By ROBIN McDOWELL and MARGIE MASON
They are two young girls from two very different worlds, linked by a
global industry that exploits an army of children.
Olivia Chaffin, a Girl Scout in rural Tennessee, was a top cookie seller in her troop when she first heard rainforests were being destroyed to make way for ever-expanding palm oil plantations.
Olivia, who earned a badge for selling more than
600 boxes of cookies, had spotted palm oil as an ingredient on the back of one of her packages but was relieved to see a green tree logo next to the words “certified sustainable.” She assumed that meant her
A child helps her parents work on a palm oil plantation in Sabah, Malaysia, in 2018. With little or no access to daycare, some young children in Indonesia and Malaysia follow their parents to the fields, where they are exposed to toxic pesticides and fertilizers.
Binsar Bakkara/Associated Press
They are two young girls from two very different worlds, linked by a global industry that exploits an army of children.
Olivia Chaffin, a Girl Scout in Jonesborough, Tennessee, was a top cookie seller in her troop when she first heard rainforests were being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations. On one of those plantations a continent away, 10-year-old Ima helped harvest the fruit that makes its way into a dizzying array of products sold by leading Western food and cosmetics brands.
An estimated tens of thousands of children work alongside their parents in Indonesia and Malaysia, which supply 85% of the world’s most consumed vegetable oil.
Associated Press
A child carries palm kernels collected from the ground across a creek at a palm oil plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia, in 2017. Previous Next
Wednesday, December 30, 2020 1:00 am
Global palm oil industry exploiting child labor
AP investigation looks into problem
ROBIN McDOWELL and MARGIE MASON | Associated Press
They are two young girls from two very different worlds, linked by a global industry that exploits an army of children.
Olivia Chaffin, a Girl Scout in rural Tennessee, was a top cookie seller in her troop when she first heard that rainforests were being destroyed to make way for ever-expanding palm oil plantations. On one of those plantations a continent away, 10-year-old Ima helped harvest the fruit that makes its way into a dizzying array of products sold by leading Western food and cosmetics brands.