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Summary: Ecuador's child labour laws say children who work must also go to school. Yet poor families simply can't afford to do that.
[26 May 2011] - Pick up a banana in any supermarket in the Europe and there is a strong chance that it would have been grown, picked and boxed in Ecuador. The South American country is the world's biggest banana producer, exporting more than 5m tonnes of bananas every year with just under a third being shipped to Europe and the UK by companies such as Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita. Ten years ago there was also a chance that the banana you bought in the same supermarket would have been picked from the tree by a child. But in 2002, Human Rights Watch exposed the shocking extent of harmful child labour in Ecuador's banana industry. Its report revealed widescale abuse of children as young as eight working in hazardous environments, often exposed to violence, and paid a pittance by the international companies that relied on children's cheap labour to make hefty profits. The report and the resulting wave of media coverage had an almost immediate impact in Ecuador, leading the Ministry of Labour to declare the elimination of child labour a "political priority" and putting enormous pressure on the international banana producers to clean up their employment practices. Nearly 10 years on, campaigners say great progress has been made and Ecuador has taken significant strides forward in eradicating harmful child labour from its banana plantations. "There have been encouraging advances," Gustavo Guerra, the technical director of child protection agency DYA (Desarollo y Autogestion) told me over the phone from his office in the Ecuadorian capital, Quito. "It's now rare to find child labourers on the large banana plantations. Neither the government nor the producers want the bad publicity they received in the past and the banana industry is too lucrative to take any more reputational risks. So it is now in everybody's interest to take care to ensure that new child labour regulations are adhered to." The regulations that Guerra is referring to were hastily put in place in 2003 after the US, Ecuador's largest banana customer, threatened to impose sanctions after HRW's exposé. The new code for children and adolescents raised the legal age of employment, increased penalties against employers and prohibited children from working in dangerous environments. The laws didn't ban child labour completely. Instead they set a minimum age for employment at 15, as long as children weren't working more than six hours a day, and more than five days a week, and had access to education. The Labour Ministry also has 29 inspectors operating in 22 provinces across the country. According to official figures, in 2009 these inspectors visited 3,992 workplaces where they removed 2,056 children from work that violated Ecuadorian labour laws. Illegal child labour was reduced from 800,000 children in 2001 to 600,000 in 2009. Ministry of Labour officials admit that they are a long way from making child labour a thing of the past, but significant advances have clearly been made. Yet child protection groups applauding Ecuador for making strides in the right direction also add a note of caution. They warn that although seemingly tough regulations make all the right noises, they sometimes just push the spectre of harmful child labour out of sight. "Problems occur when you regulate the formal employment sector because if it is not carefully done then all you do is push a large number of children into the informal work or sub-contracting sectors, where they are often exposed to even more dangerous working environments which remain hidden from view," says Jonathan Blagbrough from Save the Children UK. Local groups like DYA also concur that so far the new regulations have often not managed to extend into areas where child labour is still prevalent and dangerous. While the big plantations might have cleaned up their acts, it's the small family farms and plantations that have stayed under the radar of the inspectors where informal and illegal child labour still thrives. The reality is that on many of these farms the existence of child labour is often a matter of basic survival. In 2006, 18 per cent of the 285,000 children born in Ecuador were to families that survive on less than $1 a day. Many families can't afford for their children not to work. "Up until now many families employed by the smaller farms are employed on an informal basis and are not being paid a decent wage and so feel they have no option but to put their children to work as well," says Guerra. "It's a vicious cycle and very hard to regulate because you don't get inspectors travelling out to these farms. What happens there remains unseen." However, this week there is hope that change could be on the horizon. On the 17 May, Ecuadorians overwhelmingly voted in favour of proposals put forward by the government in a national referendum that stated that employers must register all workers at Ecuador's Social Security Institute. Child labour campaigners believe that, if enforced, this will clamp down on illegal child labour by regulating the informal work sector, forcing employers to register workers with the Labour Ministry and providing proper work contracts and labour conditions. Perhaps more importantly it also means that due to the public enthusiasm for these new measures, the government will be throwing more resources at formalising the labour sector. This should mean more cash for more workplace inspections and more heat on smaller businesses to clean up their act, when it comes to employing children illegally. Now these campaigners are turning their attention to what they consider the biggest missing link in Ecuador's efforts to eradicate child labour – its Ministry of Education. Despite the law stipulating that all children in work must also be in school, campaigners are critical that Ecuador has no formal education policies that make this a reality for many of Ecuador's child labourers. Campaigners like Guerra now want to see specific policies using programmes like cash transfers and scholarships to help poorer families that need their children to work to also be able to send them to school. "In the past there has been a blanket emphasis on poverty reduction as a way to stamp out illegal child labour but this just isn't working, it's too ambitious and too slow-moving," says Guerra. "Focusing on education will have an immediate effect. Get children in school and you will get them out of the workplace within a generation." So, can Ecuador's progress provide inspiration for other countries struggling to tackle the problem of child labour? On a global scale child labour figures are decreasing, but there are still 215 million children at work. Although child labour is conspicuously absent from the MDG framework, ILO figures still show that 6.7 per cent of all children in Latin America, 15 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa and 5 per cent in Asia Pacific are engaged in some form of hazardous work. In Ecuador, child labour was pushed to the top of the political agenda when the country's main export industry was hung out to dry. Many other children around the world work in industries where we can't make the simple connection between a banana in our fruit bowl and a child on the other side of the world. Further Information:
pdf: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/26...