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(NYASATIMES) Malawi tobacco child labourers being poisoned –TV documentary

Malawi tobacco child labourers being poisoned –TV documentary
By Nyasa Times
Published: May 14, 2010

The documentary was produced by Julie Noon and reporter Jenny Kleeman which uncovered that children suffer health problems from handling tobacco and some are trapped in bonded labour arrangements, leaving them unable to escape and little seems to be done to protect their health and wellbeing.

In the documentary, the team begin their journey in Mchinji district. While some children are in their uniforms on their way to school, the team spots

[Really? How convenient. I don't believe in coincidences. - MrK]

a group of 15 to 20 sorting tobacco by the roadside. Emilida and her three children – including her three-year-old son – have been working there since dawn.

The team finds a family of seven harvesting tobacco who says they work every day from dawn to dusk. The children’s hands are covered in a sticky brown residue and they say they suffer from severe headaches: a symptom of green tobacco sickness, or nicotine poisoning, where high doses of nicotine are absorbed through the skin.

Farges, the mother of the family, says the entire family takes home the equivalent of about K4,000 a year (£18), the cost of three packets of cigarettes in the UK. Her children must work so they can fulfil the daily quota of tobacco the farm owner has demanded of them.

She says the farm owners claim they’re not getting a fair price for tobacco at auction and can’t pay them more. The family wants to escape tobacco farming, but they’ve been forced to borrow money from the land owner and can’t leave until they work off their debt. The UN says this is bonded labour, a modern form of slavery.

The team visits the local primary school to see how tobacco is affecting children’s education. The headmaster tells Channel 4 TV that a third of his class are absent, probably in the tobacco fields. He says most pupils fail their exams and then can’t go on to secondary school because they miss out on so much of their education to work with tobacco.

In Kasungu, they investigated claims that some farm owners are trafficking children to work on larger estates. They meet Elisa, 13, Akim Nkhoma, 14, and Joseph, 17. Elisa says a farm owner came to her village to recruit child labourers, promising that her family would be paid for her work at the end of the season. The boys claim they were treated very badly on the estates: their supervisors shouted at them, withheld their food and beat them with sticks.

South of Kasungu, the team joins a group of charity workers and government officials who are trying to stop child labour. They quickly find children sorting tobacco in a facility owned by a former MP.

The District Labour Officer tells the British TV the owner will definitely go to jail, but the team later discovers he has been let off with a caution. No one has ever been imprisoned in the district for employing children.

Channel 4 TV team end their journey in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, where the majority of tobacco picked by Malawi’s children enters the world market.

Malawi is one of the world’s biggest tobacco producers. Tobacco Control Commission CEO, Dr Bruce Munthali said in the documentary that Malawi relies on the crop for 65 per cent of its foreign income and its tobacco is bought by companies including British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris.

The TV crew try to arrange an interview with the Minister of Labour Yunnus Mussa to talk about their findings, but he fails to turn up to every appointment.

But Mussa told Malawi’s private Capital Radio Straight Talk programme recently that his ministry through district and regional offices had put in place initiatives to build capacity in rural communities to combat child labour

“I am told with the school-feeding programme, a lot of children are going to school. We’re actually addressing the issue with the assistance of International Labour Organization. We have a programme to eliminate child labour,” the minister said.

“We have rescued a number of children of being child-labourers. Out of those some have gone back to school. Some we have given them start-up capital and equipment so that they are self-employed in brick-laying, carpentry, tailoring and even farming,” he said.

“The Minister disclosed that government would table a tenancy bill in parliament which proposes an age limit.

“No child shall be employed until the age of 18 years otherwise there will be a punishment of up to K1 million or imprisonment,” the minister said.

The investigations by Channel 4 TV follows another research by international children’s organisation Plan showing that Malawi has the highest incidence of child labour in southern Africa, with 88.9% of five to 14-year-olds working in the agricultural sector.

Plan called on Malawi’s government to enforce existing child labour and protection laws and on plantations to provide safer, fairer working conditions for those children forced to work.

“Plan is calling for better enforcement of child labour laws and harsher punishment for employers who break them,” said Macdonald Mumba, Plan Malawi’s child rights adviser.

Malawi is a signatory to numerous conventions against child labour, including the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of a Child, the 1973 International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 138 (setting a minimum working age of 18), and the 1999 ILO Convention 182 (outlawing child labour). —Nyasa Times/Channel 4 TV-Unreported World

Labels: CHILD LABOUR, TOBACCO

posted by MrK @ 6:22 AM