Belching Out the Devil (19 page)

The gates to the plantation are tall and iron and come with a gatekeeper, an old man in a battered straw hat who is in charge of the padlock and chain. As another truck comes out we act as if we are expected and go through. He shuts the gates behind us and we are in, on a dirt track surrounded by tall green sugar cane, taller than the van it leans over the pathway forming a shady lane. This is all plantation land, behind the gates and away from prying eyes. No one expects to see a film crew in a van cruising around these tropical pathways and their expressions of surprise prove to be unnerving. The first harvest we come to has a group of about five or six children standing with machetes. They are young children. Maybe eight years old. One awkwardly puts the machete down when she sees us, holding it by their side and then cautiously dropping it, as if she had been caught doing something naughty. She looks at us and then runs to her parents working further away. Turning down a fork in the track we stop alongside a boy who is standing just off the road cutting. We are so unexpected that he looks up to find the van practically next to him. He too is underage. Through one corridor of cane a group of kids on bikes appear, catch sight of us, drop their heads, lift their backsides out of the saddle and pump their legs in panic, cycling madly to get as far away from us as they can get.

 

Further still we arrive at the main harvesting field to find a vision of seething toil. The men's vests and T-shirts are patched with sweat already and the sun is still far from its midday prime, their hands are black with soot and their faces smudged with ash too. Predictably the sad regularity of the scene unfolds. A young boy in a white shirt is in the cropped
area, exposed for all to see, including the foreman who stands watching with his machete in a leather sheaf decorated with tassels slung over his chest. His older and legal workmates shout to him that we are here. He turns in utter confusion and starts to run, but not towards the dense cane that can hide him, but across the cleared field. He throws a long handled shovel to the ground. Someone shouts for him not to panic, ‘Pick it up! Act normal!' they must have bellowed. In his chaos he picks up the shovel again but starts to run. ‘Don't draw attention to yourself!' Someone must have shouted, as he slows down and walks to the edge of the field. Trying to gently let go of the long-handled shovel as he goes. He has made it to the path, where older workers are watching. He puts his head down, his hands in his pocket and walks away from us. He goes to turn around but seems to hear an older voice nearby, saying ‘Just keep walking kid, just keep walking.'

 

Through it all, the foreman just stands there with one hand holding the machete sitting on his fat stomach. He has not even bothered to turn a blind eye to it all. He watches the whole thing, down to the kid disappearing into the plantations pathways. Along the pathway at the side a few workers stand watching, and it looks like the owner has arrived, or at least someone with money enough to ride a horse around the plantation with a pair of cowboy boots and a posh cowboy hat. No one talks to us directly, but you could cut the atmosphere with a knife and there are plenty of those around here. They stare at us with poker faces. Then turn back and as one group of men does this one of them spits. I couldn't say if it was out of necessity or with contempt. But what I hear next is definitely shouted for our benefit, as one of the
caneros
in the field yells, ‘Come and look at the animals! Come watch the animals!'

Oh Christ, look at us, chasing children as they flounder and flee. Charles Dickens would have loved to have seen us in action, ‘the kid hunters', caring beadles with compassionless hearts, terrifying youngsters so they can have a better life. We've been tracking kids like Fairtrade perverts. No wonder the cutters hate us. They hate our presence. Perhaps the landowners do too, but the landowners won't lose one moment's sleep over our visit; we've caused them neither distress nor loss. We have not even reprimanded them nor the plantation managers or the foremen either. But our very presence reprimands the cutters, the families and the children. Just standing by the field, we judge them, our presence alone says, ‘you shouldn't be letting your children work on the cane harvest'. But what are they to do, go without money? So we judge them for having to work like this. We judge them for being poor. Intentionally or not, that is what we do. They did not asked us to come, they did not want to tell their story.

 

For all our discomfort, which is nothing compared to the discomfort of actually having to work in these fields, the fact remains that child labour is obviously present on an unacceptable scale. Our film crew, none of whom know the area, or have had any experience of harvesting cane, have in one morning managed to bumble through cane fields and found, by our reckoning, at least 15 children working. Which goes some way to showing that child labour is still commonplace, and on the plantations that provide the raw materials for Coke's sugar.

 

It would be glib and wrong to say The Coca-Cola Company don't care about this issue. They do - they say so on their website. ‘We care about the plight of these children,'
²⁰
they say. They also say. ‘We firmly oppose the use of child labour.'
²¹
Yet despite this and their multitude of codes and practices there is a glaring loophole. The Coca-Cola Company has a
Global Workplace Rights Policy that says, ‘The Company prohibits the hiring of individuals that are under eighteen years of age for positions in which hazardous work is required.'
²²
OK, that's fine. They have Supplier Guiding Principles, for direct suppliers like Central Izalco, which state that the ‘Supplier will not use child labor as defined by local law.'
²³
But some countries do not have adequate laws. Nothing compels either The Coca-Cola Company or the sugar mills to investigate, take responsibility or prevent children harvesting cane on the plantations - no matter what happens further down the supply chain, it is simply not their problem. And until they make it their problem they will be open to the charge of not trying to solve it.

 

Last night as we filmed the foreman burning the dry leaves in the cane field, cutters told me that the Central Izalco engineers will tell the plantation owners which cane to cut, where, when and how much. The
rastras
have to know where to come to pick up the cane to take it to the mill and the cutters are often driven in company buses to the crops. HRW found that ‘Central Izalco directly administers some of its plantations and provides technical assistance to those it does not administer directly.'
²⁴
It is impossible for Central Izalco not to know about the child labour happening under their eyes. But such are the loopholes that a manager from Central Izalco could find children cutting sugar cane literally outside the mill, walk past without batting an eyelid and still comply with all of Coke's codes of conduct and principles. And this is what we witness next.

Leaving the plantation we tuck behind one of the large
rastras
as it heads to the sugar mill - Central Izalco. There is no other
mill in the area but we should double check that the cane cut here is going to Coke's sugar supplier. So we settle into the whirr of the wheels on the road and the warm sun on the forearms that dangle out of the window alongside the van. The lorry sways along the road as it heads to the mill with the cane that children helped cut.

 

The
rastra
turns off the main highway onto a dirt track that leads to the sugar mill. The truck churns the ground into dust under the weight of its sweet load. The huge lorry turns tightly into an even tighter tunnel that goes under the road it has just left. There is only just enough room to get through and our van follows into the darkness and swirling clouds of dirt, missing the chance to wind the windows up and emerging into the sunlight with an added layer of grime. The truck continues to the mill, while we stop. Just next to this dirt track is a field being harvested, right under the Central Izalco water tower, which is shaped like a turnip on stilts and painted in red and white with the company name in bold: it is impossible to miss. As are the children working in the field below it. Three children, one as young as ten, are working harvesting cane, one cutting, another tying, they all look sheepish and pull baseball hats low over their eyes at the sight of us. And all of this is within view of the sugar mill. If a manager cared to look out of a window they would see the children working outside their mill, right under their noses. You would have to stick pokers in your eyes to miss it. How much more obvious can it get? Outside the fucking company office! For all their codes and PR guff the mill's managers can sit watching the kids hacking cane all day and would still be in total compliance with Coke's ‘principles' if they did absolutely nothing. And from what I can see here this is exactly what they are doing.

The Company say ‘we have made tremendous progress' on child labour, claiming to have been involved in the removal of 9,000 children from the sugar cane fields.
²⁵
Let us assume this claim stands up to scrutiny: if you have sorted out 9,000 kids, how come there are children are working in broad daylight outside the sugar mill Coke use, and no one does a thing? Not one thing. Coca-Cola - were you so busy with the 9,000 you missed the ones outside the mill? Until the children are out of these fields and either in school or in legal non-hazardous work then every bottle and can coming out of El Salvador should be labelled: May contain child labour.

 

 

T
he afternoon sun is hitting the diesel fug in Central London and I am sitting in the visitors' cafeteria of the House of Commons when a woman from Coca-Cola's Human Resources looks at me across the table with earnest eyes and asks one of the best questions I have ever been asked. She says, ‘Why are you picking on us?'.

 

There are few other people in the tearoom and the clink of cutlery being collected just nudges above the low hum of the chiller units that hold the sandwiches and yoghurts. In this setting and with a plastic tray placed on the table between us, the question has a strangely domestic tone to it. Almost as if the woman from Coca-Cola's Human Resources department is going to tug her chair closer to the table and say in a lowered voice, ‘You've been seeing other multinationals, haven't you?'