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We sat down to draft this final chapter in the run up to Easter 2022, at a moment when shops across the UK were promoting a bewildering variety of seasonal chocolate eggs–small and large; solid and hollow; white, milk and dark; economy and top-of-the-line. At this same time, The Observer newspaper ran a story about an upcoming Channel 4 Dispatches programme 1 with the headline:‘Cadbury faces fresh accusations of child labour on cocoa farms in Ghana. A new TV documentary alleges that children as young as 10 are using machetes to harvest pods.’2 And on Saturday 16th (the last day before Easter to buy chocolate eggs), The Guardian newspaper carried a fullpage advertisement for Tony’s Chocolonely–a self-proclaimed ‘100% slave free’chocolate producer–with a vivid, colourful accusation to readers, spanning two-thirds of the page, that ‘there’s child labour in your Easter chocolate.’The beat goes on, and there is little sign that the debate around children, work, school, harm and agriculture in rural Africa will be disappearing anytime soon.

Despite children’s work in African agriculture most often being portrayed as a ‘bad’, pure and simple, the preceding chapters confirm the fact that there is nothing simple or straightforward about this longstanding conundrum. Understandings of harm are not universal, but contingent–international norms and definitions can be irrelevant, if not harmful, at the local level. Complex definitions and assumptions about what is hazardous and/or harmful obscure the fact that there is little evidence that large numbers of children actually experience harm from work. School versus work is a false choice: many …