Only Commies are Against Child Labor

Via Skippy comes this not-so-shocking story about American agricultural companies’ reliance on slave and child labor.

April 7 -Agricultural corporations Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland have started an aggressive lobbying effort to drop a provision from the Farm Bill which would establish a voluntary certification program related to imports made using forced labor and child labor.

Section 3104 of the Farm Bill, called Voluntary Certification of Child Labor Status of Agricultural Imports, would provide a method which producers of agricultural products could use to certify that their products are free of child labor and forced labor. The Department of Labor, under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, is compiling a list of imported goods believed to be produced using forced labor or child labor – conditions which violate international standards.

Seventy percent of the world’s child labor is concentrated in the agricultural sector, where vulnerable children toil in blazing heat, exposed to dangerous farm machinery and deadly pesticides. Working children are also deprived of an adequate education. Provision 3104 would provide a step forward in working to eliminate the worst forms of child labor and forced labor around the world, in conformance with existing U.S. and international law. “Section 3104 of the Farm Bill is a simple piece of legislation to do one thing and one thing alone –help finally bring slavery and illegal child labor to an end – a change in the global economy that I think we can all agree is long overdue” said Adrienne Fitch-Frankel, Economic Justice Campaigner for Global Exchange. “By fighting against a provision that would help end child slavery, ADM and Cargill are revealing their true colors, a lesson their investors and customers who care about these issues should take note of.”

Neither ADM nor Cargill are strangers to human rights violations:

In July 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed suit against the Nestle, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill companies in Federal District Court in Los Angeles on behalf of a class of Malian children who were trafficked from Mali into the Ivory Coast and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings. The three children acting as class representative plaintiffs are proceeding anonymously, as John Does, because of feared retaliation by the farm owners where they worked. The complaint alleges their involvement in the trafficking, torture, and forced labor of children who cultivate and harvest cocoa beans which the companies import from Africa.

One wonders what argument ADM and Cargill are presenting against stopping forced child labor. I’d think that was one regulation that everyone could get behind. I mean, turning a blind eye to it, as the US government traditionally does, is one thing. But to actively enable it, how do you sell that to your constituents?

Ask them to stop fighting for child labor.

Tags: farm bill, child labor, cargill, archer daniels midland, why we need regulation