Child Labour in the Agricultural Sector (Part 1)

Mr. Hans Olsen, UNICEF Representative, Malaysia, speaks on how corporates and businesses can play a crucial role in advancing children’s rights in the first of a two-part series.

Mr. Olsen, who assumed the leadership of UNICEF’s country programme in Malaysia in February 2010, gave the following speech on 18 March at the launch of Sime Darby‘s Child Protection Policy.

Her Majesty
Seri Paduka Baginda Raja Permaisuri Agong
Tuanku Nur Zahirah

Yang Berbahagia
Dato’ Azhar Abdul Hamid
Managing Director
Sime Darby Plantations Sdn Bhd

Mr. Harjeet Singh
Under Secretary, Policy Division
Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development

Ms. Nooreen Presseur
Training and Education Director
PS The Children

Datuk-datuk, Datin-datin

Distinguished Guests

Members of the Media,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to start on a personal note and tell you how pleased I am to be in Malaysia and that my first opportunity to speak publicly as UNICEF Representative to your country is at an event like this. I would like to thank Yang Berbahagia Dato Seri Ahmad Zubir Murshid and Sime Darby Berhad for extending the invitation for me to participate here this morning.

First of all, I would like to express my appreciation to Sime Darby Berhad for its Corporate Child Protection Policy. As an international conglomerate with operations spanning across 20 countries, its corporate actions to help move the global agenda for the world’s children is a significant development.

Children and young people need protection and safeguarding for many reasons, spanning from the effects of economic, social and political problems on large numbers of children down to individual violence and abuse by adults or peers.

To respect the rights of children is more than not doing harm to children. It is to actively protect and provide for the survival, protection and development of children, and to always have their best interests in mind.

Corporates and businesses can play a crucial role in advancing children’s rights. With a child protection policy in place, a company can ensure compliance with national and international laws and manage risk; it can determine the context in which business is conducted as well as assess its activities and relationships related to this business.

These are good things, not just for children, but also for the wellbeing and growth of economies and nations and not least for the company’s own business. So once again, please allow me to say “Syabas!” to Sime Darby Berhad for taking this important step forward to safeguard children’s rights.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

218 million children in servitude

I have chosen the main focus of my lecture today to be on child labour and the agricultural sector and I would like to start by sharing a story with you of a migrant farm worker. His name is Javier[1]. He is 10 years old and he travels to Mexico seasonally to work in its plantations. For Javier and other migrant farm workers like him, the work day often starts long before the sun rises. The arrival of their boss brings a flurry of activity followed by long hours in the plantation picking crops. For his hard-breaking labour, Javier earns seven US dollars each day. Instead of going to school like other children to carve a brighter future for himself and his family, this little boy has been working the chilli fields since he was seven.

Tragically Javier is not alone. In countries around the world, there are children who labour at tasks that harm their bodies and minds, their spirits and future.

Instead of enjoying their childhood, they are toiling as domestic servants in homes; laboring under back-breaking conditions in the construction industry; hunching at looms knotting the strands of luxury carpets for export; diving in dangerous conditions to help set nets for deep-sea fishing; picking coffee and inhaling pesticides; cutting cane with machetes, a punishing task which puts them at constant risk of mutilation; and working in brothels, under forced conditions, as child prostitutes.

According to estimates from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) published in 2006 there were 218 million child labourers aged 5-17 years in 2004. The number in hazardous work, which accounts for the bulk of the worst forms of child labour was 126 million. The Asia Pacific region accounted for the largest number of child workers – 122 million in total, followed by Sub- Saharan Africa (49.3 million) and Latin America and the Caribbean (5.7 million).

It is important to be clear. Not every working child is a child labourer. “Child labour” is a narrower concept than “economically active children”, excluding all those children aged 12 years and older who are working only a few hours a week in permitted light work and those aged 15 years and above whose work is not classified as “hazardous”. The concept of “child labour” is based on the ILO Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138), which represents the most comprehensive and authoritative international definition of minimum age for admission to employment or work. When we say children are involved in hazardous work, we mean children in any activity that can harm their safety, health and moral development. Hazards could result from excessive workload, physical conditions of work, and working hours.

Invisible and unacknowledged in farms and plantations

The vast majority of the world’s child labourers – close to 70 per cent[2] according to ILO — are not toiling in factories and sweatshops or working as domestic help or street vendors in urban areas. Instead, like Javier, they are working on farms and plantations, often from sunrise to sunset, planting and harvesting crops, spraying pesticides, and tending livestock.

These children play an important role in crop and livestock production, helping to supply some of the food and drink we consume, and the fibres and raw materials we use to make other products. Examples include cocoa/chocolate, coffee, tea, sugar, fruits and vegetables, along with products like tobacco, cotton and soap.

The work that children perform in agriculture is often unseen and unacknowledged because they assist their parents or relatives on the family farm or they undertake work under a quota system on larger farms or plantations, often as part of migrant worker families.[3]

In many countries, agriculture is historically and traditionally an under-regulated sector which essentially means that child labour laws – if they exist – are often less stringent than in other industries. In some countries, adult and child workers in agriculture are not covered by or are exempt from safety and health laws covering other categories of adult workers. Children, for example, are generally allowed to operate machinery and drive tractors at a younger age in agriculture than in other sectors.

In rural areas especially, household income is often insufficient to meet the needs of families. Children work as cheap labour because their parents are poor and do not earn enough or simply have no employment and income to support the family or to send their children to school. Working children represent a plentiful source of cheap labour.

Deprivation of children’s rights and intergenerational poverty

UNICEF’s  understanding of the causes of child labour has become more sophisticated over the years, shaped and influenced by our experience of 60 odd years, working in more than 150 countries, and through our collaboration with agencies such as the International Labour Organisation and academics.

Child labour is clearly a product of market forces – supply and demand – influenced by the behaviour of both employers and of individual households. Poverty and economic shocks clearly play an important role in determining the market for child labour. Child labour in turn contributes to the perpetuation of poverty, resulting in a vicious cycle of intergenerational hardship. For example, empirical findings in 2005 by the World Bank from Brazil demonstrated that early entry into the labour force reduces lifetime earnings by some 13 to 20 per cent, increasing significantly the probability of being poor later in life.[4]

However, to blame child labour on poverty alone is incorrect, and certainly fails to fully explain some of the worst forms of child labour. What we need is a human rights perspective to better understand child labour, focusing on discrimination and exclusion as contributing factors.

Children whose rights are violated are often invisible and some rights violations even contributes to making them invisible. The most vulnerable groups are often those whose families are living on the margins of society and subject to social, economic and geographical exclusion.  They include girls, ethnic minorities and migrants, people with disabilities, displaced persons and those living in remote areas.

Birth registration, or the lack of it, has as frightening consequences on childhood as it does on a child’s future prospects. Lack of birth registration presents real obstacles to children, barring them from receiving health care, attending school, sitting for exams, and protection from harm, including the risk of being trafficked. The absence of a birth certificate also makes it impossible to monitor the implementation of child labour laws. Children without a birth certificate simply do not exist for government authorities in many countries.

Registering a birth is a critical first step in ensuring the rights of a child. Registration means proof – not only of identity, but of existence. A birth certificate is also confirmation of a child’s age. Proof of age is critical in successfully prosecuting perpetrators of crimes against children such as child trafficking, sexual offences, early recruitment into the armed forces, child marriage and child labour.

So why then, with so much at stake, are children unregistered and forgotten, particularly in the agricultural and plantation sectors?

One reason is the general lack of awareness amongst labourer parents, a problem often compounded by illiteracy.  At the same time, minority groups and migrants are often isolated when information and documentation are presented in the national language or languages they do not understand. In many countries civil registration is centralised, meaning that parents must travel into the city to register the birth of a child. For people living in rural communities or remote areas, the trip to the civil registry office can be long, expensive and unsafe.

Children of migrants are particularly at increased risk of being left behind due to their lack of access to the birth registration system, sometimes because their parents fear reprisals if they are “illegal” immigrants or because of a country’s concerns over national security.

With parents in the agricultural sector, many children lack the obvious alternative to work – a quality education, thus limiting their future chances of escaping the cycle of poverty by finding better jobs or becoming self-employed.

In many parts of the world, plantations are characterised by lack of schools, schools of variable quality, problems of retaining teachers in remote rural areas, lack of accessible education and lower standards of educational performance and achievement. If schools exist, children may also have to walk long distances to and from school. Even where children are in education, school holidays are often built around the sowing and harvesting seasons.

All these challenges are not only robbing children of their future, it also robs society and nations of productive and self-sustaining citizens.

Convention on the Rights of the Child: Protecting children from exploitation

The idea that such abuses against our children and their childhoods exist today is difficult to grasp let alone endure. As a father with two children, this is certainly not the vision I have for them or any of our world’s children.

Child labour was in fact one of the first and most important issues addressed by the international community, resulting already in 1919 in the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Minimum Age Convention. However, early efforts to end child labour have had its ups and downs. Perhaps, because campaigners chose to appeal to morality and ethics, values easily sidelined by the hard realities of commercial life.

Instead of positioning children for who they were – individuals with rights – child labourers became objects of charity, with little recourse or ability to claim their rights.

But things are different today.

Children’s rights have been established in international law, particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Malaysia in 1995. Ratification specifically obligates governments — in article 32 — to protect children “from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.”

But beyond article 32, the exploitation of children contravenes many more of the rights enshrined in the Convention, among them children’s rights to be registered after birth and to have a name and nationality, to care by their parents, to compulsory and free primary education, to the highest attainable standard of health, to social security, to information, and to provisions for rest and recreation.

Looking at children’s work through the lens of children’s rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, offers not only new ways of understanding the problem of child labour but also provides new impetus and direction to the movement against it. No child should have to labour in hazardous and exploitative conditions, just as no child should need to die of preventable illnesses.

If we are committed to ending the exploitation of children and ensuring that the promise of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, is a promise to every child, then UNICEF is dependent on finding partners that can help achieve change, be a role model for others and advocate among peers.

Which is why finding corporate allies such as Sime Darby is crucial to UNICEF and organisations that strive to ensure the best interest of every child.

Our work must be centred on inspiring positive change for children, ensuring that we seek mutual, rather than exclusive gain.

More to come!

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[1] UNICEF Global Website – (Newsline – Child Protection)

[2] International Labour Organisation, Report 2007 (International Day Against Child Labour)

[3] International Labour Organisation, Report 2007 (International Day Against Child Labour)

[4] How does working as a child affect wage, income and poverty as an adult? Social Protection Discussion Paper Series, No. 0514 (Washington, DC, World Bank, May 2005),