IATP Senior Fellow Mark Muller is working in a volunteer program in Honduras through July. He will blog periodically on his experiences there.
“A liberal is just a conservative that hasn’t been mugged yet.”
I’ve always been bothered by that phrase, treating someone’s ideology as something that can dramatically change in a brief episode. But I have to admit that over the past several years, things that once seemed very black and white have now become several shades of gray.
Take child labor – there aren’t many issues that once seemed clearer. Children have a right to a childhood and an education. Can any form of child labor be excused?
Well last week I spent a morning working with a chili pepper producer cooperative here in southern Honduras. It’s an impressive business, where several of the community’s leaders have come together to generate an income source out of the poor soils on the incredibly eroded hillsides near the Nicaraguan border. I will be spending some time with this cooperative, and hopefully help them with some of the agronomic and marketing challenges that they are facing.
But when I arrived at the field being harvested that morning, I was taken aback by the age of some of the kids working in the fields. Many of them appeared to be about the same age as my seven year old. I have worked with farmworker families in New York State, and children have been part of the vegetable-harvesting labor force in the U.S. and most parts of the world, but this seemed to be a whole different level.
One of the directors of the cooperative must have seen the concern on my face, because he started to explain to me the rationale for children working the fields. He admitted it was illegal, but the families desperately needed the income that this work provided. He stated that a mother with children (very few men were in the fields) could earn up to 500 Lampiras (about $25) a day, much more than what is provided by other local jobs. The children are amazingly dexterous pickers, and on average they could probably pick the peppers twice as fast as I could.
Part of the reason that the work is appealing to the kids is that they get to spend their hard-earned money at the truck that serves as the mobile junk food market. Ironically, occasionally between songs blasting out of the truck radio would be a message from UNICEF alerting people that children are required to attend school.
So can I morally justify working with this cooperative? After a lot of pondering, I believe I can. First of all, if the options available to the kids were to either work the fields or to attend a well-run school where they could receive a good education, then of course they should be receiving the education. But I visited the school in the little village, and it’s hard to imagine a lot of education happening in the run down building with almost no resources. Whether the kids work the fields or not, a good education is simply not available.
Second, the kids can really earn a considerable amount of money for their family, and poverty has already taken away many of the joys of childhood. Picking vegetables is not an ideal childhood experience, but neither is drinking contaminated water or spending the day washing laundry. Despite the fact that it is hot, backbreaking work, the kids seem to make the best possible experience out of it, working next to their friends and enjoying the sugar-laden candies for sale on the truck.
I hope that, in my brief time here, I can help create some opportunities for sustainably grown, fairly traded products in this region. But without that option currently available, I have to think that some form of production and job creation is better than the alternative, which is most likely the continued migration of families away from the countryside and into overcrowded cities or to the country’s clothing factories.
Having kids myself, I can’t imagine how frustrating it is for the parents to have to rely on the labor of their children to make ends meet. Childhood labor won’t go away, though, without adequate income opportunities for the adults. And that seems to be a long ways off for many of the people here in southern Honduras.
