3071-The political economy of new slavery

Amanda Berlan 171
at a much younger age. No cocoa farmer would contemplate hiring
a child below the age of seven (and most full-time working children
are over 14 years old), whereas owners of stone quarries even ‘employ’
toddlers to sit in the dirt in the scorching heat for up to ten hours a day.
Sadly, children in this form of slavery receive very little international
attention and child rights organizations should be cautious not to let
the sensationalism surrounding child labour or slavery in the cocoa
industry in West Africa bias their research findings and detract from
other needy cases.
The effectiveness of field-based investigations (and subsequent policy
formulation) may be further undermined by the methodology used
in researching the problem. In the case of children in cocoa farming,
short-term, quantitative surveys asking children questions such as
‘Do you go to school?’ ‘What equipment do you use on the farm?’ or
asking farmers ‘Would you hire a child to work full-time on your farm?’
‘Do your children apply pesticides?’ have serious limitations. A child
who is enrolled in school and not involved in high-risk tasks is likely to
be perceived as being less ‘damaged’ by child labour, and a farmer whose
children only participate in farm work outside school hours is not seen
as significantly interfering with the child’s education. While there is no
guarantee that a farmer or a child are answering the questions truthfully
anyway, the focus on risks associated with farming, or the use of school
enrolment as a measure of success against child labour, overshadows the
real damage being caused by child labour and the need for intervention.
Such a focus reveals a very narrow perception of child rights as it does
not reveal long-term effects such as the physical damage caused by
exhaustion, malnutrition, or by carrying heavy loads, or the effects of
child labour on a child’s right to obtain a quality education. A quantitative
approach and short-term surveys only provide a partial body of
information on which to formulate policy, and often result in too much
attention being paid to the wrong issues, such as whether or not a child
is using a cutlass to open a cocoa pod. Therefore my recommendation to
development organizations and policy-makers would be to avoid relying
exclusively on short-term, quantitative surveys using pre-established
definitions and to recognize the value of a more qualitative approach.
The integration of qualitative and quantitative data is central to effective
child-related policy and campaigning, as well as a key strategy for targeting
the rise of contemporary slavery identified in this volume. I shall
now expand on some of the more long-term effects of child labour, and
use the conditions in rural schools in Ghana to illustrate the need to
take a holistic view of children’s rights on the issue.