Victoria's Secret lingerie: child labour in Africa

Clarisse Kambire, 13, a child laborer, stands in the her farmer’s store room after delivering a basket of freshly-picked fair-trade organic cotton from a field almost a mile away near Benvar, Burkina Faso, on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011.

Bloomberg:

Benvar, Burkina Faso — Clarisse Kambire’s nightmare rarely changes. It’s daytime. In a field of cotton plants that burst with purple and white flowers, a man in rags towers over her, a stick raised above his head.

Then a voice booms, jerking Clarisse from her slumber and making her heart leap.

“Get up!”

The man ordering her awake is the same one who haunts the 13-year-old girl’s sleep: Victorien Kamboule, the farmer she labours for in a West African cotton field. Before sunrise, she rises from the plastic mat that serves as her mattress, barely thicker than the cover of a magazine, opens the metal door of her mud hut and sets her almond-shaped eyes on the first day of this season’s harvest.

She had been dreading it.

“I’m starting to think about how he will shout at me and beat me again,” she said two days earlier. Preparing the field was even worse. Clarisse helped dig more than 500 rows with only her muscles and a hoe, substituting for the ox and the plow the farmer can’t afford.

This harvest is Clarisse’s second. Cotton from her first went from her hands onto the trucks of a Burkina Faso program that deals in cotton certified as fair trade. The fibre from that harvest then went to factories in India and Sri Lanka, where it was fashioned into Victoria’s Secret underwear.

Planted when Clarisse was 12, all of Burkina Faso’s organic crop from last season was bought by Victoria’s Secret, according to Georges Guebre, leader of the country’s organic and fair-trade program, and Tobias Meier, head of fair trade for Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation, a Zurich-based development organization that set up the program and has helped market the cotton to global buyers.

Meier says Victoria’s Secret also was expected to get most of this season’s organic harvest, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its February issue.

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