Victoria’s Secret Revealed in Child Picking Burkina Faso Cotton
2011-12-15 05:00:01.13 GMT
By Cam Simpson
Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) — Clarisse Kambire’s nightmare rarely
changes. It’s daytime. In a field of cotton plants that burst
with purple and white flowers, a man in rags towers over her, a
stick raised above his head. Then a voice booms, jerking
Clarisse from her slumber and making her heart leap. “Get up!”
The man ordering her awake is the same one who haunts the
13-year-old girl’s sleep: Victorien Kamboule, the farmer she
labors for in a West African cotton field. Before sunrise on a
November morning she rises from the faded plastic mat that
serves as her mattress, barely thicker than the cover of a
glossy magazine, opens the metal door of her mud hut and sets
her almond-shaped eyes on the first day of this season’s
harvest. (Follow her journey in videos, photos and more here.)
She had been dreading it. “I’m starting to think about how
he will shout at me and beat me again,” she said two days
earlier. Preparing the field was even worse. Clarisse helped dig
more than 500 rows with only her muscles and a hoe, substituting
for the ox and the plow the farmer can’t afford. If she’s slow,
Kamboule whips her with a tree branch.
This harvest is Clarisse’s second. Cotton from her first
went from her hands onto the trucks of a Burkina Faso program
that deals in cotton certified as fair trade. The fiber from
that harvest then went to factories in India and Sri Lanka,
where it was fashioned into Victoria’s Secret underwear — like
the pair of zebra-print, hip-hugger panties sold for $8.50 at
the lingerie retailer’s Water Tower Place store on Chicago’s
Magnificent Mile.
Clarisse’s Cotton
“Made with 20 percent organic fibers from Burkina Faso,”
reads a stamp on that garment, purchased in October.
Forced labor and child labor aren’t new to African farms.
Clarisse’s cotton, the product of both, is supposed to be
different. It’s certified as organic and fair trade, and so
should be free of such practices.
Planted when Clarisse was 12, all of Burkina Faso’s organic
crop from last season was bought by Victoria’s Secret, according
to Georges Guebre, leader of the country’s organic and fair-
trade program, and Tobias Meier, head of fair trade for Helvetas
Swiss Intercooperation, a Zurich-based development organization
that set up the program and has helped market the cotton to
global buyers. Meier says Victoria’s Secret also was expected to
get most of this season’s organic harvest.
Telltale Green Flag
The leader of the local fair-trade cooperative in
Clarisse’s village confirmed that her farmer is one of the
program’s producers. A telltale green flag, given to its
growers, flies at the edge of the field she works.
As Victoria’s Secret’s partner, Guebre’s organization, the
National Federation of Burkina Cotton Producers, is responsible
for running all aspects of the organic and fair-trade program
across Burkina Faso. Known by its French initials, the UNPCB in
2008 co-sponsored a study suggesting hundreds, if not thousands,
of children like Clarisse could be vulnerable to exploitation on
organic and fair-trade farms. The study was commissioned by the
growers and Helvetas. Victoria’s Secret says it never saw the
report.
Clarisse’s labor exposes flaws in the system for certifying
fair-trade commodities and finished goods in a global market
that grew 27 percent in just one year to more than $5.8 billion
in 2010. That market is built on the notion that purchases by
companies and consumers aren’t supposed to make them accomplices
to exploitation, especially of children.
Perverting Fair Trade
In Burkina Faso, where child labor is endemic to the
production of its chief crop export, paying lucrative premiums
for organic and fair-trade cotton has — perversely — created
fresh incentives for exploitation. The program has attracted
subsistence farmers who say they don’t have the resources to
grow fair-trade cotton without violating a central principle of
the movement: forcing other people’s children into their fields.
An executive for Victoria’s Secret’s parent company says
the amount of cotton it buys from Burkina Faso is minimal, but
it takes the child-labor allegations seriously.
“They describe behavior contrary to our company’s values
and the code of labor and sourcing standards we require all of
our suppliers to meet,” Tammy Roberts Myers, vice president of
external communications for Limited Brands Inc., said in a
statement. Victoria’s Secret is the largest unit of the
Columbus, Ohio-based company.
“Our standards specifically prohibit child labor,” she
said. “We are vigorously engaging with stakeholders to fully
investigate this matter.”
In The Fields
To understand the plight of Clarisse and others like her,
Bloomberg News spent more than six weeks reporting in Burkina
Faso, including interviewing Clarisse, her family, neighbors and
leaders in her village. Her experiences were similar to those of
six other children extensively interviewed by Bloomberg, such as
an emaciated 12-year-old boy working in a nearby field.
Interviews around the country with fair-trade growers,
officers of fair-trade cooperatives and child-welfare officials
reveal that there is little training and few if any safeguards
against using children, even after dangers were uncovered by the
2008 report.
Victoria’s Secret, whose supermodel “Angels” helped it
set record sales and profit in the third quarter of 2011, agreed
in 2007 to a deal to buy fair-trade and organic cotton from
Burkina Faso. The aim was to purchase sustainable raw materials
and benefit female African farmers.
In time for Valentine’s Day 2009, the retailer marketed a
special lingerie line made from “pesticide-free, 100 percent
rain-fed cotton” and sold with the claim that each purchase
improved lives in the country.
‘Good for Children’
“Good for women,” read a booklet accompanying a white
thong covered with blue and lavender daisies. “Good for the
children who depend on them.”
The thong was labeled 95 percent organic. Today, such
Burkinabe fiber is blended into lingerie at a much-reduced
level, allowing the company to spread it across most of its
cotton underwear lines, Lori Greeley, chief executive officer of
Victoria’s Secret Stores, told a Wharton School publication in
March.
Growers sell the fiber to the company with fair-trade
certification, though the finished garments no longer carry the
“good for children” marketing message, nor do they have a
fair-trade stamp. Victoria’s Secret has more than 1,000 stores
in North America, and sells through its famously risque catalogs
and around the world via the Internet.
Mango-Tree Serenade
An executive with Limited Brands’ sourcing and production
arm, Margaret Wright, visited Burkina Faso in April. Women who
produce organic cotton serenaded her under mango trees in the
city of Tiefora, according to a press release from the national
growers group. In Tiefora, about a 130-mile (210-kilometer)
drive from Clarisse’s village of Benvar, Wright told them that
the well-being of women was the main reason the company was
interested in organic cotton, the release said.
The company’s desire for fair-trade cotton testifies to the
success of a labeling movement that began in the 1980s with
small-scale Mexican coffee farmers and now boasts the
involvement of consumer-goods giants such as Wal-Mart Stores
Inc. and Starbucks Corp. The movement has boosted the profits of
farmers in impoverished parts of the world.
Fairtrade International, the world’s largest group of its
kind, certified that Burkina Faso’s organic crop met its
standards, says Tuulia Syvaenen, chief operating officer of the
Bonn-based organization.
Myers, of Limited Brands, says the company relied on that
certification to meet its goal of “improving the lives of some
of the world’s poorest women and children through the
responsible sourcing of cotton — something we have been doing
through our efforts with Burkinabe women cotton farmers.”
Program Under Review
Fairtrade International started a review in Burkina Faso
after Bloomberg News raised questions, says Syvaenen, adding it
would begin a training program for farmers. She also says the
UNPCB never gave Fairtrade a copy of the 2008 study it co-
sponsored on child labor, which identified concerns about the
vulnerability of so-called enfants confies, a French term used
in West Africa for a type of foster child — kids such as
Clarisse.
Bloomberg News obtained a copy of the study, which has
never been made public, and spoke to a field investigator
involved, as well as farmers who were originally interviewed for
the report.
With the exception of gold, cotton is produced with child
or forced labor in more countries than any other commodity in
the global supply chain, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
One of those countries is Burkina Faso. In its reports, the
department has repeatedly cited the country for the worst forms
of child labor, while the State Department has done the same
regarding child trafficking to conventional cotton fields there.
None of those reports has ever specifically examined Burkina
Faso’s organic and fair-trade crop.
Lost Childhood
Clarisse’s life and her experience in Victorien Kamboule’s
field capture a childhood lost at the bottom of an American
company’s purportedly ethical supply chain.
As a little girl, Clarisse viewed the world around her with
wide eyes, giving her a look of constant amazement, her mother
says. Her expression earned her a nickname, Pree-Pree. In her
family’s native tongue, Dagara, it roughly translates into
“bug-eyed.” Though a term of endearment, it wasn’t terribly
flattering. The girl, born in 1998 to migrant-worker parents in
neighboring Ivory Coast, hated it. Still, Pree-Pree stuck.
Pree-Pree’s Journey
After her parents split up when she was about 4, Pree-Pree
was shuttled between her father’s relatives on either side of
the border until the age of 9. That’s when an aunt took her to
the village of Benvar in Burkina Faso and left her in the sod-
covered, mud-walled home of the farmer, Kamboule, where she
lives today. Though they’re separated in age by a generation,
Clarisse and Kamboule, 30, are cousins. Clarisse also is his
enfant confie.
In the room where Clarisse sleeps, a narrow wooden bench
lines one wall. A few clothes washed by hand dry on a line
strung along another. She has no dolls, no photos, not even a
toothbrush. “Nothing,” she says. Kamboule, his wife, and their
own children — a 3-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy — sleep
together under a mosquito net on a bed in the adjoining room.
The air inside the room where Clarisse sleeps is stale, heavy
with the smell of perspiration.
Except for the metal door, a small triangle is the only
opening in the mud walls that surround her. It’s stuffed with a
yellow rag, but when Kamboule wakes Clarisse for work she knows
it’s still dark outside: Her mornings begin before dawn when the
season demands it. After the farmer shouts her awake, “he tells
me to go to the farm,” she says.
Slinging a Hoe
Clarisse steps outside after Kamboule has already pedaled
his bicycle to the organic cotton plot. Slinging a hoe with a
freshly sharpened blade over her shoulder, she makes her way
alone along a ribbon of dirt, explaining how in the planting
season in May and June she walks through a blanket of humidity
and heat, when temperatures reach well above 100 degrees
Fahrenheit (38 Celsius).
The sun begins to rise as Clarisse approaches the empty
field. She takes the hoe from her shoulder and clasps the
handle, placing her right hand above her left along a patch of
wood faded by wear. The grueling routine is so well-practiced
that she demonstrates it with ease. Her hands are thick and
strong, her thumbnails blackened. Her only possession, a gift
from her grandmother, encircles her left wrist — a bracelet of
eight strings of orange and blue beads, as small as apple seeds,
and a single strand of white ones.
‘It’s Painful’
Bending at the waist, Clarisse buries the edge of the blade
and starts scraping a deep row into the earth, taking small
steps backward with each cut. “It’s very, very hard,” she
says, “and he forces me to do it.” Before long, her arms and
hips ache. “It’s painful,” she says. When she strikes rocks
beneath the soil, it sends the blade cutting into her bare toes.
If she slows down from exhaustion, “he comes to beat me,”
she says. He whips her across the back with the tree branch and
shouts at her. “I cry,” she says, looking down as she speaks
and rubbing the calluses on her hands.
The two of them dig for weeks to carve a plot stretching
the length of about four American football fields.
Even in poor countries, this job is often performed by a
beast tethered to a plow. But Burkina Faso ranked 181st out of
187 countries in the 2011 United Nations Human Development
Index, and the farmers who force Clarisse and the other children
to work don’t own animals. Even if they did, they say they don’t
have access to a plow, which costs the equivalent of about $150
in Burkina Faso, where about 80 percent of the population lives
on less than $2 a day. The farmers contend that they wouldn’t
need child laborers if they had the right tools.
Going Hungry
Each afternoon, Clarisse walks back to the hut, exhausted.
Some days, she says, the farmer’s wife brings her a starchy
white paste, made from corn or millet. Her head bowed, Clarisse
makes the sign of the cross with her right hand before raising
her chin and sinking her fingers into the gelatinous paste. If
she’s lucky, she’s fed once per day, she says. Some days, she
doesn’t eat at all.
Kamboule says he couldn’t raise fair-trade cotton without
Clarisse. “If I leave the child out, how will I be able to do
the work?” Kamboule says. He acknowledges striking her. “I
sometimes beat her,” he says. “This is when I give her work
and she doesn’t deliver.”
Like Clarisse, his own parents left him with relatives to
labor rather than attend school. Strong and lean, the illiterate
farmer seems to toil endlessly, wearing the same pair of
tattered shorts each day.
Thousands of Farmers
On small-plot farms like Kamboule’s across Burkina Faso,
researchers sponsored by the growers federation in 2008 found
that more than half of 89 producers surveyed had a total of 90
foster children under the age of 18. Many had two or more. The
problem was acute in the country’s southwest, which is the heart
of the program’s production and Clarisse’s home. There were
about 7,000 fair-trade farmers in the program that year,
according to data from Helvetas.
The study found that two-thirds of foster children in homes
like Kamboule’s weren’t in school when they were required to be.
Fair-trade farmers told researchers they didn’t pay the kids,
leading the study’s authors to write, “This category of
children is a problem on several levels: in terms of their
social vulnerability on the one hand, and in terms of their
status at work on the other. These foster children have an
employee status: they are clearly asked to work, as expressed in
the words of the producers, but they receive no remuneration,
regardless of age.”
Wanting to Learn
Some foster children also were abused or malnourished. Even
though they’re legally required to be in school, fewer than one
in three was enrolled in the southwest, in contrast to the
farmers’ own children.
“The study showed that the situation of the children is
not a catastrophe, but they are quite weak,” says Meier, of
Helvetas, adding that his group is “in favor” of implementing
its recommendations. “But we cannot act ourself in this
respect.”
The bulk of the research focused on the work performed by
the growers’ own kids, arguing that even when they were
illegally kept out of school their labor was a beneficial form
of vocational education.
Clarisse was determined to attend school. Shortly after her
aunt brought her to Burkina Faso, she set off without permission
one winter morning for Benvar’s primary school, more than a mile
down a red dirt road. She planted herself inside one of the
three classrooms that make up the squat, concrete building,
where she was one of 70 new pupils squeezed onto benches in a
school with more than 300 students. One classroom had
blackboards at either end, with half the students listening to
one teacher, and the other half facing the opposite direction
listening to another.
‘Clever and Polite’
Amid the crush of children, teachers noticed her. “She was
unusual — clever and polite,” recalls Moussa Kiemtore, 34, the
school’s headmaster, who sports a clean-shaven head and a small
tuft of hair on his chin. Clarisse stood out because she
understood and even spoke some French she had learned in Ivory
Coast. Though it’s the official language in Burkina Faso — and
the language of instruction in its schools — very few children
in and around Benvar know French, especially the youngest,
Kiemtóre says.
Clarisse was overjoyed. “They showed me many new things,”
she says.
She wouldn’t stay in school for long. Her seat was empty
before she completed a single term. The schoolmaster was alarmed
when he heard the French-speaking girl was no longer in class.
He visited Kamboule and tried to persuade him to bring her back.
School ‘Useless’
“He claimed she left on her own,” the schoolmaster
recalls, “but we realized later he had compelled her to
leave.” Or as Clarisse puts it, Kamboule “told me going to
school was useless.”
She wasn’t useless to Kamboule. Like other farmers from
across Burkina Faso, he says the cash that neighboring growers
fetched for organic and fair-trade cotton persuaded him to plant
the fiber. Previously, he had grown millet, mostly to feed his
family. For the cotton planted in 2010, organic farmers could
net up to 70 percent more per hectare than neighbors using
genetically modified seeds, according to data from Helvetas.
Kamboule and some growers say nobody from the program gave
them rules or training about child labor on their farms. Face-
to-face instruction would be a necessity in a nation where 71
percent of the population can’t read.
‘Nothing About Children’
“No, they said nothing about children,” recalled Louis
Joseph Kambire, 69, a wiry fair-trade farmer who sits on the
audit committee of the Benvar cooperative. Without kids of his
own, Kambire forces the foster children in his care to work in
an organic and fair-trade cotton field that he’s cultivated
right next to Clarisse’s.
The children — 10-year-old Edmond Dieudone and 12-year-old
Ponhitierre Some — make it possible for him to earn a living
from fair-trade cotton, says Kambire, wearing a white crucifix
on a black cord around his neck and a white fedora with a black
band on his head. “That’s why they are working with me,” he
says. Before the fair-trade program, he hadn’t made them labor
in his subsistence fields.
Sometimes, Clarisse spies Edmond and Ponhitierre in the
distance, though they keep silent. “We can’t speak when the
farmers are there,” she says.
Little Training
There was little or no effort to increase training after
the 2008 report, according to Bloomberg interviews with farmers
in five of the six villages where the survey was conducted.
Dramane Diabre, a farmer with 13 children in the eastern region
of the country, says he received training on avoiding illegal
child labor in 2010. By contrast, every farmer in the southwest
said there was never any resulting action.
Growers across the country say they got regular technical
training on how to maintain organic purity following concerns
about contamination with the 2008 introduction of genetically
modified crops in the country’s conventional cotton sector. The
fiber can be scientifically tested for organic purity, not for
whether children grow it.
Guebre, the head of organic and fair trade for the growers
group, says technical sessions included information on child
labor. “If someone doesn’t want it, we can’t force him,” says
Guebre, whose group keeps a share of the price paid by
Victoria’s Secret. “If he says he didn’t participate or didn’t
hear, that’s something else.”
In response to questions, the growers federation denied
that child labor is used in its program. Guebre also says its
myriad requirements, including avoiding such labor, are read out
to farmers when they initially sign on.
Hauling Manure Compost
Like others, Baasolokoun “Bassole” Dabire, 53, president
of the organic and fair-trade cooperative in the village of
Yabogane, didn’t get the message. He said his understanding was
that it’s acceptable for his roughly 60 farmers to use children
in their fields on two conditions: They’re not their own
biological children, and they’re at least six years old.
“Your own children, no, but somebody else’s child can
work,” he says in an interview near his farm in the southwest.
The cotton Clarisse grows comes with two certifications —
one for fair trade and one for organic. Buyers pay the program a
premium for each. In the field, the organic designation means
she avoids pesticides or mineral fertilizers that can plague
children forced to labor in conventional cotton.
Yet the lack of chemicals carries its own cost. Two or
three times between digging rows and harvesting each season,
Clarisse must spend days hauling buckets of manure compost on
her head about half a mile to her field from a pit she helps
maintain. Bending at her waist, she uses both hands to spread a
circle of compost around each of the thousands of plants. Her
lower back aches.
‘Very Painful’
“It’s very painful,” Clarisse says, “because I have to
keep doing it until he tells me I can stop.”
Without herbicides and pesticides, Clarisse must defend the
crop against weeds and other invaders — by hand. One of the
cotton farmer’s greatest enemies is the boll worm, which can
quickly destroy an entire crop if left unchecked.
Clarisse says she walks the rows, delicately reaching into
a plant when she spots a worm. Without disturbing their fragile
bolls, she extracts each worm with a firm pinch. They can grow
as large as her index finger. She throws them onto the ground,
flips over her hoe and uses its flat side to crush each one
against the gravelly earth.
First Harvest
By the time Clarisse started picking her first harvest in
2010, Victoria’s Secret was becoming the program’s only buyer
instead of just the most prominent, according to Guebre of the
growers group and Meier, whose Swiss group advises it. That’s
because the country’s overall organic yield was shrinking ever-
closer to the 600 metric tons per year guaranteed to the
lingerie company.
At about 5:40 a.m. on the first day of Clarisse’s harvest
this November, the horizon behind her hut starts to glow red,
almost purple, while she stirs inside. Just before sunrise, she
pushes open the metal door. She places a bucket inside a wicker
bushel and tightly folds a faded propylene sack until it’s the
size of a pocketbook, flicking it into the bucket with a snap of
her wrist. Without breaking stride, Clarisse raises the bushel
with both hands, walks beneath it and balances it on her head.
She heads down a path beside a corn field leveled by the
harvest, a pair of flip-flops with pink straps popping beneath
her feet, her hands resting easily at her sides. All around
Clarisse, the earth is like a wasteland. It’s black and charred
from clearing fires set by farmers, filling the air with the
smell of burning grass, sweet and strong.
Row Upon Row
After about half a mile, she crosses the main village road,
the one that leads to Benvar’s school, and steps onto a slender
trail winding through dry, golden stalks of grain that rise
above her head. After about 50 paces, she emerges to see the
work that awaits her: row upon row of bolls bursting with
cotton. The farmer is already here, working where the plants are
most in danger of being trampled by passersby. At the opposite
end stands a tree branch topped by the green flag.
By 7:15 a.m., the sliver of shade in the bottom corner of
her field disappears, as the West African sun rises with the
temperature. On the road above the field, a boy walking to
school says he and his friends notice the children working
almost every day. “We see them to be suffering,” says Seuka
Somda, who, like Clarisse, is 13.
Giant Shea Tree
The harvesting pauses at about noon, after six hours of
picking. Clarisse heads to the village square to cool herself in
the shade of a giant shea tree that grows in its center. Before
long, a woman calls her name. She jumps to her feet and scurries
over. Three men traveling through the village have stopped to
cool themselves and drink some of the local brew, called
“pito.” As Clarisse refills their bowls, one man tells her:
“If you give me a refill, it means you have agreed to sleep
with me.” She pours his pito, turns and walks away.
Around 4 p.m., Clarisse returns to the field. A large
wicker bushel bulges with cotton. She bends over and compacts it
as tightly as she can. Cotton towers above the bushel’s rim.
Clarisse wobbles as she sets it atop a blue, yellow and red
scarf wrapped on the crown of her head.
She makes her way along the road under the weight of the
harvest, weak from eating nothing for two days except some
roasted groundnuts given to her by another child laborer. Two
men on bicycles pedal toward her, both carrying bulging bags
balanced on their frames. “Have you gone to grind some flour?”
she calls out. “Can you kindly give me some so I can make
something to eat?” The men say nothing, continuing down the red
dirt road toward the village square.
Storing the Cotton
Clarisse carries her bushel to a neighbor’s home where
Kamboule stores his cotton because it’s closer to the pickup
point for the organic and fair-trade program. The house, in
relative luxury with its poured concrete foundation, sits just
down the road from the school she used to attend.
Back at Kamboule’s hut, under the light of a full moon,
Clarisse says she’ll use some of the water she’s drawn from the
well to wash herself, then she’ll go to the homes of neighbors
and friends in the village. If they’re eating, she’ll wait
politely and hope they offer her some food. For an enfant
confie, this is everyday life, Clarisse says: “If your mother
is not with you, you become like an orphan.”
Far away, in midtown Manhattan, Irina Richardson says she’s
shopped at Victoria’s Secret for bras and underwear for 15 years
and was pleased to think she was doing good. Told of Clarisse’s
role in providing cotton for lingerie, the 51-year-old property
manager from Long Island says she was stunned. “Buying
something made under those conditions shows no respect for other
human beings,” she says.
No More French
Clarisse, who once stared at the world in wonder, now has
difficulty looking others in the face. She no longer speaks
French, because, she says, there is no one left in her life who
would understand her.
Exhausted at the end of each day, she can’t fall asleep
easily after she lies down on her faded plastic mat. “I feel
uneasy,” she says. “Sometimes, I’m very angry.” It’s hard to
close her eyes, she says, when she knows waking up means “I
will suffer again.” She tries to think of a better life: She
imagines owning and tending a few sheep and some goats. Women
can earn money raising small animals, and it’s easier than
working the fields. This is her new dream now that she knows, as
she says, that “I have no chance to go back to school.”
Once she does fall asleep, the nightmares return.