conditions. A report released by the University of Chicago, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor found that 95% of the 1.56 million children engaged in child labor in Ivory Coast and Ghana’s cocoa production, the largest in the world, were exposed to at least one hazardous condition, ranging from handling sharp tools like a machete, or being exposed to harmful pesticides and herbicides often used in cocoa plantation. A worrisome finding, according to project leader Kareem Kysia, was the 5% to 24% jump in exposure to harmful pesticides and herbicides between 2008–2009 and 2018–2019.
In 1996, Abdoulaye Macko, a Malian consul general stationed in Ivory Coast, had started hearing whispers of human trafficking.
A spate of civil wars ravaged the region. In Ivory Coast, the economic boom of the 1960s bolstered by the growth in cocoa production started spiraling downward after cocoa and coffee prices fell and ethnic conflicts deepened following the death of the first President Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s in 1993.
“Malians who lived in Ivory Coast had seen buses filled with children crossing the borders,” Macko said, in French, during an interview in November last year.
Soon, the rumors became sizable enough to prompt an investigation, often funded from his own salary because of budget issues, he said. “They [traffickers] were powerful men and women. We needed to be careful.”
Over the years, Macko said he sent out batches of investigative teams into Ivorian farms under the pretense of surveying abandoned cocoa plantations or researching the production process. “We just needed to have–- once and for all–- a clear idea of whether there were Malian children in these plantations,” he said.
Then he would send a second team of emissaries from the consulate. If the information matched from both rounds, he would visit local prefectures and step into the field himself. Macko repeatedly said that he needed to be sure. The three-pronged investigation was important because of the disbelief he encountered everywhere he went.
“When I told Ivorian police officers about children on cocoa farms, their first reaction was always that it was impossible, that it could never be,” he said. “But then when we went to the field, we found extraordinary things.”
In 1999, the 12-year-old boy who had tried fleeing several times from the cocoa farm in the Kassangoro region finally escaped after a year in captivity. He and the children in his hut dug a hole through the dirt floor and fled to the Baoule region, a v-shaped savannah in Central Ivory Coast.
Here is where his path crossed with Macko’s.
“It was terrible! It was terrible! Terrible!” Macko said recalling the sight of the children he rescued.
“They left the desert and found themselves in Ivorian forests in the dark of the night, completely isolated from the world,” he said. Nights were when the traffickers shipped the children into these farms.
At no point could they leave. “They were given a tin of milk or a tin of tomatoes to urinate in,” he said in a single breath.
Between 1996 and 2000, Macko intercepted several buses and vans and estimated that he rescued 900 children before they made it to the plantations.
As for those enslaved in the plantations, he said he doesn’t exactly remember how many children he saved, but swears that there were hundreds. In 2000, the worst year, he said, he took out 300 Malian children from the cocoa farms.
While rescuing the trafficked children, it dawned on him that these cocoa farms were associated with big chocolate-makers like Cargill and Nestle. The more he intervened and freed children, the more it bothered him. Did these companies not know what was happening on their farms?
In the United States, Terrence Collingsworth, an American human rights lawyer based in Washington, D.C., was also investigating the cocoa industry.
Collingsworth spent five years of his youth working in a factory in Cleveland to pay for school. His know-how of the ins and outs of the working class had made an impression. He wanted to become a union lawyer representing trade union members.
By the 1990s, corporations grew exponentially and the world became more interconnected. “The global economy changed everything. Big U.S. companies had moved their manufacturing to Mexico, Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia,” Collingsworth said in an interview in November. The epoch of global supply chains then sparked the establishment of the International Labor Rights Forum, where Collingsworth worked on several cases that focused on corporate accountability. One of them hinged on chocolate companies operating in West Africa.
“There was a raging war going on [in several West African nations] and people started leaking out reports that the cocoa companies never missed a beat,” he said. “They were still harvesting cocoa, and they were using a lot of child slaves and trafficked kids.”
That is when he met Macko.
“This was the only case where I wasn’t invited by someone else, a local organization, to come in because there were no local organizations,” Collingsworth recalled. “This was a horrible situation with a civil war. And that gave the companies a sort of cover for using child slaves.”
By then, the steely-eyed lawyer joined hands with human rights lawyer Paul Hoffman.
Hoffman, who lives on the other side of the country in California, has a quiet, erudite calmness to him. He sits alone in his office near his home with a big wooden table laden with papers he needs to write briefs on. The two met first in the late 1980s when Collingsworth was teaching in California’s Loyola College and Hoffman was the legal director of the ACLU in Southern California.
Having both built their careers on challenging corporations operating in far-flung developing countries, theirs was a partnership that worked.
In 1996, the two worked together to sue oil company Unocal in California, using the Alien Tort Statute. Villagers from Myanmar, who they represented, alleged that their country’s military had secured lands for the Yadana gas pipeline, helmed by Unocal through forceful relocation, rape, torture and murder.
The lawyers argued that the company knew of this and were complicit in those crimes.
They won.
Around the same time, on the East Coast, another partnership was in the making. Two members of Congress, Former Rep. Eliot Engel, D-NY, and Tom Harkin, then a Democratic senator from Iowa, had read enough investigative reports to know that there was a major problem in the global cocoa supply chain.
In 2001, Engel introduced an amendment to a bill that would have allocated $250,000 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to develop a “label for chocolate products that indicated no child labor was used in the growing and harvesting of cocoa.” Major pushback came from, among others, the chocolate companies.
As a middle ground, Engel and Harkin came up with a cocoa protocol that called for the elimination of the “worst forms of child labor.” Eight major chocolate companies signed the protocol, along with the US congressmen, the ambassador from Ivory Coast and International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor. The first deadline was in 2005.
Collingsworth had been waiting. “We held on for a little while to file the complaint because the Harkin-Engel protocol had been signed in 2001 and the companies all promised to stop using child labor. By 2005, they were supposed to announce that they had implemented all these programs they promised and that there was no longer child labor in their supply chains.
“Well, the deadline rolled around. And not only did they not do anything, which I knew. They just unilaterally gave themselves another five-year extension without doing anything at all,” he said. The next deadline the companies failed to meet was in 2008.
Companies, including Cargill and Nestle, then signed the Harkin-Engel framework to eliminate 70% of harmful child labor by 2020. With the release of the 2020 report led by the University of Chicago, that deadline is unlikely to be met, again.
In August, the World Cocoa Foundation, a group consisting of chocolate manufacturers, processors and supply chain managers, said in a press release that “the target was set without a full understanding of the complexity and scale of a challenge heavily associated with poverty in rural Africa.” It was important to fix the poverty first, to successfully combat child labor, the group said.
Etelle Higonnet, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, agrees. But, as a lead investigator for the NGO Mighty Earth looking at protected lands in Ivory Coast, she argues that there is more to it.
“It’s a mix. Governments have a responsibility to crack down, ensure that there are no harmful chemicals that are being sold and children are not being forced to work. Middlemen, cooperatives and farmers need to be held accountable. Just because someone is poor doesn’t mean we allow them to be an axe murderer. Just because someone is poor, doesn’t mean we think it’s okay if they enslave small children or harm forests in a national park,” she said in an October interview.
But companies, she said, bear a huge responsibility for promoting conditions that worsen lives or put them at risk. “We still don’t have a living income for cocoa, the price is still too low,” she said.
Recalling the findings of the 2020 study that said there was a 30% increase in the prevalence of hazardous child labor, Higonnet said that the industry was poisoning children.
“Companies will often provide access and credit to their farmers to get access to pesticides and other chemical inputs, fungicides, insecticides,” she said. “That has to stop.”
Could the ATS lawsuit against Nestle and Cargill be the way to do it?
No one knows for sure what the First Congress had in mind in 1789 when the members added the ninth clause to the First Judiciary Act. It appears as a single sentence, almost as an afterthought, at the end of the act, which established the American judicial system.
That foundational clause reads: “The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”
Back then, the First Congress was worried about different things, said William Dodge, a law professor at University of California Davis, who also wrote a brief related to international law supporting the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Nestle and Cargill.
“They [the First Congress] were worried about pirates. They were worried about violations of international law that would cause one country to be responsible to another. The clearest example is infringing the rights of a foreign ambassador, because countries were supposed to protect ambassadors and make sure that they didn’t come to any harm, so that their country couldn’t be sued,” Dodge said in an interview.
That definition of injury has changed since then. In the past 40 years, federal court records show that more and more alien torts cases were introduced to combat injuries and grievances that arose from human rights abuses ranging from state-sponsored genocide to torture.
“It’s important to recognize that there was no international law of human rights when the Alien Tort Statute was passed,” Dodge explained. “The international law of human rights really dates from the Second World War, and the experience of the Holocaust.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Human Rights system built under the United Nations were the first milestones in envisioning a framework for human rights. But all of that began in 1946 or so, he said.
In 1980, a lawsuit filed by Paraguayan nationals Dr. Joel Filartiga and his daughter Dolly Filartiga against a law enforcement official from their home country, Americo Pena-Irala, in federal court in New York became the first international human rights civil action under the U.S. Alien Torts Statute. The Filartigas, after years under the dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner, came to the United States seeking asylum. Joel Filartiga was a vocal critic of the regime. One night, Paraguayan police officers stormed his home, kidnapped his 17-year-old son Joelito. Dolly Filartiga, Joel’s daughter, would later go to identify her brother’s mutilated body.
Years later, as fate would have it, Joel would come face to face with Pena-Irala, the man responsible for Joelito’s death, on a busy street in New York.
Filartiga sued Pena-Irala under the Alien Tort Statute in the U.S. District Court in New York, the first of its kind in the modern era. The Supreme Court awarded Filartiga damages and ruled that the ATS gave U.S. federal courts jurisdiction over acts of torture that violated the law of nations, which prohibits torture and extrajudicial killing, no matter where the violations occurred.
So even if the First Congress did not have torture in mind when it passed the ATS, the Supreme Court in a landmark decision said that courts must interpret law, not as it was in 1789, but as it had evolved and existed among the nations of the world today. That ruling, Dodge pointed out, came during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. “The Carter administration was known for its focus on human rights. So, unsurprisingly, the United States supported the case.”
Floodgates were opened. Starting in the mid-1990s, plaintiffs started bringing claims against a new, more-elusive defendant: corporations. Foremost among them was the case against Unocal, the site of Collingsworth and Hoffman’s first alien tort partnership.
Among the multiple ATS cases brought to court, two reached the Supreme Court: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum in 2012 and Jesner v. Arab Bank in 2018. Both involved foreign corporations.
In Kiobel, Dodge said, “a majority of the justices thought that the real problem with the case wasn’t that the defendant was a corporation, it was that the case had nothing to do with the United States. We had a foreign corporation, foreign plaintiffs, and the conduct happened outside the United States.”
So, the high court decided that it would not overstep national boundaries and dismissed the case.
Then last year, in Jesner v. Arab Bank, the court decided to limit the scope by saying it didn’t apply to foreign corporations. In the opinion read by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the majority held: “The ATS was intended to promote harmony in international relations by granting foreign plaintiffs remedy for international violations but here and in similar cases, the opposite is occurring. For 13 years this litigation has caused significant diplomatic tensions with Jordan and Jordan is a critical ally and one of the world’s most sensitive regions.”
But the decision wasn’t unanimous. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a blistering dissent joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, said that the court’s decision “absolved corporations from responsibility under the ATS for conscience-shocking behavior.”
A few weeks away from the day of the oral argument, Collingsworth sat ruminating the law’s fate, a pall of finality setting in. “If we lose this case, the Alien Tort Statute is finished,” Collingsworth said.
Legal experts, including lawyers who are involved and who are merely observers from both sides, said that the case against Nestle and Cargill was a longshot, regardless of whether they think the law is the best way or the worst way to deal with corporate behavior in foreign lands.
Ginsburg’s death in 2020 also left the United States with a court where ideologies are tipped heavily towards one side. The stakes weren’t a mystery to Collingsworth and Hoffman. “We had to basically convince ourselves that we just had to do the best job we could, even though we’re looking at one of the most conservative courts ever,” he said.
On Dec. 1, 2020, Hoffman woke up early when the skies were still dark. He was three hours behind on the west coast, tuning in from his office near his home in Hermosa Beach. The day of the argument slipped in quietly without much fanfare.
In Washington, Collingsworth was pacing alone at home. Despite there being a court that seemed to favor corporations, it was unlikely that Chief Justice John Roberts, he theorized, would want to preside over a court that gave an out to corporations considering the facts of the case.
When the gavel fell a little after 10 a.m, it looked like Collingsworth was onto something. The discomfort among the judges was evident. No one, conservative or liberal, wanted to take a position that inadvertently justified slavery.
Nine judges and three American lawyers sat next to their telephones, unable to see each other but hanging onto to hear what the other had to say.
Neal Katyal, the counsel for the companies and the former Acting Solicitor General in the Obama administration, sat waiting.
It was his second appearance in the Supreme Court in just under a month. Katyal has had an illustrious career. His profile at his law firm, Hogan Lovells, proudly touts his track record of handling the largest number of cases argued by a minority in the Supreme Court.
In his opening statement, Katyal struck an aggressive stance. He argued that the abuse happened overseas in Ivory Coast, which meant that it didn’t touch or concern the United States and the claim that the companies “aided and abetted” slavery was flimsy at best. That was the first ground on which the lawsuit should fail. The second reason, he said, was that the law was fashioned against “natural persons” — something that the corporations are not.
Furthermore, since such cases often involve foreign entities, sometimes even foreign governments, in every prior ATS case the court had generally ruled against overstepping its boundaries and jeopardizing U.S. foreign relations, he later said.
During questioning, Roberts observed that no foreign country had objected to this case. “Why should we be cautious in terms of international relations in such a case? What objection would foreign countries have to ensuring that U.S. corporations follow customary international law?” he asked, hinting at the 2019 ATS case, Jesner v. Arab Bank. Back then, the court ruled that it would not adjudicate over foreign corporations because the nation of Jordan had expressed concern.
But that was not the situation in the case at hand.
Katyal said that while that may be so, allowing domestic corporations to be sued might lead to potential situations where the Jesner decision could be circumvented. Plaintiffs might just sue U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations.
“Mr. Katyal, many of your arguments lead to results that are pretty hard to take,” said Justice Samuel J. Alito with evident discomfort.
“Suppose a U.S. corporation makes a big show of supporting every cause but then surreptitiously hires agents in Africa to kidnap children and keep them in bondage on a plantation so that the corporation can buy cocoa or coffee or some other agricultural product at bargain prices. You would say that the victims who couldn’t possibly get any recovery in the courts of the country where they had been held should be thrown out of court in the United States, where this corporation is headquartered and does business?”
Meanwhile, Justices Kagan and Breyer asked why corporations deserved to be immunized from this law at all.
“What’s new about suing corporations?” asked Breyer. When he looked it up, there were 180 ATS lawsuits against corporations, the majority of which failed. “But why not sue a domestic corporation?” he asked again.
“We’re not here seeking any sort of corporate impunity,” responded Katyal. “We’re just saying you have to go after the individual unless the statute and Congress makes a different choice.”
Seemingly dissatisfied with his answer, Kagan zeroed in on Katyal’s definition of corporations not being “natural persons.”
“Could a former child slave bring a suit against an individual slaveholder under the ATS?” Kagan asked.
“If it were — if it weren’t extraterritorial and it wasn’t a corporate action, yes,” Katyal replied.
“Yeah, no problem extraterritorial, no problem aiding and abetting, just a straight suit?” she asked.
“Correct,” Katyal responded.
“Okay. So if — ” Kagan continued.
“ — if it was a plausible allegation,” Katyal added.
“ — if you could bring a suit against 10 slaveholders,” Kagan said, “when those 10 slaveholders form a corporation, why can’t you bring a suit against the corporation?”
“Because the corporation requires an individual form of liability under a — a — a norm, a specific norm, of — of — under international law, which doesn’t exist here,” replied Katyal.
“I guess what I’m asking is, like, what sense does this make? You have a suit against 10 slaveholders, 10 slaveholders decide to form a corporation specifically to remove liability from themselves, and now you’re saying you can’t sue the corporation?”
“When you go after individuals, you often can go after the true wrongdoers,” Katyal replied. Once a corporate form is involved, it is easy to get bogged down with questions of who really had the knowledge and how much in a collective enterprise, he added.
But why should the court gut a statute that was once an engine of international human rights protection, asked Justice Brett Kavanaugh, alluding to a brief submitted by faculty members of Yale Law School.
“Well, I really feel like that’s some overheated rhetoric,” said Katyal. “For 200 plus years this statute’s been around, there’s not a successful example of a case like this, ever.”
“All we’re suggesting is to preserve the status quo as it’s always been.”
In step with Katyal, Curtis E. Gannon, the principal deputy assistant attorney general, arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, said that a decision to alter the language of the law by “extending the liability from natural persons to corporations” must be made by the legislature, not the judiciary. There were other remedies, he said. The 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the newer 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, have guidelines for providing asylum to trafficked children and serve as a better remedy than the ATS.
Hoffman, whose turn to build the plaintiffs’ case came after an hour, expected the volley of questioning and came prepared. He reasoned that the TVPRA wasn’t explicitly applicable to foreign plaintiffs in 2005 when the lawsuit was filed. “The TVPRA was never meant to replace the ATS,” he said. The U.S. Congress, he said, had intended it to be complementary to the 18th century law.
On the face of it, the complaint filed by Hoffman and Collingsworth lists the ways Nestle and Cargill profited out of child slavery. Yet, as Satomayor pointed out, the complaint only showed that the companies knew what was happening on these farms because they sent representatives from the U.S.
That was the point that had justices from both sides of the spectrum expressing a degree of uncertainty about the corporations’ involvement. Mere knowledge is not enough to say that the companies aided and abetted child slavery. They had had to have committed a physical act.
The whole complaint, Breyer worried, sounded like someone just doing business.
“They help pay for the farm, and that’s about it. And they knowingly do it. Well, unfortunately, child labor — it’s terrible, but it exists throughout the world in many, many places,” he said.
Hoffman said that these companies have established a supply chain that is fundamentally predatory.
“They know that that’s where the cheap beans come from. They have used things like financing and payment — ”
“Yes, that sounds like a business,” interjected Breyer. “A business that does business blinking their eyes or open eyes with farmers and others throughout the world who use child labor.”
“Do we want a judge to say you can’t do that anymore?” he added.
Justices Alito and Satomayor asked if Hoffman had enough evidence to prove that the American corporations were directly involved in slavery. They wanted to see more than just decision-making from the headquarters, but the overt action of sending money to these farms.
“There are exclusive marketing relationships that are controlled by headquarters,” replied Hoffman. “That people are sent from headquarters, money is sent from headquarters, equipment is arranged from headquarters, training is arranged for by headquarters,” he said.
In rebuttal, Katyal said Hoffman’s argument was “thin and accusatory”.
“Your Honor, Nestle and Cargill abhor child slavery. This case isn’t about that. It’s about whether this old statute applies extraterritorially and who can be sued,” he said.
Surmising that the case might open a can of worms, Katyal called on the court to defer to Congress in deciding the fate of the Alien Tort Statute.
Following an oral argument that lasted an hour and a half, the Court took the case under advisement.
Collingsworth and Hoffman are unsure of how long it may take the court to come up with a decision. Some anticipate a judgment in the summer.
Sitting in his office, amid files of nine other corporate liability cases, Collingsworth is realistic, and he’s already strategizing about other legal avenues, should this door close.
He thinks of the six boys, now in their late 20s, back home in Mali with their families. Even as the case was filed in 2005, it would take seven more years for them to meet in person. “We would have attracted a lot of attention and we didn’t want to endanger them,” he said. But in 2012, when he was back in Ivory Coast for another round of research, he slipped across the border into Mali and rented a room that had a private courtyard in the back.
Finally, they met.
Collingsworth grew visibly animated. “It was a very warm and emotional get-together because they knew me for all these years. And they knew that I’ve been working for them all this time, but we never actually met in person,” he said.
A faint smile took over his face. Under Macko’s guidance, he said, the six boys went to school. The oldest, John Doe I, now works with Macko and was instrumental in gathering information for the court case.
As for Macko, he sits in his home in Bamako, the capital city of Mali. After leaving government service, he started work as an independent consultant and now runs a labor group called RAMAT. He speaks in a slow, measured tone about all the factors that contribute to the enslavement of a child.
“When these children leave their villages looking for work and return after a year of suffering, their parents often don’t even realize that they had been enslaved on a farm. They assume that the child died or got lost in the city,” he said.
Echoing Etelle Higonnet, the researcher from Mighty Earth, he laid out a flowchart. The base began from the poverty many families grew up in, their remote circumstances, their unawareness, the apathy on the part of local authorities who he wished tried enough.
“But those who pay! Those who pay!” his voice growing forceful, the memory of children in ramshackle huts overwhelming him. Those who pay, he said, the companies that make the chocolate and the customers who eat it, should know.
“That chocolate comes from the blood of enslaved children.”
Notes on the process: I first came to know about the Alien Torts Statute while researching the Bhopal gas leak in 1984. It was and continues to be the biggest industrial tragedy in modern Indian history. By narrativizing the circumstances and debates around the gas leak in 1984, I wanted to analyze the Alien Torts Statute, which I think to be a fascinating law.
I started researching its origins and usage beginning April 2020 and was going through Supreme Court dockets when I came across the lawsuit against Nestle and Cargill a couple of months later. I soon switched gears and started looking at at it from a U.S. perspective.
I will confess my reporting remains limited by a pandemic, which I have tried my best to deal with, both professionally and personally.
Guided by my brilliant advisor, Prof. Christopher Daly at Boston University, I spoke to multiple researchers and experts (some quoted in the story) to get a whole picture–– the scope of the law and the global supply chain. I managed to get the original complaint from Terrence Collingsworth, which had the details in the first section of the story. He was also kind enough to connect me with Abdoulaye Macko who was the hidden pivotal figure in this story. I thank my colleague and dear friend Sofie Isenberg for sitting with me and conducting the interview in French.
It is hard to not feel a certain way while reporting a story swirling with memories of trauma and suffering. But I believe that it’s an important story to tell and I owe it to the many journalists–– both in the U.S. and abroad, who have painstakingly covered the cocoa supply chain for decades now.