Only remote Ivorian farms use child labor, farming figure says

YABAYO, Ivory Coast (Reuters) -- The use of children from Mali as laborers on Ivory Coast's cocoa plantations is limited to remote plantations deep in the bush, according to the head of one large community of migrant farmers from Mali.

"The children are in the bush. If you bring a child here, it will flee," Ibrahima Samake told Reuters.

Yabayo is on the main road between Soubre and Daloa, in the key southwest cocoa region.

Around 650 Malian farmers and their families live in the Yabayo region, some since the early 1950s.

On September 28, Britain's Channel 4 television aired a documentary on children from Mali being used as slaves on plantations in the west African nation of Ivory Coast.

One allegation that 90 percent of cocoa farms in Ivory Coast used slave labor was seen as a gross exaggeration by people inside the country with knowledge of the cocoa sector.

Ivory Coast's ambassador to Britain, Kouadio Adjoumani, called the program "wildly inaccurate" and "nonsense" in a statement.

Samake said the youngest Malians who had migrated to the Yabayo area to work on the plantations were adolescents of at least 15 or 16 years of age.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

See related sites about Africa

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.