Criticism
In 2001, the Child Labor Coalition, a collection of advocacy groups focusing on child labor issues in the US and worldwide, criticized the protocol for only addressing Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. It suggested extending the protocol to the whole world, because exploitative practices were also reported in the cocoa industries in Brazil and Indonesia. The Child Labor Coalition also recommended that the chocolate industry set the price of chocolate so that the producers make enough money to fairly compensate their workers.
In 2011, ten years after implementation, it was unclear if the protocol had any effect in reducing child labor. One Payson Center researcher claimed few of the protocol commitments have been implemented, but the ICI claimed five of the six articles have been completed and they are actively working on the sixth.
In 2012, Miki Mistrati, creator of the award-winning documentary, The Dark Side of Chocolate, claimed the protocol is just “a document and politics” because there has been no progress. He thinks that the same issues will be present in five years and that changes will not come through the protocol, but instead from consumers who demand change.
Read more about this topic: Harkin-Engel Protocol
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)