"Caffeine Jungle: Child labor, struggling farmers found on 'ethically' certified coffee farms in southern Mexico", 21 October 2022

...[A]...more than year-long investigation by "Impact x Nightline" found evidence of child labor and farmers living in poverty on multiple ethically certified coffee farms in southern Mexico - the heart of coffee production in North America...Impact producers discovered a group of children working on a Rainforest Alliance-certified farm in Chiapas, Mexico in 2021, with some as young as 6-years-old. One boy told the team he was 12-years-old and had been working the harvest for two months without access to a school. Mexico's minimum age for working is 15 and Rainforest Alliance policies mandate that children who live on their member farms, must be in school or childcare while their parents work...Some adult farmers from other small-scale Rainforest Alliance farms told Impact that they were struggling to provide enough food for their families...Fernando Bautista, the Rainforest Alliance's regional lead for Chiapas, initially told Impact that his organization keeps an eye on its farms to ensure that children aren't working, but when presented by Impact reporters with videos and photos of the kids on their farm, he acknowledged that not all of the farms they certify are inspected. "As an organization, I can tell you that we're working to eradicate all of that [child labor]," he told Impact, adding that the organization would investigate the farms in question. The Rainforest Alliance would ultimately pull its certification from the three of the farms where Impact saw evidence of child labor during its 2021 trip... Amelia Evans, who leads an independent research team that is studying the ethical certification industry and its impact on human rights across the world, told Impact that the ethical certifiers are systematically failing to prevent human rights abuses and it's not possible for them to do full audits of all the farms they certify...