Twenty-two people were sentenced Tuesday (May 18) to prison terms for trafficking in children in cocoa plantations in Côte d'Ivoire, a police official told AFP.
Five people were sentenced to 20 years in prison and 17 people to five years in prison by the court in Soubré, in western Côte d'Ivoire, the country's large cocoa production area, said Commissioner Luc Zaka. , deputy director of the Ivorian criminal police.
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These convictions follow a fist operation in early May against child trafficking in the Soubré region.
This operation, the fifth of this type carried out since 2009, had mobilized over two days a hundred men from the police (police, gendarmerie, water and forestry officers).
Sixty-eight children had been taken in.
Côte d'Ivoire is the world's largest producer of cocoa with more than 40% of the market.
Five to six million people make a living on "brown gold" in this West African country, but more than half live below the poverty line, resulting in children working on the plantations.
According to the NORC survey from the University of Chicago in 2018-19, nearly 800,000 children work in cocoa in Côte d'Ivoire.
Cases of child trafficking, minors generally coming from neighboring Burkina Faso or Mali, however concern "only" less than 2,000 children, according to another 2018 study by the Walk Free Foundation and the NGO Vérité.
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Some 300 people were convicted of child trafficking by the Ivorian justice between 2012 and 2020, according to the National Committee for Monitoring Actions to Combat Child Trafficking, Exploitation and Labor (CNS).
About 2,000 children have been removed from cocoa plantations since 2019, according to the CNS.
Cocoa-producing countries, including Côte d'Ivoire, and multinational chocolate companies are under pressure on the issue of child labor, as Western consumers increasingly demand respect for ethical criteria on plantations.