3071-The political economy of new slavery

222 Modern Slavery and Fair Trade Products
trafficked to Ghana, Gabon, Nigeria, and Cote d’Ivoire, while children
from neighboring Niger, Togo, and Burkina Faso, are trafficked to
Benin. Some Beninese women are trafficked to European countries
for prostitution.
US Department of State, 2002, p. 30
New Internationalist quotes a local UNICEF worker as saying: ‘People
come and offer the families money and say that their children will work
on plantations and send money home. They give the family a little
money, from $15 to $30 – and then they never see their children again’
(Bales, 2001, p. 14). The same is true as regards child slavery in Ghana:
internally, Ghanaian children are sent from the poorest regions to
work in the fishing industry and for domestic labor in urban areas.
Many of these children, sold by their families to traffickers, suffer
physical or sexual abuse and receive insufficient food, no wages, and
no access to education.
US Department of State, 2002, p. 53
Liberalization of trade and capital movements around the world
has played an important role in contributing to slavery. Introduction
of free trade in cocoa in West Africa, for example, has had disastrous
consequences for cocoa farmers. West African cocoa plantations, where
reports of slave labour have been widespread, have long been subsidized
by the state, which guaranteed a fixed price for farmers. With the
liberalization of the cocoa market due to pressure from the World Trade
Organization (WTO), cocoa producers now sell their products themselves
at world market prices, which are unstable and generate lower
returns (although, as Berlan in Chapter 9 in this volume shows, there
are exceptions to this, such as Ghana). Slave labour allows these
producers to reduce their production costs. In other words, trade liberalization
and impoverishment of farmers cannot be said to directly lead
to slavery, but they may be said to encourage forced labour to some
extent. This conclusion is reached by Global Exchange, a non-profit
research, education and action organization, whose experts argue that
the causes of slavery are ‘free trade, structural adjustment, and corporate
control’ (Global Exchange (a)). They further argue that:
severe poverty, child labor, and the reemergence of child slavery can
be blamed, in part, by raw cocoa prices that are too low to provide
farmers with enough income to meet their production costs, much