And if the "child labor certification" inspectors you send are anything resembling decent human beings, then they will send back endless lies in their reports, saying "no child labor here" - because they prefer lying to seeing yet more farm family members die of starvation, because the families could not afford luxuries like food.
You can't conceive of the possibility that they'd hire adults at a higher wage? Or raise prices for consumers in the developed world?
You're basically saying it's OK for American companies to hire undocumented workers because the alternative is everyone starves.
> "...American companies to hire undocumented..."
Please re-read at least the first paragraph of the article. There is no "hire". There is no "wage". The child labor is on subsistence farms. In Ghana.
I think it would be better to frame the issue as why so little of the profit made from their work reaches them. It's insane to see cocoa farmers so poor that they've never tasted chocolate, as can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEN4hcZutO0
Sounds good, until you realize that doesn't do much for the starving family with kids to feed. Even though there might be some knock on effect to increase the adults' earnings, there's no way that it'll match the lost income from the kids not working.
Is it because some wealthy landlord owns all the land? Is it because we dump subsidized food on the global markets, making local agriculture non-competitive? Could either of those have anything to do with it?
There seems to be a very obvious economic solution somewhere between 'grow cocoa for other people for a pittance' and 'starve'. These people are poor, not helpless.
Perhaps they are not property rights that serve the people doing the work, but that's a separate problem.
Where does it say that? It's not mentioned in the CBS article nor the youtube video.
(I’m ignoring corporate profits and consumer prices for simplicity-but I think most of us would be happy if child labor was banned even if it meant higher prices)
For most of human history, child labor was common practice. It's purely a first world, modern thing that you can truly dial back child labor.
A pressure on the big companies to clean up their supply chain of child labor (noble effort) - do you know which segments of Ghana laborer will be hurt and how. If you don't know (or at least have very good guesstimate) - then be prepared to be surprised unpleasantly from some of the results.
I think they meant root, not actual. Fixing the child labor problem on its own is unlikely to improve these kids' lives.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/12/1181472559/child-labor-farms-...
(And slavery in prison. But one problem at a time)
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#empowerment-of-wom...
I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them. If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.
Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.
By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage. I’ll even help you bootstrap the direct cash transfer mechanisms via mobile payments if you have deep pockets. But that is unlikely to happen. Hope is not a strategy.
https://www.unicef.org/protection/child-labour ("Nearly 1 in 10 children are subjected to child labour worldwide, with some forced into hazardous work through trafficking.")
https://ourworldindata.org/child-labor ("The International Labour Organisation states in its latest World Report on Child Labour (2013) that there are around 265 million working children in the world—almost 17 per cent of the worldwide child population. According to the publicly available data discussed in more detail below, Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where child labour is most prevalent.")
https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-... ("You can’t even pay people to have more kids")
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6198592/ ("Challenges and perspectives of child labor")
> I suggest empowering women who don’t want children to not have them.
Let's first get this out of the way. The men don't want children at equal rate. No need for grand plan about empowering women (what ever that means beside just increasing everyone, both men and women economical outlooks) : just make contraceptive and sexual education available.
> If we look at the developed world, it is clear the total fertility rate will settle far below replacement rate (2.1) and child labor will dry up when women are educated and have robust access to family planning.
Correlation and causation etc...etc... I might introduce you to orthodox jews, some Mormons and Muslim communities which don't really follow those models.
> By all means, open your wallet to pay these kids a living wage.
ahah yes, personal solution to systemic problems... Following this logic, we should all be silent about everything.
> Perpetual labor shortages are a better outcome than surplus labor and lives of suffering, most especially children suffering.
I don't buy the premise and this sounds like a false dichotomy to me. Just treat people decently and don't participate in system which involve children doing back breaking jobs.
> Hope is not a strategy.
And whatever you are proposing is ? The idea that it's easier to somehow curb the population growth a whole group of nations instead of just having proper international laws to regulate child labour seems both crazy and reversed.
Polution control won't solve child labor, instead child labour, women right and polution growth will be solve by better economical outlooks. And that start by having people actually make living wages...
In the final anlysis the problem is not that deep. To paraphrase Gates, those conditions continue because the market wants it, and the public opinions doesnt particularly care. You are wellcome not to care, but to invent poorly constructed argument to make you sleep better at night.
Is the only reason you think that isn't "child labor" because no one is directly paying them for their work or that the work is "good for them"? Plenty of kids would argue picking fruit was more valuable than algebra homework.
Having kids working a little isn't necessarily bad, it is the conditions under which they work which is important but more subtle issue. In regions of extreme poverty it isn't even the conditions that are often the root problem but the foreign exploiters of the extreme poverty failing to pay a fair wage for human work.
>"I feel sad. I want to be, like, a medical doctor," Munira said. "But my family doesn't have money for school."
It's much easier for corporate overlords to focus on cheap issues like child labor and then make the appearances of trying to do something about it... when the causes of child labor are more like "you pay my family so little I can't afford to go to school and nobody else either so the nearest school is an hour away". If you give people the opportunity to barely stay alive they'll fix these things themselves.
In a similar vein to your anecdote, and pertinent the larger topic, I greatly enjoyed harvest when I was 7 and always missed it when it was over. That's why I became a farmer in adulthood – and I still feel the same way about it. Work (even paid work) doesn't mean unenjoyable.
Yes, these are very significant differences. Children are also given time off with holidays, time to play, etc.
School disgusts me, personally, but it's not even close to child labor.
Is that not also the case for the kids in the article harvesting cocoa? According to the article, they harvested a total of 140 pounds of cocoa for the year. According to Wikipedia, a typical worker can harvest around 150-175 pounds of cocoa in one day.
Even if they are horribly inefficient compared to a typical worker, perhaps in large part because they are having fun and playing at the same time, we're still only talking a handful of days of work each year. You can only drag out the harvest for so long. What do they do the rest of the time?