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When I arrived in the sugarcane fields in a swirl of
dust churned up by the police vans in Nasugbu, Batangas, two hours
drive south of Manila to free the men, women and children from the
slave-like conditions, I saw a snapshot of colonial slavery as it
was 200 years ago. Then hundreds of thousands of Africans were
abducted and enslaved in America to feed the white man’s greed for
cotton, tobacco and money. I stood among the towering sugarcane
stalks and saw ragged weary workers and children stagger from the
fields of cane bewildered and unbelieving they were being rescued.
They got no pay, were threatened at gunpoint if they tried to escape
and were charged exorbitant prices of the food they were given. They
were in debt bondage the day they were brought to the fields. This
modern slavery is common in the democratic Philippines supposedly
under the rule of law but in fact under the rule of the elite.
The National Bureau of
Investigation (NBI) antitrafficking of persons unit was effective
and efficient and its existence is testimony that there is a huge
trafficking and trade in men, women and children. It has to be
opposed and eliminated. However, trials and convictions are hard to
get. The US Department of State had the Philippines on a critical
level for noncompliance with international agreements to curb people
trafficking and gross failure to prosecute the people traffickers.
Sex trafficking is another scourge that continues unabated, too.
How much more do powerful elite
conceal and deny the widespread existence of child labor. We rescued
two young teenagers, aged 15 and 17, from the sugarcane fields. They
were already condemned to a life of illiteracy and ignorance. Other
little children of one worker and his wife were not in school but
part of the slave camp, three and five year old, they went about
gathering fire wood to cook the meager portion of rice given by the
manager. This is a common reality in many parts of the Philippines
where most child workers are working on the land helping their
impoverished families seek out a living planting enough food to feed
themselves, anything beyond that is a dream.
The Philippine Department of
Labor and Employment (DOLE) has reported through Labor
Undersecretary Luz-viminda Padilla that in every 10 Filipino
families three have children out working to help feed the family.
That means, given the Philippine population of 86 million, 3 million
families rely on their children’s meager earnings. There are 25
million children and 4 million of them, between the ages of 5 and
17, are working and miss out on a schooling. Seventy percent of them
are in rural areas working in the fields. They grow up illiterate,
abused, exploited and, as a result, can never reach an economic
stability where their children could go to school and break the
cycle of poverty. It is a self-perpetuating system of hardship and
deprivation of children.
Advocates of family planning and
population control say the average family of six to eight children
is the root of the poverty problem. But is it? The poor will say if
we have only two children all will starve, with more we have a
better chance to survive most of us can make it and we (parents),
when old, will live a bit longer. It’s a bit like starting a
minibus stranded in the desert with a weak battery, two are not
enough to give it a push start but six can. Their survival strategy
lies in the strength of numbers, more child workers in the family
means more food not less. It seems to work because there are
millions of them surviving although utterly impoverished and
deprived. Life is all they have even if it is lived in utter want.
Their children work by necessity
in the fields hauling water, selling in the streets, begging on
corners, scavenging in the garbage dumps. More are lured into
prostitution or are breaking stones in quarries back street
factories or are collecting scrap and junk. They are exposed to
pesticides, chemicals, fumes and dangerous gases and lead. They get
diseases from insects and parasites from the contaminated food and
water, and nearly all suffer from malnutrition. Poverty and social
injustice is a form of slavery and a cruel one at that.
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