By Marwaan Macan-Markar
MEXICO CITY, Nov 29 1999 (IPS)

Latin American governments are increasingly throwing their support behind an international campaign to eliminate the exploitation of child workers.

Costa Rican labour minister Victor Morales, one of the leaders of the effort, has told the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that his government will soon ratify the convention on the “Worst Forms of Child Labour”.

Labour ministers from other Central American nations also have pledged to seek legislative approval of the convention , early in the new year.

The forms of child labour that the ILO seeks to ban have been portrayed as “an unconscionable abuse of human rights.” They include:

– All forms of slavery or practices similar to it such as the sale and trafficking of children.

– Debt bondage, serfdom and compulsory labour.

– Forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflicts.

– Use of children for prostitution or pornographic performances.

– Procuring a child for illicit activities such as for producing or trafficking in drugs.

– Work which is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.

The island-nation of Seychelles, off the east coast of Africa, was the first to formally ratify this convention, which was adopted unanimously by the ILO’s 174 member states during its annual conference in Geneva in June.

The need for such a ban arose after the international community became aware of what ILO chief Juan Somavia describes as “the nightmarish vision of girls and boys toiling in mines, sold for prostitution and pornography, enslaved and trafficked like chattel or exposed to hazardous work”.

Ratification will mean that governments must take immediate action to prohibit and eliminate such forms of child labour through time-bound programmes of action and proper law enforcement, which includes penal and other sanctions, says Claudia Coenjaarts, a coordinator in South East Asia for the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour.

She expects governments to report regularly to the ILO as regards their progress, since they will be held accountable for any allegation about such forms of child abuse.

“What is so promising about the new convention is its active call for international cooperation, making it a global issue that we, as a world community, cannot ignore,” she observes. “It needs a response today, not tomorrow.”

According to available studies, a bulk of the 250 million children currently working in developing countries perform tasks that are harzadous and dangerous to their health and well-being. While close to half of them have been forced into full-time work, the others combine work and schooling.

A majority of the children are between 5 and 14 years-old.

In Latin America, for instance, nearly 20 million children are exploited in this manner. Children can be found working virtually as slaves in the agricultural sector of the Dominican Republic, in the stone quarries of Guatemala and in the prostitution rings of Costa Rica.

Columbia has acquired notoriety for the proliferation of child trafficking,and in Peru, the mining industry thrives on a vast army of child workers.

The most vulnerable young workers are the children from indigenous and migrant communities.

The situation in Africa is a mirror image of this dismal picture. ILO researchers are aware of children trapped in the web of the sex industries in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. In Madagascar and Mali they have been driven into hazardous quarries and forced into domestic servitude in Senegal.

Child labour abuse, however, is most rampant in Asia.

A recent World Bank report estimates that as much as 150 million children work full-time. They can be found, for instance, in the brothels of East Asia, where some of them have been either “sold outright” or their families “paid in advance by contractors.”

According to Swapan Mukharjee, the head of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) ‘Free the Children-India’, child smuggling is thriving in the districts of Bengal. Some of the children are used as “carriers of smuggled goods” while others are used for “harmful and dangerous purposes”.

The tanneries and brick kilns in the region employ children who are expected to work up to 15 hours a day, often without any days off for months on end.

India has the dubious reputation of being the country that leads the world in the number of bonded child labourers – close to 15 million, of an estimated 60 million children under 18 who work in India.

In neighbouring Pakistan, one the other hand, debt servitude is prevalent. According to one child-rights organisation, debts are often incurred by the child’s parents and it is paid-off by labour – the children sold into debt bondage to work long hours for many years. Some of them, as young as five, have been found making hand- stitched soccer balls inside dark and silent factories.

The ILO’s efforts to clamp down on child labour abuse has encountered opposition in some quarters. For example at an ILO meeting in Mexico earlier this year a regional union – the Latin American Workers Centre (CLAT) – argued that abolition of child labour would push many families “deeper into poverty”.

A CLAT member appealed to the ILO to understand the “true extent” of the problem, saying that working children “contribute additional income for their survival and that of their families”.

An alternative proposal suggested linking the campaign for the elimination of the worst forms of child labour to the struggle in many poor communities for decent jobs, fair pay, quality education and effective professional training.

Other social workers also have questioned the ILO’s campaign.

“If the menace of child labour is to be effectively addressed, people must be empowered at the community level. Because without empowerment at the community level, mechanisms to hold governments accountable to act decisively against child labour and sexual exploitation will never develop,” one wrote in a newspaper article.

Coenjaerts agrees in principle on the need for “comprehensive measures” to achieve a lasting success. The ILO, she points out, aspires to give these children “better alternatives, including education or vocational training programmes, rehabilitative counseling and support”.

Their families will not be ignored either, she adds. They will be offered economic opportunities adaptable to their specific situation.

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