SaveChildren翻訳チームコミュのでは、さっそくなんですが、依頼です

以下のカカオに関する文章を翻訳したいのですが
どなたか、やってもらえる方はいらっしゃいますか？？

また、分担とかはどうしましょうか？？

意見、発言待ってます〜♪

http://www.globalmarch.org/clns/clns-feb-2007-details.php#13-1

A bitter side of the cocoa trade

Advocates want consumers to know if child labour was used in making of candy

Abidjan, COTE D'IVOIRE–As sweethearts spend billions on boxes of artfully wrapped Valentine's Day chocolates, a U.S.-led plan to save children from the worst forms of child labour on West African cocoa plantations is a tangled mess – a lot like love itself.

Five years after Iowa's Democratic Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation to stamp every chocolate bar sold in the U.S. with a "free from child labour" label, industry, government and farmers are stuck in a quagmire of sorting out certification to ensure that only adult hands plant, harvest and transport the beans made into products like M&Ms and Mars bars.

"It helps to be aware of the problem. But to solve the problem ... I don't feel we are on the way so far," admits Amouan Acquah, the government's special advisor for agricultural commodities.

Save the Children Canada is calling for a similar tracking system, which would allow Canadian candy buyers to trace where the beans in their chocolate bars originate and whether child labour was used in processing.

Still, farmers say having children work on the farm is part of the natural teaching process that will ready their sons for the day they grow their own cocoa.

Four sets of eyes follow farmer Cheba Ouattara as he pries milky white beans from the slimy confines of a yellow cacao pod in preparation for planting. Three of Ouattara's disciples are his sons, aged 13, 15 and 18. The other is a 4-year-old neighbour who followed them to the isolated, 16-hectare farm in the heart of Côte d'Ivoire's cacao region.

"You can't leave your child at the village," said farmer Eugene Djiara. "They must go to the farm. If you leave them behind in the village, they pick up bad habits."

Since a 2001 report from the International Labour Organization found thousands of children working in the depths of Côte d'Ivoire's isolated cacao farms, the Ivorian government has spent a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to assess the extent of the situation in six central villages.

It is seemingly impossible to get a sense of the number of children actually working in the fields, which span some of Côte d'Ivoire's more remote regions, hiding small workers in the leafy expanse of the tall cacao bushes.

One anti-child labour group quotes a U.S. State Department report saying there are 15,000 children involved. Harkin's literature claims there are 5,000 children exposed to the worst forms of child labour, which include working with sharp instruments, heavy loads, chemicals and fires.

The Ivorian government project, meant to train people to teach about the dangers of child labour and set up task forces to monitor the situation, found more than 6,500 children in six villages were "at risk" of the worst forms of child labour.

"We needed to know the reality on the ground. It's not as exaggerated like they say, but it exists," Acquah said.

The ILO report found some of the children working in Côte d'Ivoire were actually from neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso, desert countries where people are so desperate, parents were selling their children to farmers who sometimes paid their workers nothing, often leaving them malnourished and sometimes beating them.

After intense industry lobbying, Harkin's motion went from a stamp on every chocolate bar to a stamp on every bag of cocoa beans to certification for every farm, moving from a ban on any child involvement to only the most serious forms of child labour.

With less than six months to go before the July deadline to implement certification, none of the world's cocoa producing countries has managed to solve the riddle of documentation and Côte d'Ivoire, the world's biggest cocoa producer, is facing the added challenge of a stalemated civil war.

"We can't monitor every cocoa farm," Acquah said. "Farmers just work with children because they won't have to pay."

Harvesting the beans for chocolate is brutal work. Ripe pods are collected by hand, using machetes, then split open to collect the seeds, which are dried, fermented, packaged and shipped.

With the war hurting cacao prices and making the usual migration of adult workers more difficult, more and more farmers are having trouble finding and paying seasonal workers, making children even more vulnerable, said Michel Seka, a project manager with the German Development Agency.

The agency spends about $100,000 each year supporting small programs in 57 cocoa-producing villages and Seka's desk is littered with funding requests for programs aimed at getting kids off farms and into school.