A large number of firms including Coca-Cola are secretly enjoying benefits of using child labor in sugarcane fields in El Salvador. Around 30,000 Salvadoran children, starting from the age of eight, work everyday in the these sugarcane plantations.

Children are usually hired as “helpers” instead of employees but are forced to work up to nine hours a day in the intense heat. This involves a lot of dangerous work like using machetes to cut the canes and other sharp devices are also used. Moreover, children are also required to skip few months of school especially during the harvesting time.

“Child labor is rampant on El Salvador’s sugar cane plantations,” Michael Bochenek, lead researcher of Human Rights Watch said in the June 2004 release of Turning a Blind Eye: Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador’s Sugar Cane Cultivation.

How’s Coca-Cola involved in this? Coca-Cola is indirectly involved in these activities. It does not own the plantations nor it buys directly from them, but it does buy the sugar milled from the cane from Central Izalco, El Salvador’s largest sugar mill. Guiding Principles of Coca-Cola state that its direct suppliers will not use child labor as defined by local law. Whereas, HRW’s research says, Izalco purchases sugar cane from a number of plantations that use child labor in violation of the law.

Sources: http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp/coke061304.cfm
http://www.satyamag.com/mar07/bochenek.html