Gender and Forced Labour: Understanding the Links in Global Cocoa Supply Chains
基于加纳可可产区497名工人的调查数据，分析性别如何影响强迫劳动风险，发现家庭不平等、再生产劳动责任和社会财产关系使女性更易遭受严重剥削。
This paper investigates the gendered patterns and dynamics of labour exploitation and forced labour in the cocoa supply chain. The empirical basis of our analysis is an original primary dataset produced through the Global Business of Forced Labour project, which includes data gathered in Ghana in 2016–2017, comprising 60 in-depth interviews and a survey of 497 cocoa workers across 74 cocoa communities from Ghana’s two largest cocoa-producing regions, the Western and Ashanti Regions. Drawing on this dataset, we show that prevailing business models within the Ghanaian cocoa industry rely on and reinforce labour exploitation and unequal gender power relations. Given that the links between forced labour and gender remain poorly understood, we analyse the factors that render women workers disproportionately vulnerable to severe labour exploitation, underscoring the role of unequal family relations, responsibility for reproductive labour, and social property relations in creating vulnerability to exploitation.