Ethics

Over the years, the issue of human rights has come to be treated with a lot of interest especially where it touches on the rights of workers employed in organization and corporations. This is because there has tended to be a lot of emphasis by corporations on the need to make profits and not on the more humanitarian issue of human rights. Over the years, corporations have been increasingly found to engage in gross abuses and contravention of the rights of the people who either work directly under them or who are indirectly involved in the many stages of their production process. Although measures have been put in place to ensure that such abuses are minimized and even totally curbed, it has been difficult to do this. Instead, with every passing day, new and even more disturbing cases of abuses of human rights are reported.

Multinational corporations that have operations all over the world and which are able to source their products from a wide array of areas are particularly prone to human rights issues. Nestl, for instance, has been dogged with controversial claims of gross human rights abuses not in its processing plants but in the fields from where its sources its raw materials. Under international law, it is the duty of every corporation to ensure that its human rights record is clean from the point it sources its raw materials to the point where its finished products are consumed. Any failure to ensure this will taint the corporations image and probably bring up legal charges against it for contravening international law. This paper critically discusses Nestls past and present human rights abuses in cocoa farms in Africa where the company primarily sources the raw materials for its beverages. It also seeks to explore and critically analyze how the companys products have affected children in the developing world.

Nestl and African Children
It is so hard to tell why Nestl is such an enemy of children in developing countries and especially in Africa. Over the years, Nestl has been faced with issues that have involved children which have made it and the community to be continually at loggerheads. It is actually difficult to tell whether Nestl deliberately seeks to court controversy in Africa or if its desire for profit is too huge that it has nothing else left in its strategy to cater for the humanitarian issues. From child labor, slavery, and torture to child poisoning through formula feeds, Nestl has often come to earn itself the name of a villain in Africa not just for the sake of it but owing to the way it seems to be less concerned, even careless, in its dealings with issues that touch on African children. There have been a number of occasions when the corporation has been thought to be bent on ensuring that its business goes on without caring what the implications for the community are. Therefore, it has constantly been involved in controversy after controversy and yet has failed to express any sincere feelings of remorse over its cruel actions. This is in spite of human rights groups getting involved ad pushing for tougher measures against the company as well as seeking to have more international involvement in the issue.

So far, it does not take one a lot of investigating to prove that Nestl has terribly failed to apply itself to the use of internationally recognized codes of business, especially where business ethics and the general human rights is concerned. The corporation can, on this basis, be said to have failed to respect human rights and therefore contravened the international law that require that business operations must not only be driven by the profit motive but with it, and more importantly so, by the need to be ethical and to respect the rights of the people. As Emmanuel Kant would put it, human worth is like no other, being absolutely unequalled and unmatched. Nothing can take the place of the human being and what one does. Kant insists, in his theory of categorical imperative, that every human being is unique, and ought anyone never to use another human being as a means to an end  any end to that. Instead, he adds, every human being ought to be an end to oneself.

The behavior of Nestl in Africa has come to demonstrate its disregard of human and children rights, and has been used as proof that the company is only concerned about making money quickly the way and methodology used notwithstanding. Without seeking to malign the company, many human rights organizations have cited Nestl as a perfect example of a leading corporation whose human rights records are worst in any developed nation and whose list of atrocities committed is too long. The underlying case has been cited as a combination of the companys ability to capitalize on the dire and needy cases of the children in Africa as well as the failure of many governments there to enforce the international labor laws thereby leaving loopholes where offenders like Nestl bent on exploiting children can continue to thrive without any challenge.

The Evidence around the World
It began some nine years ago when a legislator in the Congress threatened to sponsor a bill that would require Nestl and other leading manufacturers of cocoa-based beverages to guarantee on their labels that there was no form of slavery or child labor or any other form of enslavement that was associated with their manufacturing process. Failure to do so, the legislator said, would mean breaking the law and the necessary legal proceedings would be imposed. However, after much negotiating and discussions, an agreement was reached so that the companies would ensure they step up their efforts to combat the vice. In yet another case, the UK public is up in arms against chocolate and cocoa for being products whose production has been closely linked to gross human rights violations in many parts of the world, but specifically in West African countries of Liberia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso. The blame has been on Nestl and other producers for failing to do anything to handle the ever-increasing cases of child trafficking, slavery, and child labor in order to benefit themselves.

In Africa itself, child rights organizations have been on the forefront pointing accusing fingers at governments for dragging their feet in moves to reign in law offenders like Nestl that have been increasingly subjecting children to mistreatment as they have worked on farms. The specific case that has been used a lot and that served as evidence for the gross violation of child rights in Africa is one where children that had been abducted from their native Mali were transported to a cocoa farm in Ivory Coast and once there they were forced to work for up to 14 hours every day, sometimes without any food to eat and yet with many beatings to compel them to work without complaining. This case, although with a lot of international interest, never changed the way Nestl goes about its business. Its approach has never improved and although on many occasions it has promised to do what it has called investigating the matters and the allegations, it has never been coming up with anything that is proof that it is bent on changing its approach.

Perhaps what remains to be done is for the international labor organization and the international Human rights Commission to take more bold steps to ensure the corporation complies with the law or risk being barred from operating in those territories where it has failed to honor child rights. In addition, the international community must collaborate to ensure that this leading corporation does not turn Africa into a kind of Concentration Camp where it not only causes the torture of the children but benefits in the process.

Formula Milk
The desperate situation in many African countries owing to the continents poor economic performance must have set the stage for exploitation of its people with products from foreign Western countries, some of which have not found a market in their countries of manufacture. Nestl is again a culprit and key player here. For a long time over the years, Nestl has had and maintained a very vigorous marketing strategy in Africa with the aim of ensuring its many food products are sold to completion. But it is the case of formula milk that has come to bring to the fore just what Nestl is when it comes to human rights abuses. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is mandatory that before any health product is marketed in a region and allowed to be consumed by human beings, it ought to meet basic standards of health which guarantee that it is not only safe for consumption but also capable of improving the health of the consumers.

Another ethical requirement that corporations ought to adhere to is that no initial trials of new products ought to be done on human beings. Nestl has proved to be too conscious of its business strategy to pay any attention to such international requirements. Therefore, it went ahead and vigorously marketed its formula milk to babies in the belief that it would work alright in Africa just as it had worked elsewhere in Europe and the United States. That was a big mistake and a gross violation of ethical requirements in business dealings. Although formula milk could actually be ideal fro children in the continent, Nestl did create an impression that the product could actually be used instead of mothers milk. That in itself was a deceptive marketing strategy. According to international law as far as ethical business is concerned, a law of which Nestl  being a leading multinational corporation  understands perhaps a lot better than any other corporation, the seller must give to the buyer all the information that is relevant and deemed enough for the buyer to make an informed consent about the product. Nestl breeched this law when it purported that the milk was as good as the milk from mothers.

What followed was a catastrophe of great magnitude. First of all, many mothers attempted to substitute their milk for formula milk. The health of the affected children deteriorated and many became weak and susceptible to attack by diseases owing to lack of a strong immune system. Many deaths resulted from this alone. Another, even worse situation was that Nestl did not comply with the need to try out new products before selling them to people. Again taking advantage of the lax rules in the food and health sectors in most African states, the corporation sold the formula milk to the people without paying any close attention to the real issues on the ground in these countries. Usually, this milk ought to be mixed with highly purified water if it to be used by small babies because babies are susceptible to infections - being without a developed immune system.

This was no business for Nestl. Its business and main concern was to make sure its products were selling through the rigorous marketing approaches it employed. The situation in most African countries is that access to clean drinking water is sometimes so difficult that a significant number of people settle for water that is not pure at all. So, with milk to give to their babies and purified water not available, these poor mothers used the water they had anyway. The result was the massive deaths of babies in the affected countries. Although Nestl refused to admit responsibility, its actions are directly to blame for these deaths and it ought to be pushed to compensate the people.

Human Rights Activists
As is common with most other cases of human rights abuses by most corporations around the world, it is never easy to uncover incidences of human rights abuses by corporations especially those committed out of their countries where they are headquartered unless human rights groups there, in collaboration with other organization like the international labor organization (ILO), are able to blow the whistle. This is what has happened in the past with Nestl. For many years since the start of this decade, complaints have been made to Nestl about the way in which its cocoa plantations in Africa were being used do abuse human rights. Of particular concern was the allegation that child labor was being used on many cocoa farms, where children as young as ten years were being used to work on cocoa farms.

To compound the problem further, most of these young children were there not by choice but after they had been abducted from other countries and smuggled to countries like Ivory Coast where they found themselves working in cocoa plantations for as long as 12 to 14 hours every day being given only very little food to sustain them and being beaten to submission. The situation has been so serious that it is reported that some of the victims, unable to bear the burden under the cruel conditions, have succumbed to illness and even passed on. But the farms have been careful to conceal such cases, and that is why they have often preferred to use children who are less aware of their rights and who might be driven by desperation to engage in child labor. In spite of these incidences being reported to Nestl over and over again in the last couple of years, the corporation has been turning a deaf ear on the claims and instead has pressed on with its operations as though nothing was going wrong.

More recently, tired and unable to witness more torture of children, human rights groups here have been flocking to courts to sue Nestl for gross human rights abuses in Africa. Still here at home, the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) has sued the three leading manufacturers and distributors of chocolate and cocoa, including Nestl, for the crimes of child trafficking, forced labor, and torture of children in Africa. The plaintiffs in the case have been increasing with the day as more and more human rights groups of both international and national accreditation seek to be included in the case, claiming that Nestl has been so negligent of human rights and the rights of children to be let to go any farther. A notable successful addition to the case that is expected to bring a new twist to it and probably have a lot of influence on the ruling on the matter is Global Exchange which is a rights group based in San Francisco. The organization has brought to the case other former child laborers who have a tale to tell of how horrendous it was like working as a forced laborer for organizations keen to have a quick profit at the expense of human rights.

The Place of Nestl
It is clear from the current and past accusations leveled against Nestl that the company has indeed failed to deal with the issue with the firmness it deserves unless of course what is being claimed by most plaintiffs  that the company has no intention of seeking to end the atrocities it commits against children in Africa because it is the way to make quick supernormal profits  is true. The company has from time to time claimed that it had no role to play in what happens in African cocoa plantations, being only a buyer of the commodity. But the truth and the fact is that Nestl has been informed over and over again of what happens in the its cocoa belt, where young children are hired or forced to work on the farms, carrying out duties like planting the cocoa seeds, cultivating the young plants to control weeds, harvesting the seed pods an d carrying them to destined places, breaking open the pods to release the seeds, drying and roasting the seeds, among other duties.

According to the international labor organization, all these activities expose the children to various health risks, making it one of the worst forms of child labor in the world. Nestl has failed to honor international law by continuing to encourage the use of child labor on farms even after the efforts of the entire world have been geared towards s stamping out the vice. The problem has particularly been blown out of proportion by the nature of the economies in most of the African states concerned. These countries, notably Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo, Cote dIvoire, and Cameroon, have national economies that are very poor and so it is hard for a significant number their citizens to access as much as the basic human needs they require. Given this state of affairs, rampant absolute poverty has dogged them, driving many in the agricultural sector where they have to work on cocoa farms for a living. They do so for a pay that is too low and definitely out of step with rates approved by the international standards, a factor that pushes them to work for extremely long ours to make enough money to sustain their families.

Young children have in some cases been encouraged by parents to work on these farms to subsidize family income but in other cases children themselves, unable to cope with poor lifestyle in their homes, have opted to seek work on plantations of cocoa for a pittance. It is true that Nestl can deny to have any direct involvement in what goes on cocoa farms in West Africa but the company cannot be let to go scot-free because as a leading importer of cocoa  from the region, notably from Ivory coast, it has a lot of say in what ought to be done. Business contractual terms stipulate that trade that is free and fair ought to involve two parties that are a wiling buyer and a willing seller. On this basis, Nestl has always been a willing buyer of West African cocoa even with proof that the cocoa has been produced with labor from children who under the ILOs rules and regulations are not supposed to engage in any form of labor, whether paid or not. The point at which the corporation has failed terribly is to put in place even the most basic of measures to help reverse the trend even if it means not totally curbing it.

The Harkin-Engel Protocol
This is an initiative that was originally by Western African states especially those that are involved in the large scale production of cocoa to put in place measures to ensure that child labor in cocoa farms is stamped out. Later on, however, it came to be internationally accredited and is now recognized internationally as the Cocoa Protocol with aims to end child labor in the industry. Among other provisions, the protocol requires organizations and individuals to work together to ensure that the use of child labor is not condoned at all by any farm whatsoever. Another key requirement contained in the protocol was the need to have all the players in the industry put in place the appropriate infrastructural systems and programs that would ensure that that there was no loophole to be capitalized on by anyone to promote child labor.

Nestl, as one of the leading players in the industry and a beneficiary of labor in the region, was among those charged with ensuring compliance to the protocol. However, the corporation did not as much as do anything and to date nothing to enforce the protocol is in place. This is the basis for the many legal battles against the company. It has deliberately failed to deal with the issue. A company of such global recognition ought to demonstrate an organizational culture that is highly respectful of the rights of all people but even so those of children. It is a shame, even a regressive act, for Nestl to keep silent and watch atrocities of such a high magnitude being meted on children who are not able to defend themselves and who cannot speak for themselves.

How Nestle is Responding to the Accusations and Legal Battles
Ever since these accusations started coming to the fore and become a subject that was common everywhere, Nestle realized that it was to do something in order to be in a position to remain competitive in the market. It has been putting in place measures to improve its human rights records as much as possible. The following are just some of them, all revolving around the wider subject of corporate social responsibility.

Corporate Social Responsibility
According to the company CEO, the main area of focus has been to engage in a business model that gives recognition to the role that the customer plays in ensuring the success of the corporation. Nestl has in the last decade been engaged in a completely new business model which seeks to specifically help its customers to develop and to be able to benefit even as it is benefitting from them. There have been many approaches used by the corporation in different areas, but its efforts have been greatly recognized in Africa where most of the alleged injustices have been committed. The first approach has been the use of philanthropy. The corporation has become increasingly generous of late. It has been giving donations to the communities in areas where it sources its raw material, particularly in West Africa where it has been seeking to develop infrastructure to ensure that children are not allowed to stay at home but are taken to school to study.

Nestl recognizes that most of the accusations leveled against it have been because many children in the region have not been going to school because of rampant poverty and so their idleness has been largely responsible for their ending up in cocoa firms as laborers. By donating directly to schools in Africa and by providing scholarships, the corporation has been able to help many young people get a precious education. The corporation is also funding different initiatives aimed at helping the continent achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For instance, the Nestle Fund for Creating Shared Value has been designed to award innovative personalities in different parts of the continent. The fund has been guaranteed to be an ongoing annual competition so that many Africans can be empowered to help their countries and communities to develop.

The second approach used by Nestl is social accounting. Ever since the milk scandals were reported, the corporation, though having denied the claims that it was directly responsible and as proof that it was indeed none of its faults, has been more accountable for every action it takes. In marketing, the company been paying a lot of attention to the slogans it uses and to other details like the value of the formula milk compared to mothers milk. It has been clearer in seeking to point out that its milk is actually cow milk and has even gone ahead and stated that it is not meant to be a substitute for mothers milk but a supplement, except in cases where the mother is not available to breastfeed the baby. The company now ensures that all marketing and advertising of all its products is first of all monitored by an independent team to ensure that it is in no way misleading or biased. This has fairly helped the situation because there is a minimal drop in cases of child mortality.

That aside, Nestl has developed a policy where it communicates with its clients and acts on the feedback it receives from them. This has led to a situation where the corporation has come to prioritize child health in Africa, investing a significant amount of money in support of community efforts to combat ill-health and child mortality through setting up of health facilities like dispensaries and health centers. However, Nestl has not come clear and stopped its aggressive ways of marketing and so there is still a danger that some families may be buying the products not because they are actually in so much need of it but because they have had a misconception that that its is as good as mothers milk. Nestl ought to be more proactive and go another step to include a clear label on its milk packets stating that the milk is of far less value than mothers milk and that it should only be used in cases where there is no mother to breastfeed the baby or when the mother has an infection which can be transmitted to the baby through breastfeeding.

About the milk poisoning case, the corporation has done a lot more to ensure that the people are able to get water that is clean and fit for human consumption. Although it has not possible for all communities to have access to clean water, the corporation has been collaborating with local administrative authorities to ensure that the very needy areas are provided with water.  The corporation has in most circumstances been seeking responses from users to find out how the products were impacting their lives. Branding is the other way the corporation has employed to deal with the problem. Rather than just focusing on a generalized market and on selling its products, Nestle has been seeking to make the products it supplies in Africa to be what the people really need so that it does not appear to ne imposing on the people what they do not want. The approach has been to use unique products to draw and keep customers so both the parties can benefit. These moves by Nestl are good in the face of the accusations leveled against it. However, it remains to be seen if the efforts will be sustainable or whether they are just public relations gimmicks aimed at cooling down the storm that has been raging over its handling of human rights issues.

The UK Biscuit Market
Nestl has in the recent past been experiencing a rather tremendous surge in its sale of the Kit Kat biscuits ever since they became Fairtrade certified. The improved sales have prompted the company to seek to prove its word of being committed to corporate social responsibility by saying that over half a million cocoa farmers in West Africa are set to benefit from the increased sales by getting a better pay for their cocoa. This is the first time that the company has publicly demonstrated its commitment to help West African farmers ever since the scandals involving child labor and gross abuses of human rights came to the fore. It is being viewed as a good move to clean up its soiled reputation as far as these claims and allegations are concerned. The corporation is proving that it is actually committed to corporate social responsibility, and that it cares about the welfare of farmers.

In spite of this move, however, this is still not all that farmers in Africa want from the corporation. It is ridiculing the poor farmers if they will only have to be waiting for the corporations financial fortunes to be as good as they are now in order for the corporation to as much as help them. Instead, there ought to be a deliberate effort to ensure that farmers get such benefits even when the corporation is not making supernormal profits. Besides, considering that the corporation sells over a billion Kit Kats in the UK alone every year, it would have been a lot better if it would have started doing this long time ago given that its record has never been right in Africa for years now. As far as this is concerned, I believe, Nestl is yet on another of those many public relations gimmicks aimed at diverting the attention of the public from the real matters on the ground involving its human rights record in Africa. Had the corporation been genuinely eager to support farmers, it would have disclosed the percentage of its proceeds from the Kit Kat biscuits sales that is going to go the farmers.