Burkina faso children reap cotton for Victoria’s Secret

Clarisse Kambire's nightmare almost never changes.It is day.In a cotton field that explodes in purple and white flowers, a man leans on her swimming a stick on her head.Then he rumbles a voice, which shakes Clarisse of his dream and makes his heart jump."Get up!".

The man who orders him to get up is the same one that appears in the dream of the 13 -year -old girl: Victorien Kamboule, the farmer for whom he works in a cotton field in Western Africa.Before dawn, a November morning rises from the faded plastic mat that serves as a mattress, bareThis season's harvest day.

I was already fearing."I'm starting to think about how it will shout and hit me again," he had said two days before.Preparing the field was even worse.Clarisse helped dig more than 500 grooves only with their muscles and a hoe, which replace the ox and the plow that the farmer cannot pay.If she is slow, Kamboule whips her with a tree branch.

This is the second harvest of Clarisse.The cotton of the first passed from his hands to the trucks of a Burkina Faso program that manages cotton certified as fair trade.The fiber of that harvest then went to factories in India and Sri Lanka, where inmate underwear for Victoria’s Secret was created.

Clarisse cotton

"Manufactured with 20% organic fibers of Burkina Faso", reads the garment label, bought in October.

Forced labor and child labor are not a novelty on African farms.Clarisse cotton, product of both, is supposed to be different.It is certified as organic and fair trade, and therefore it should be safe from such practices.

Sow when Clarisse was 12 years old, the entire organic harvest of Burkina Faso of the last season was bought by Victoria's Secret, according to Georges Guebre, leader of the National Organic and Fair Trade Program, and Tobias Meier, head of Fair Trade in Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation, an organization for Zurich -based development that established the program and has contributed to market cotton for global buyers.Meier says that in principle Victoria’s Secret would also stay with most of this year's organic harvest.

Green identification flag

The leader of the Local Cooperative of Fair Trade in the Pueblito de Clarisse confirmed that his farmer is one of the producers of the program.On the edge of the field where she works there is a green identification flag, which deliver to their producers.

As Victoria’s Secret partner, the Guebre organization, the National Federation of Burkina Cotton Producers, is responsible for handling all aspects of the Organic and Fair Trade Program in Burkina Faso.Known for its French initials, the UNPCB (Union Nationale des Produceurs of Cotton du Burkina Faso) in 2008 co -crocked a study in which it was indicated that hundreds or perhaps thousands of children such as Clarisse could be vulnerable to the exploitation by producers andHelvetas.Victoria’s Secret says that he never saw that report.

Clarisse's work highlights the deficiencies of the system to certify as fair trade basic products and finished in a global market that grew by 27% in just one year, up to more than 5.800 million dollars in 2010 (4.500 million euros).This market is based on the notion that purchases made by companies and consumers should not make these complicit exploitation, especially children.

Fair trade perversion

In Burkina Faso, where child labor is endemic in the production of its main export culture, paying lucrative overpricing for organic cotton and fair trade has created- perversely- new incentives for exploitation.The program attracted subsistence farmers who say they have no resources to cultivate cotton with fair trade certification without violating a central principle of movement: force working in their fields to other people's children.

An executive of the Matrix of Victoria’s Secret says that the amount of cotton buying the firm to Burkina Faso is minimal, but that accusations related to child labor take seriously.

"They describe a behavior contrary to the values of our company and the labor code and the norms of origin that we demand to comply with all our suppliers," Tammy Roberts Myers, Vice President of External Communications of Limited Brands Incs Inc.Victoria’s Secret is the largest unit of Columbus's company, Ohio.

"Our norms specifically prohibit child labor," he said."We are strongly determined to thoroughly investigate this issue with interested parties".

In the fields

To understand the terrible situation of Clarisse and other children, the Bloomberg agency spent more than six weeks making reports in Burkina Fasho, among others, Clarisse, her family, the neighbors and the leaders of her village.His experiences are similar to those of six other children interviewed by Bloomberg, as a 12 -year -old squalid boy who works in a neighboring field.

In small plot farms such as Kamboule in all Burkina Faso, researchers sponsored by the Federation of Producers confirmed in 2008 that more than half of the 89 surveyed producers had a total of 90 children temporarily welcomed under 18 years old.Many had two or more.The problem was acute in the southwest of the country, which constitutes the program production center and is the homeland of Clarisse.That year, there were about 7.000 Farmers in Fair Trade, according to Helvetas data.

The study revealed that two thirds of children temporarily received in houses such as Kamboule did not go to school as required that they did it.Farmers attached to the Fair Trade program told researchers that they did not pay the children, which led the study authors to write “this category of children constitutes a problem at several levels: in terms of their social vulnerability by aside, and as for your situation at work on the other.These children are temporarily welcomed in employee: obviously they are asked to work, as producers expressed in their own words, but do not receive any remuneration, regardless of age ”.

Nothing about children

Kamboule and some producers say that no one in the program gave them standards or training on child labor on their farms.A face to face instruction would be a need in a country where 71 percent of the population does not know how to read.

"No, they didn't tell us anything about children," said Louis Joseph Kambire, 69, a nerve farmer of fair trade that is part of the Audit Commission of the Benvar Cooperative, the village of Clarisse.As you do not have your own children, Kambire forces children to temporarily received in charge of working in an organic cotton and fair trade field that cultivates with Clarisse.

"That's why they work for me," he says.Before the fair trade program, he did not work in his subsistence fields.

There have been few efforts or none to improve training after the 2008 report, according to Bloomberg interviews with farmers in five of the six villages where the survey was made.

Store cotton

Clarisse entails his bushel to the house of a neighbor where Kamboule stores his cotton because he is closer to the collection point for the Organic and Fair Trade Program.The house, with a relative luxury with its cement floor, is going through the school to which it previously attended.

Back in Kamboule's hut, in the light of a full moon, Clarisse says that he will use part of the water he took from the well to wash and then go to the houses of the neighbors and friends of the town.If you are eating, you will await them until they offer some food.For an "Enfrant I trust", this is the life of every day, says Clarisse: "Without your mother nearby, you are like an orphan".

Far away, in the center of Manhattan, Irina Richardson says he buys corpiños and Victoria’s Secret for 15 years and made it happy to think that he was doing a good.Upon learning of Clarisse's role in the provision of cotton for lingerie, this 51 -year -old Long Island property administrator said he was passed: "Buying something made of such conditions is a lack of respect for other human beings".