Child Labor

Monsanto uses child labor in its Indian cottonseed fields

Farmers in the Uyyalawada region process high-tech cottonseeds genetically engineered to contain a natural pesticide, on behalf of U.S. agriculture giant Monsanto. To get the seeds to breed true the farmers have to cross-pollinate the plants, a laborious task that keeps a peak of a dozen workers busy for several months on just one acre. And to make a profit the farmers have to use cheap labor. That means using kids. To harvest the bolls three months later, the farmers use cheap labor again, not the machinery that is used to pick cotton in the U.S.

Fields have sign proclaims, “Monsanto India Limited Child Labour Free Fields.” Jyothi, one child labor, says she has been working in these fields for the past five years, since her father, a cotton farmer, committed suicide after incurring huge debts.

Last year 420,000 laborers under the age of 18 were employed in cottonseed farms in four states across India, estimates Glocal Research, a consultancy in Hyderabad that monitors agricultural labor conditions. Of that total 54% were under the age of 14 and illegally employed.

Even as India gallops toward First World status–with its booming economy, roaring stock market and rapid progress in autos and steel–it is still a giant back-yard sweatshop to the world, staffed by underage boys and girls. The government itself, in its most recent account (from a 2001 census), estimates that 12.6 million children under the age of 14 are at work in India. NGOs that make a career of exposing excesses put the number much higher–50 million. the teenagers in the Midwest get $7 an hour so they can spend it at the mall. Their Indian counterparts are getting 20 cents an hour to buy food.

Every time somebody in Europe or the U.S. buys an imported handmade carpet, an embroidered pair of jeans, a beaded purse, a decorated box or a soccer ball, there’s a good chance they’re acquiring something fashioned by a child. Such goods are available in places like GapKids, Macy’s, ABC Carpet & Home, Ikea, Lowe’s and Home Depot.

“There are many, many household items that are produced with forced labor and not just child labor,” says Bama Athreya, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum in Washington, D.C. It’s a fact of a global economy, and will continue to be, as long as Americans (and Europeans) demand cheap goods–and incomes in emerging economies remain low. If a child is enslaved, it’s because his parents are desperately poor.

The UN International Labor Organization guesses that there are 218 million child laborers worldwide, 7 in 10 of them in agriculture, followed by service businesses (22%) and industry (9%). Asia-Pacific claims the greatest share of underage workers (122 million), then sub-Saharan Africa (49 million). Noteworthy offenders: Cambodia, Mali, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Guatemala. A decade ago India ratified the UN convention on children’s rights but refused to sign one key clause that set the standard for child labor–14 and under. “This already waters down their obligations under international law, which of course remains a voluntary matter,” says Coen Kompier at the ilo’s New Delhi bureau.

Monsanto’s competitors, the Swiss Syngenta and the German Bayer, also contract with farmers in India to produce seed. For all three the arrangement is like the one that governs chicken production in the U.S., with a giant corporation supplying inputs to a small farmer and then picking up the output at harvest time.

A typical Monsanto farmer owns only 1 to 4 acres of intensely cultivated cotton plants and keeps up to a dozen workers busy for the better part of a year tending to the plot. Often the farmer is from a higher caste (Brahmin), the laborers from a landless lower caste (Dalit). The pay, typically $38 to $76 a month, goes directly to the parents of the workers. Sometimes the farmer pays for the labor in advance, or offers a loan, charging the parents interest of 1.5% to 2% a month.

The season starts with the sowing of seed, staggered over a three-month period that begins in April. Two months after a row is planted the bushes are in bloom and the real work begins. Pollen from male plants must be dusted by hand onto the flowers of female plants. The pollination work lasts for 70 to 100 days and is followed by cotton-picking staggered over several months. Children’s hands are ideal for the delicate work with stamens and pistils. Their bodies are no better at withstanding the poisons.

farmers spray the fields with pesticides like Nuvacron, banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and endosulfan, methomyl and Metasystox, considered by the EPA to be highly toxic. overexposure result in diarrhea, nausea, difficulty in breathing, convulsions, headaches and depression.

The farmers buy the starter seed from Monsanto at a cost that comes to the equivalent of $30 an acre. That acre will produce something like 900 pounds of cottonseed, to be sold back to Monsanto at $3.80 a pound, or $3,400 an acre. The cotton fiber is sold separately by a middleman. In a magnanimous gesture that accomplished nothing, the Indian government cracked down on the seed companies by putting a ceiling on the cost of the starter seed (it used to be $64 an acre) but did nothing to change the price paid for the product seed, which was left to the seed companies. The product price has remained essentially flat in rupee terms over the past six years, despite 4.7% average annual inflation in India.

In the neighboring states of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat, you find children producing genetically modified seeds for such vegetables as okra, tomatoes, chilies and eggplant, in the service of Syngenta. Pesticides are more frequently applied, and the pay is less, 5 to 10 cents an hour, even though the mandated minimum wage is 17 cents. The seeds are sold to U.S. farmers, the tomatoes and eggplant to U.S. consumers.

The labor organizations can’t agree on how to ameliorate the situation. Some say that children of poor families have to work in order to make ends meet and that the government should offer them night classes to prepare them for better jobs. Others want to end child labor by finding jobs for parents, thereby eliminating the necessity for kids to work.

India is the third-largest exporter of decorative stone–marble, granite, slate, sandstone–after Italy and China, with $1.2 billion in export revenue in fiscal 2006. This industry also employs child labors. Their work finally will likely end up in the garden and patio shops of American retail chains.

Laborers get paid by the cobble–a penny for a piece of 8 square inches, 7 cents for one of 66 square inches. Children are ideal because of their flexible hands and gentle pressure on the chisel and the hammer, says Rana Sengupta with the Mine Labor Protection Campaign (Trust) in Rajasthan. Hammer bruises are as common as cuts from flying pieces of the stone or slices from the chisel. So, too, says Sengupta, are silicosis, tuberculosis and bronchitis from inhaling dust particles.

Leela, 10, has been at this work for two years now. In a nine-hour workday she can turn out 50 pieces and earn $1.26. She takes two days off a month. At another Rajasthan quarry, 15-year-old Raju has spent his adolescence among the piles of sandstone waste. He dropped out of school four years ago to make cobbles.

Further north, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, hand-knotted carpets are made and sent to showrooms in the U.S. Such goods can be found, says Washington D.C. NGO Rugmark, at Bloomingdale’s, ABC Carpet & Home and Ikea. In Mirzapur most looms are inside people’s homes or in communal sheds. Workers live and sleep in the same low-slung sheds, stepping down into 3-foot-deep trenches dug into the earthen floors to house the looms. Two or three people sit at a loom. The pits get damp, especially during the monsoons, and after the daylight fades, weavers must rely on a single naked lightbulb.

Sometime within the next few months Gap intends to convene a global forum to consider “industrywide solutions” to child labor. Good luck. Since October Gap has cut in half its orders from a contractor in New Delhi it claims had subcontracted embroidery work out to an unofficial vendor without the company’s knowledge. But in the wake of the bust, middlemen have found new ways to duck responsibility by removing labels that identify the origin of apparel.
Now it’s even harder to trace who the shipment is for and to hold the companies accountable.
- from Forbes.

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you may feel that when we purchasing something by the child labor, you may be helping them by giving some money to them. But actually nothing is going to change by doing that. Only you and the middle men will get advantage. The money which reaches the bottom level labor will aways be sucked by entertainment industry(movie, TV), alcohol, God, Religion, and government etc. Movie are very important. That help them to dream about a good time (may come in future) and power to work hard today for the rich. So nothing going to change.
What we can do?
Consume less. And do not pay money to those industries which are making problem or hiding the truth.
Dont pay money to entertainment(movie, music etc) industry.
Dont pay money to alcohol.
Dont pay money to God, religion.
Charity is sin. All the people in this world have the right to live.
- jagadees
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