Why Kids Need Fair Trade
Miles Litvinoff and John Madeley
Children in developing countries are exploited by the mainstream international trading system. The system pays millions of parents a pittance for what they produce. This often means that children have to work rather than go to school, do not have health care when they need it, and are trapped in a vicious circle of poverty.
Poverty
One of the world’s grimmest statistics is that on average 30,000 children die of poverty every day – victims of malnutrition and easily treatable diseases like measles that can prove fatal to poor children in poor countries.
Whole communities have been dragged into misery by debt brought on by the world trading system. Falling prices for cotton on world markets, for example, have led to a catastrophe for millions of small-scale farming families in India, plunging them into ruinous debt which has led to many suicides. Some Indian villages have been reported as being up for sale. In December 2005, villagers of Dorli in Maharashtra state put up signboards announcing: `Dorli village is for sale.’ Each of the village’s 270 residents, including all its children, was said to be carrying a debt of 30,000 rupees (£380).
Poverty is also the overriding reason why children are exploited. Adult wages are often not enough to feed, clothe or house a family, so children are sent out to work. Coffee, cocoa (chocolate), bananas, oranges and sugar are among the food sectors that most exploit child labour. Other sectors include cotton and textiles, carpets and rugs, jewellery and sports balls.
Child labour is all too common. The International Labour Organization estimates that 126 million children aged 5–14 work in hazardous and illegal conditions worldwide – 73 million of them younger than ten. Many are trapped in forced and slave labour.
A few years ago in Côte d’Ivoire, which produces almost half the cocoa for the world’s chocolate industry, more than 200,000 children were estimated as working in dangerous conditions on cocoa plantations, many of them trafficked from Burkina Faso and Mali. There were reports of boys as young as nine working. Many were never paid. Beatings were common. Boys who tried to escape were sometimes killed.
How Fair Trade helps
Children deserve better. They deserve a system that gives their families a decent return for the goods they produce and trade. Kids need Fair Trade. Every time we buy Fair Trade we can improve a child’s life.
Fair Trade helps low-income households earn a decent living, so they don’t have to send their children to work. By improving resources and empowering people at both family and community level, it helps ensure better access for children to clean water and sanitation, education and health care.
By buying Fair Trade we can also be sure that children have not been exploited or trafficked in producing the food we eat, the beverages we drink, the clothes we wear.
IFAT member organisations commit to ensuring that the participation of children in production processes of fairly traded articles does not adversely affect their well-being, security, educational requirements and need for play.
The Network of European Worldshops (NEWS) permits children’s work in producing goods sold as long as it is temporary, part-time, healthy and non-exploitative. NEWS reflects the views of many who believe that an immediate and total ban on child work could force the issue underground and make child protection more difficult.
Education
Fair Trade helps kids to go to school. More than 120 million girls and boys (more girls than boys) of primary-school age don’t go to school. Almost half the girls in the world’s poorest countries get no primary education at all, and in 19 African countries fewer than half the children complete primary school.
Rural poverty is the biggest obstacle to children’s schooling, and rural children are the most affected. Primary education is usually free in the South, but parents need money for uniforms, books, pencils, daily travel and food at school. In Ethiopia the nearest primary school can be up to 20 kilometres away. Secondary schools in developing
countries are more likely to charge fees. Not surprisingly, a third of the world’s children never get that far.
Southern farmers, rural workers, craftspeople and their organisations say it loud and clear: children’s education is top priority. Fair Trade can mean that families earn enough money to send their children to school.
Fair Trade helps provide the money to build and equip schools too. Fair Trade producer organisations use their income to build and maintain local primary schools and to fund secondary school and university scholarships for children.
For example, Kuapa Kokoo, a large Ghanaian Fair Trade cocoa co-operative with 45,000 farmer members, has set up schools and nurseries for non-members as well as co-op members. Pupil attendance and education quality have improved significantly. Kuapa is reckoned to have earned about US$1 million in extra income through Fair Trade over eight years – equivalent to annual primary schooling costs for 245,000 children in Ghana.
In southern Brazil, Apaco, a Fair Trade orange growers’ co-operative, supports a boarding school for girls from difficult family backgrounds, where the girls receive psychological support and therapy as well as a regular education.
Health and family support
Fair Trade also means healthier children. Ten million children die each year before their fifth birthday, many from easily preventable diarrhoea. Fair Trade means more money to ensure that young children receive nutritious food at household level, and enables producer communities to build clinics and pharmacies and provide low-cost medicines.
In 2005 the BBC reported on one of the women-only fair trade coffee co-operatives that have sprung up in Rwanda, where many women were widowed in the 1994 genocide. One member explained that now she could now afford family health insurance and her children could see a doctor.
In East Timor 18,000 children and adults have used free health clinic services paid for by Fair Trade. Elsewhere, Fair Trade producers have used their extra income to provide public toilets and maternity clinics, support community health programmes, and in one case even buy an ambulance.
In Bahia, one of Brazil’s poorest regions, members of Cealnor, a federation of Fair Trade fruit producers, have invested in equipment to make a nutritious juice mixture for malnourished children. Their infant health drink is now sold in local supermarkets.
Vietnamese Fair Trade craft producer Mai Handicrafts provides decent work for low-income and marginalised families by marketing handicraft products to local and export markets. Mai combines income generation with training and educational provision for poor women and children, promoting self-reliance among disadvantaged families and ethnic minority communities. Profits from handicrafts sales are used to support social work activities with single parent families, children and young adults.
Helping children by empowering women
Much of the world’s poverty has a gender dimension. Women-headed families are statistically more likely to be poor than those headed by men. Fair Trade has a strong focus on the rights of women and girls. By helping empower women, it benefits some of the world’s poorest children
Just as deprivation gets passed down across generations, so does empowerment. Women strengthened by Fair Trade bring up daughters with higher expectations. Teenager Rijayatu Razak, daughter of Kuapa Kokoo co-operative members, is an example of how Fair Trade can help change girls’ outlook. Able to go to secondary school as a result of the benefits of Fair Trade, Rijayatu says:
`At school I have started my own co-operative for girls only. We think that it is not fair that the girls have to do all the housework while the boys can ride around the village on their bicycles and play football. We think the work should be equal between the girls and the boys.’
Buying Fair Trade is the best way of assuring that we are not involved – however indirectly – in exploiting children. For many of the world’s children Fair Trade means a much better life.
Miles Litvinoff and John Madeley are the authors of 50 Reasons to Buy Fair Trade, Pluto Press, London, price £7.99 / $15.95 / €15.00 - www.plutobooks.com
Case Study:
1.Sana Hastakala, Nepal - Boibha and Babita's story
2.Get Paper, Nepal - Sanjay and Subash's story
3.Mahaguti Craft with a Conscience
4.Kumbeshwar Technical School (KTS), Nepal
5.New Sadle, Nepal |
