Abstract
This paper investigates the gendered patterns and dynamics of labour exploitation and forced labour in the cocoa supply chain. The empirical basis of our analysis is an original primary dataset produced through the Global Business of Forced Labour project, which includes data gathered in Ghana in 2016–2017, comprising 60 in-depth interviews and a survey of 497 cocoa workers across 74 cocoa communities from Ghana’s two largest cocoa-producing regions, the Western and Ashanti Regions. Drawing on this dataset, we show that prevailing business models within the Ghanaian cocoa industry rely on and reinforce labour exploitation and unequal gender power relations. Given that the links between forced labour and gender remain poorly understood, we analyse the factors that render women workers disproportionately vulnerable to severe labour exploitation, underscoring the role of unequal family relations, responsibility for reproductive labour, and social property relations in creating vulnerability to exploitation.
Highlights
Forced labour is widely acknowledged to be a resilient and endemic feature of the contemporary global economy, and policy and civil society actors around the world are dedicating sizable efforts and resources to combat it
This paper investigates the gendered patterns and dynamics of labour exploitation and forced labour in the cocoa supply chain
We argue that these dynamics come together to render women workers disproportionately vulnerable to severe labour exploitation
Summary
Forced labour is widely acknowledged to be a resilient and endemic feature of the contemporary global economy, and policy and civil society actors around the world are dedicating sizable efforts and resources to combat it. Barrientos, Kothari, and Phillips argued that there was a burgeoning literature on vulnerable workers and labour standards in the global economy, the most severe forms of exploitation encompassed in the terms forced and unfree labour were ‘only rarely integrated into the continuum that informs most research. Instead, they are thought to represent a separate and special category of labour relations and need to be viewed through different theoretical and empirical lenses’
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