Anyone watching tonight's Nightline?

[Roland99]

They're interviewing a couple of filmmakers who have documented forced child labor in India (sometimes in conditions outside - at a brick kiln - where temps exceed 120F)


This is incredibly sad.

[whatgives]

1. Damn

[Kool Kitty]

2. Yes, I am watching.

It is incredibly sad and so unfair. I remember an argument that I had with my repug father-in-law about child labor. He said if it wasn't for these companies that use child labor, these children wouldn't have a job at all. To which I replied that they were children, they should be in school or out playing, just being children. I asked him if he wanted his grandchildren to be gainfully employed at 9 or 10. And he said that "those" children weren't like our children, that their "culture" was not like ours. Stupid racist bastard.

[Roland99]

3. Wish they'd segue into the Marianas/DeLay connection.

[Gabi Hayes]

5. don't hold your breath....unless they can tie it to Clenis

you won't be hearing about this in the MSM anytime soon

[FreedomAngel82]

10. How heartless

:(

[lpbk2713]

4. I saw it .... Very compelling.

Forcing children to work, especially in life-threatening conditions, is a disgrace. The kids in Sumatra received the equivalent of five dollars for three months work, if they lived that long.

And there was a segment that pointed out that it happens in the USA. It seems that in agriculture there are many loopholes in the labor laws that don't apply to farm workers. Add to that the undocumented migrant workers and their families who are victimized in many different ways. The children in these situations often grow up to continue the cycle.

[Selatius]

6. Low low prices, everyday

You gotta love capitalism. You just gotta. :sarcasm:

[Tsiyu]

7. Really made me think about the issue again

Those poor kids in Kenya in the coffee fields, in India in the gravel quarry, the ones on the fishing platform, the kids in the US picking onions. One of the girls was sicker than a dog - nine or ten years old- could barely speak but she was out harvesting onions for the US market.

I need to do a better job checking out and buying fair trade items. Once again, shame forces me to - i drink a lot of coffee, but maybe I'll quit after seeing what thopse kids go through to harvest it for me.

The point of the film was to let people know they can do something about forced child labor by refusing to purchase products made using child labor. If we buy those products, those children are OUR slaves.

[lakeguy]

8. yes! buy local or from a co-op. always fair trade and organic if available

i never shop at large grocery chains anymore. haven't for years. never know where that shit is coming from or what's been done to it (or who died harvesting it). i don't feel i spend that much more either. the food definitely tastes better though.

[shockra]

9. Don't forget chocolate...

Valentines and Fair Trade

By Caroline Tiger Feb. 14, 2003

Salon.com

Of the $1.1 billion in boxed chocolates that Americans are expected to buy on Valentine's Day, very little will be untainted by the scourge of child labor. Although some who buy those bonbons will do so without knowing the sinister history of their purchases, others, like the chocolate makers, will have known for at least two years, if not longer, that cocoa beans imported from the Ivory Coast -- used to make nearly half the chocolate consumed in this country -- are harvested in large part by children, some as young as 9, and many of whom are considered slaves, trafficked from desperately poor countries like Mali and Burkina Faso.

The most recent survey of conditions on West African cocoa farms, completed by the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture for the U.S. Agency for International Development, estimated that nearly 300,000 children work in dangerous conditions on cocoa farms in the four countries surveyed -- Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon -- the vast majority of them in the Ivory Coast. The report, released in July 2002, says that of the 300,000 children, more than half (64 percent) are under 14 years old. Twelve thousand had no connection to the family on whose cocoa farm they toiled, but only 5,100 of them were paid for their work. Almost 6,000 were described as "unpaid workers with no family ties," provoking advocates to refer to them as "slaves." The rest work on their families' farms, kept home from school to do punishing work during the all-important harvest seasons.

<snip>

Hershey's and M&M/Mars control two-thirds of the U.S. chocolate market, which generated $13 billion from retail sales of 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate in 2001. Both companies, along with other major producers like Nestlé, Archer Daniels Midland, Cadbury, Guittard and Bernard Callebaut, import cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast, which, as the largest cocoa producer in the world, provides almost half the cocoa beans that end up in America. Most of the cocoa from the Ivory Coast comes from 450,000 small farms of 12 acres or less. In September 2000, a BBC documentary entitled "Slavery: A Global Investigation" featured a segment on boys enslaved on Ivory Coast cocoa farms, showing children with heavily scarred backs from beatings with whips and switches. Awareness of the problem became more widespread in June 2001, when a four-part Knight Ridder series on the same topic told the stories of boys in the Ivory Coast, most of them 12 to 16 years old, some as young as 9, who had been sold and then tricked into indentured labor on cocoa farms.

The boys told reporters that they were underfed, locked in their filthy sleeping quarters, and forced to work more than 12 hours a day, sometimes hauling 50-pound bags of beans that were bigger than they were. Caught in the glare of negative publicity, representatives of the chocolate industry admitted the problem existed, but insisted they should not to be held responsible since chocolate companies didn't actually own the farms. But this argument didn't deflect continuing criticism, and the issue was taken up by two congressmen, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.). The Knight Ridder series came out the same week that an agricultural bill was up for a vote in the House of Representatives.

more...

http://www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/021603_fair_trade.cfm