Pick up a banana in any supermarket in 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% 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% of all children in Latin America, 15% in sub-Saharan Africa and 5% 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.

This article was first published on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog on 26 May 2011 ]]> http://www.anniekelly.co.uk/journalism/ecuadors-fight-to-eradicate-child-labour/feed/ 0 http://www.anniekelly.co.uk/journalism/perus-mountain-people-fight-for-survival/ http://www.anniekelly.co.uk/journalism/perus-mountain-people-fight-for-survival/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:11:09 +0000 Annie Kelly http://www.anniekelly.co.uk/?p=298

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru’s Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

The few hundred people who live here are hardened to poverty and months of sub-zero temperatures during the long winter. But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early. First their animals and now their children are dying and in such escalating numbers that many fear that life in the village may be rapidly approaching an end.

Quechua-speaking farmers and their families, who have managed to subsist for centuries at high altitude, believe they may not make it through the next southern winter.

There have been warnings from meteorologists in Peru that this month will see the Huancavelica region hit by the worst weather conditions in years with plunging temperatures, floods and high winds. The weather is already claiming lives; last month seven people died and scores were treated in hospital after torrential rain caused flash flooding in Ayacucho, the capital of the neighbouring region.

The cold is tipping Pichccahuasi into a spiralling decline brought on by pneumonia, bronchitis and hunger.

Although designed to withstand the cold, Huamani’s house is crumbling and his roof, half-collapsed from the snowstorms that battered the village last June and July, offers scant protection from the freezing wind and rain.

His family, including four young children, sleep on wet ground night after night. His children have not yet recovered from illnesses from this year’s winter and he is terrified that they won’t be resilient enough to endure further freezing weather.

He points to his youngest son, aged two, who trails after him, soaking wet and racked with bouts of coughing, as he goes about his work

“All the children here are sick, they all have breathing problems,” he says. “The problem is there is too much cold, too much rain. We have had no time to recover from last winter before it has begun again. There is nothing I can do.”

Enduring prolonged sub-zero temperatures is a matter of course for Peru’s indigenous mountain people, many of whom live at more than 3,000m above sea level. Scores die every year from the cold, but in recent years the number of people succumbing to the freezing temperatures has triggered talk of a national crisis.

This year the neighbouring district of Puno saw a severe spike in child mortality as the winter brought months of high winds and relentless ice storms. Government figures record that more than 300 children died in Puno in May last year from the cold; NGOs say that the figure was probably much higher.

Local government officers in Huancavelica could not provide figures for how many children died here last year, but admit that child mortality is rising in the region.

“There have been many dead children. I don’t know how many, but there are more and more and mainly the deaths have been from pneumonia,” says Rafael Rojas Huanqui, regional director for the Defensa Civil, the national disaster protection agency. “They have no resilience of any kind to deal with the weather getting colder.”

Huancavelica has always been one of Peru’s most deprived regions, with 80% of families, largely indigenous farmers living at heights of up to 5,000m, subsisting below the poverty line.

The changing weather has come on top of a lack of basic health services, animal diseases, rising food prices and a declining availability of water.

Since 2007, children’s acute respiratory infections have increased by 30% and staple food production has fallen by 44%. Latest figures show that one in 10 children do not live to see their first birthday.

Ignacio Huamani says that the main problem his village faces is a lack of water, as more extreme temperatures mean there is no grass or drinking water for the alpaca that people breed for wool and meat. “If the alpaca die, then we all die,” he says. He works with his neighbours to build shelters for the alpaca to give some protection from the elements, but he is fighting a losing battle.

Since 2007, alpaca mortality in Huancavelica has more than doubled, with pregnant animals aborting their calves, a huge psychological as well as economic blow to people who rely on their ability to keep their herds alive.

Any money the village has is spent on trying to keep their animals from dying. NGOs and children’s groups working in the area warn that in such desperate situations, the lives of alpaca become more valuable than those of children.

“The welfare of children is sidelined because the situation is so bad that everything has become about the survival of the animals, both for the families themselves and the agencies who are trying to support them,” says Teresa Carpio, director of Save the Children Peru. She expects to see child mortality in the region rise this year.

“In the west we tend to think that children take priority above all else, but when there is this level of desperation, children can be the last to get the attention they so badly need – until it is too late.”

Four hours’ drive away in the larger community of Incahuasi, a health clinic is full of women and children waiting to see a visiting nurse. Helen dos Santos trained in nearby Ayacucho, but unlike most other locally trained health workers has stayed to work in the region. Now she spends her week travelling on foot between villages, walking for up to five hours a day.

“It’s always been poor here, but now the situation is getting critical,” she says. She points to the 20 or so children lined up in the waiting room. “All of these children are malnourished, some very dangerously so, and winter is still five months away.

“I don’t have any strong antibiotics to give them, only aspirin. I can’t even refer them to the hospital in Huancavelica because nobody has enough money to pay for transport there and the men here are reluctant to spend on anything but the animals.”

Rojas Huanqui says the regional government is working hard to strengthen health systems with more doctors and nurses in “most” of the villages, but admits that the state has been unable to deliver the basic services required.

“I’m not going to deny that it’s really hard to supply the great amount of villages there are, and they are used to getting everything for free, so the progress that the government makes is limited, but we do need to implement stronger medicines up in the villages that need it most,” he says.

There is anger among Huancavelica’s mountain people at what they see as the inaction of regional and central government. Although aid packages and clothing bundles arrive with the onset of winter, it does not compensate for what these people believe is the ambivalence of the authorities to their fate.

“We can only put ourselves in God’s hands, because nobody else is helping us,” says Carolina Flores, a mother of six whose six-month-old daughter is dangerously ill with pneumonia. “Our men have gone and talked to people in the government and told them what is happening to us, but they do nothing. We are not important to them, so we die up here and nobody helps us.”

For how long the mountain people are prepared to wait for action remains to be seen. After hundreds of years of systematic discrimination, there are signs that indigenous people across Peru are prepared to fight what they consider to be threats to their survival.

Last July, dozens of indigenous protesters were killed and scores injured when riots broke out in Bagua Grande in the Amazonas region over claims that the government was giving away land to oil and gas drilling. The relationship between Peru’s indigenous people and the government of the president, Alan García remains tense.

Those working with indigenous populations in Huancavelica are warning that governments cannot expect people in threatened villages to accept their fate lying down.

“The conduct of the authorities in relation to Peru’s Quechua mountain communities is similar to the one they take to indigenous communities throughout the country, which is to ignore their problems because they don’t believe that they are a priority,” says Dr Enrique Moya, the former dean of Huamanga University, who now works with local NGOs which are running support programmes in the region.

“Religion is still a strong sedative in these communities, but although the first reaction to what they are facing might be fatalism – the feeling that they are in God’s hands – we are starting to see a change.

“The difficulty is that the government only reacts when things turn violent, so I think what we have here is potentially an area of great conflict, because no matter how used to poverty they are, these people won’t be left to die.”

This is a version of this story which first appeared in The Observer on 3 January 2010. Click here to read it in full.

To reach Zambia’s new frontline in its long and protracted battle against the HIV/Aids virus, you have to leave the hospital wards and government buildings of Lusaka and head out into the wide open expanses of the bush.

Eight hours west of the capital in the dusty Mouyo rural health centre, 62-year-old Baxter Kayombo Mubanga describes himself as a soldier waging war against the disease that has killed so many of his friends and neighbours.

“Out here we are fighting, fighting, fighting against this epidemic,” he says. “I am sick to the bone of seeing my community shrivel and die with this disease. When I discovered I was HIV positive in 2003 I told all my neighbours to take the test; most of them who refused are now dead. We have to say enough is enough.”

Transmission is still highest in Zambia’s urban centres and industrial copper belt. But it is in rural communities like Mouyo that a lack of access to health facilities, chronic shortages of trained healthcare workers, and cultural stigma and discrimination have ensured HIV rates remain stubbornly high.

This is an extract from a longer article on how Zambians are fighting back against the rise of HIV/Aids, which first appeared in The Guardian in October 2008. Click here to read it in full.