HULIGAMMA AND THE BIG MAC

Amid the cacophony of blaring horns, the smog emitted form the exhausts of hundreds of vehicles and the hoarding screaming the advantages of the new wave of Globalisation, little Huligamma doges her way through the traffic at a major intersection in one of India’s teaming cities.

Nothing much has changed for her. She has worked for as long as she can remember. Aged 11, she has never dared to dream and even if she does, it is not an extravagant dream, just to become a teacher someday. But this dream seems to be becoming more and more elusive.

Yes, actually things have changed. When she first came to the city from her village and began rag picking, she used to sort through the piles of garbage in mute companionship with cows. She would collect the paper, tins, magazines and cloth while the cow munched on the banana leaves and scraps of food. She sold these to wholesalers who in turn recycled them and made a few rupees. Now all she finds is Styrofoam cups, bubble wrap, plastic and discarded mousses, keyboards and CDs. Very little resale value for these.

In August 2005 there was an interesting battle in Chennai, India between Coca-Cola and the photographer Sharad Haksar. He has been using a billboard for three years to focus on social issues effecting India through photographs. The one displayed in August 2005 showed a line of empty water pots waiting to be filled at a hand pump with a Coca-Cola logo in the background. It was a commentary on the water shortages that country was experiencing. Coca-Cola India sent a copyright infringement notice to photographer Sharad Haksar. Haskar responded by saying that he had not infringed any law and was only exercising his freedom of expression.

Activists have been claiming that water shortages due to depleting ground water usually accompany the arrival of a Coca-Cola or Pepsi bottling factory in the area. These allegations have been vociferously denied by the companies and now, a year later, many institutions and even States have banned Coca Cola claiming that the level of pesticides found in these soft drinks are far above the permissible limits.

Huligamma extracts a half eaten big Mac from the dustbin outside Burger King. She munches on it as she gazes at a hoarding advertising ‘Power Lunches’ for busy Executives at a Five Star Hotel. A steaming plate of food stares back at her as she chews on the dry bread. So different from the occasional packet of curd rice or chapatti and subzi that she used to find. This dry and tasteless meat sandwiched between white flavourless bread is difficult to swallow and will barely satisfy her hunger.

Though economists promoting liberalisation and ‘free trade’ suggest that trade improves living standards, it is a controversial proposition that is widely debated in developmental circles. Experience has shown that trade does not necessarily promote economic growth. Even if trade boosts the economy, trade’s benefits either do not trickle down to most citizens or are offset by the costs. These potential costs may include environmental degradation, increased exposure to disease, decreased public spending due to lower ability to tax capital, increased exposure to international financial crises, and increased demand for low-skill labour and child labour; and subsequent reduced returns to human capital acquisition.

Back in her village Huligamma’s 13 year old sister spends 12 hours a day spraying fertiliser on crops. She works as a daily wage labourer in the farms of a multinational agro corporation that has a chain of stores selling vegetables, fruit and other agro products. She is paid Rs.15 per day of which the contractor takes a cut.

Her brother aged 14 years works as an unskilled labourer in the iron ore mines, digging for ore and loading trucks. It is back breaking work in very extreme conditions. The temperature is 45 degrees in summer, there is no water in that drought prone region and the ore dust causes chronic respiratory ailments. He is paid Rs. 30 per day and also pays his contractor a cut, but together they are able to feed themselves and their grandmother and put a little aside for the days when there is no work.

An often asked question is whether a countries’ openness to the international economy affects investments in children’s health and education. This question goes to the core of the debate on globalization. Children’s health and education are important ends in their own right (Sen 1999). Health and education are two of the important means of achieving long-term economic sustainability and experience has shown that trade is unlikely to be a long-lasting propeller of overall development, especially if it only spurs economic growth but substantially harms health and education through reduced public spending and the removal of safety nets. Trade also influences the degree to which governments are willing and able to fund public health and education. More generally, in open economies governments have a hard time taxing capital; in fact, they may end up largely subsidising capital at the expense of investments in children. 

To draw from Adam Smith, policies such as Structural Adjustments have contributed to “the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth from the periphery to the imperial centre in history”. And this has been achieved without much media or public attention.

The IMF and World Bank prescription to developing nations at the behest of the rich and powerful countries is that developing nation should open up to allow more imports and export more of their commodities. This is precisely what contributes to poverty and dependency.

Mainstream economists and politicians have long been criticized for concentrating on economic growth in ways that ignores humanity and the environmental costs. Perhaps one of the harshest ironies is how food and farm products flow from areas of hunger and need, to areas where money and demand is concentrated. Farm workers, and women especially, are amongst the worlds most hungry.

Though their family was not considered poor, they were small farmers; education was never an option for Huligamma and her siblings beyond the 4^th standard. Living in a drought prone area Huligamma at the age of 10 years had to walk 6 kms to collect two pots of drinking water for the family every day. Her brother and sister would take the goats in search of grazing land. As pastures are scarce in this district, it would be several days before they returned only to pack another bundle of dry rotis and set out again. Her mother and father worked in the fields.

After four years of continuous drought, her family could no longer service their debt and her father committed suicide. Huligamma left her village with her mother, two younger siblings and came to the city to find a way to survive; leaving behind her old grandmother, elder sister and brother to manage the little land they had left.

The Progress of Nations, 1999 report by UNICEF, suggests that debt is killing children. It states that as countries are diverting resources away from social provisions to repay debt, those most affected are the poor, especially women and children. The UNICEF State of the World's Children 2000 report claims that in 1960 the income gap between the richest one-fifth of the world's population and the poorest was 30-1. In 1997 it was 74-1.

“Trade, not aid” is regarded as an important part of development promoted by some nations. But in the context of international obligations, it is also criticized by many as an excuse for rich countries to cut back aid that has been agreed and promised at the United Nations.

A coalition of Indian organisations spearheaded by HAQ is campaigning for trade justice - not free trade - with the rules weighted to benefit poor people and the environment. They are “calling on world leaders to change the rules that govern international trade so that poor countries have the freedom to help and support their vulnerable farmers and industries.”

The HAQ report further claims that though the direct impact of free trade on children may not be apparent the experiences of other countries of the processes of globalisation and liberalisation on children definitely indicate that there is a strong case for making a closer examination of this linkage.

Huligamma Remembers how her father together with other farmers, some years ago, had dumped their tomatoes on the highway as the selling price had dropped 90 pisa per kilogram. Her father was a proud man who never believed in taking handouts. He would save money before each festival to buy the clothes and rations.  What a joy that was, to dress up and go with the family to the Sante (weekly market) and choose the fresh fruit and vegetables that would go into making the sweets and festive meal. And buying flowers and bangles and new clothes! What different days those were.

Huligamma also remembers how her father was told about the new economy. ‘Buy now and pay later’. He finally fell into the trap and took a loan not knowing that his profession was not sustainable. She thinks of the new TVs and cars and scooters that are displayed outside factories offering fantastic schemes. A car for just a down payment of Rs. 999! She wonders how sustainable these city jobs are.

The UNICEF in The State of the World’s Children 2006 titled the ‘Excluded and Invisible’ is a passionate plea for Nation States to focus on “Creating a world fit for children” they say that though it “may seem impossibly far away, but achieving it is as simple as this: We must do everything in our power to keep our commitments to children. These commitments are clear and unambiguous. What is now required is the understanding that a commitment is a pledge with both moral and practical obligations. In a moral sense, a commitment signifies a relationship of duty. In practical terms, a commitment binds those making it to a course of action.”

It seems that the UNICEF report is trying to desperately counter the effects of corporate globalisation and without stating as such, they make an emotional plea playing on Nations sense of humanity and moral values. 

This report also claims that “At the extremes, children can become invisible, in effect disappearing from view within their families, communities and societies and to governments, donors, civil society, the media, the private sector and even other children. For millions of children, the main cause of their invisibility is violations of their right to protection.”

Child labour is banned, and children are periodically rounded up and removed from their work situations. However, the alternatives offered to them are neither viable nor sustainable. The most detrimental aspect of this strategy is that children working in the banned sectors have no protection what so even and are considered as infringers of the law themselves. This criminalisation of child labour has forced them into more and more hidden forms of work and rendered them invisible.

In November 2005 the Daily Pioneer[1], New Delhi reported a drive against child labour in which over 500 minors working in inhuman conditions with 50 embroidery units in East Delhi were rescued on as a result of simultaneous raids on several establishments.

The next day the same paper published an investigative report[2] on the same issue. They described the intervention as “children rescued from a cage and incarcerated in a pigeonhole”. The report claims that the “477 children who were rescued …… amid much publicity……. now faced (with) an even more uncertain future. (I)nvestigations by The Pioneer revealed that rather than concern for the rehabilitation of the children, utilisation of funds under an UN-funded scheme prompted the raids. Neither the Government, nor the NGO, which carried-out the operation has an answer about their future. This would mean sending the children back to the same homes they had fled to escape hunger and disease.

“It was revealed that the raids were carried out to facilitate utilisation of funds received by the Labour Department from the International Labour Organisation, a UN body, for carrying out programmes to eradicate child labour. Sources in the Delhi Government said that such raids are planned with a lot of media hype and positive media reports are submitted to ILO to embellish the application for the release of more funds”.

A Delhi Government official is claimed to have said that “there is no provision for rehabilitation of children rescued under the Child Labour Act. The NGO's and the Delhi Government's claim that they would help rehabilitate children is hogwash. The Labour Department has coordinated (a politically correct usage for contract) with the NGO only to the extent of rescuing and deporting these children from Delhi”.

The cooption of NGOs to do Government work or act as extensions is part of the liberalisation process. The fate of those few independent NGOs who have managed to retain a sense of political activism despite the growing influence of neo-liberal policies is well summed up by Dom Helda Camara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

The UNICEF Report goes on to say; “Statistical analyses of key MDG indicators related to child health and education show a widening gap between children growing up in countries with the lowest level of development, --------- and their peers in the rest of the developing world. These factors not only jeopardize these children's chances of benefiting from the Millennium agenda, they also increase the risk that they will miss out on their childhood and face continued exclusion in adulthood.”

According to the latest UNICEF statistics[3] the enrolment figures for primary school in Indian are 111% for boys and 104% girls. However, the secondary school enrolment figures drop dramatically to 58% boys and 47% girls. Of these children who enrol in secondary school the attendance is only 45% and 36% respectively. This indicates that more than half of India’s young people between the age of 14 and 18 are not in schools and presumably must be engaged in some form of economic activity. Under educated, unskilled and therefore underpaid, these young people will join the ranks of frustrated, underemployed excluded adult population.

In India there has been a lowering of standards in education, basic health, nutrition and shelter as a result of reduced public expenditure on the social sector. The policies, programmes and development initiatives framed by the Government of India based on the dictates of the World Bank and ADB increasingly deprive communities and families of resources on which they have traditionally depended. Loss of control over and access to land and forest resources; fuel, fodder and water; privatisation of social sector benefits such as education, health and provision of water are clearly taking their toll on millions of children.

The symptoms of this negative fallout are visible. Children deprived of even basic social benefits and livelihood securities for their families are forced to migrate to urban centres in the hope of finding a means for survival. We have seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of street children  both girls and boys in urban centres, more and more children are being trafficked within and across borders and there are mounting numbers of children engaged in part or full-time labour.

Children are practically half the world’s population and in many poor countries children and more than 50% of the population. Therefore what happens to children affects all of humanity.

While Huligamma picks rags and begs, her younger brother, 6 years and sister 8 years jump through loops and turns summersaults to amuse the bored Multi National Executives as they wait at the traffic lights. Their tiny bodies have been trained at an early age to do these tricks and when they are older they will have to graduate to rag picking and begging like Huligamma.

Her mother works as a daily labourer when she can get work on a construction site. She is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is. She has been violated so often she has lost track. This is a ‘service’ she performs in return for the beat policemen to ignore her presence on the street and she bears this torment with gritted teeth. 

The recent ILO Global Report released on 4 May 2006 “An end to Child Labour – Within Reach” makes tall claims and sweeping statements. One hopes that there is some truth in its content as there is no one who would not welcome an end to the tragic consequences of children labouring. However, their claims remain on the boundary between rhetoric and wishful thinking.

The report claims that child labour has been reduced globally by 11%. Statistics in this area have always been doubtful and dubious. Examining the ILO sites on child labour statistics there is a lengthy and complicated document called ‘Statistical Information and Monitoring Programme on Child Labour [SIMPOC]’ (updated March 2006). The statistics that this document contains are all called estimates and though the methodology for arriving at conclusions are elaborate and detailed, in the latest update many countries that are said to have high populations of child labour, such as India, do not even find a mention.

Yet, if one gives the ILO the benefit of doubt, the 11% reduction claim is impressive. However, if one reads carefully and between the lines, this claim has been made only for children working in the intolerable forms. This would mean that for example that for every 1000 children working as child prostitutes in Thailand, now there are only 8900. Lucky for the 110 that got away, though one wonders where they are now and how they are faring. Or have they just grown up and crossed the age of 18 and are now counted as adult prostitutes? If this is the progress shown by the ILO in the decade since the Convention 183 has been in force; when will the ‘end be within reach’ for the remaining 8900 child prostitutes and how?

It is unfortunate that the ILO, the last surviving body to be formed as a result of the Versailles Treaty, has gone the way of other UN agencies. As the doctrine of ‘free trade’ increased in momentum, most UN agencies have been slowly and surely dismantled and rendered increasingly powerless.

With the setting up of the IPEC or International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour the ILO, that was thus far a regulatory body and protector of workers rights, became an implementing agency as well. This programme is largely funded by the USA and therefore controlled and directed by them to serve their trade agendas. The IPEC is also the only growth area within the ILO and the programme keeps the organisation afloat, and all other sections of the ILO have been reduced to mere tokenism. 

The ILO was set up to be a tripartite body consisting of representatives of Governments, Workers and Employers. However, when it came to discussions on child labour, the ILO refused to recognise the right of working children to represent themselves; and this was not from want of trying on the part of working children’s movements all over the world.

Instead the ILO chose to recognise some select privileged first world children to be their ambassadors to end child labour and turned a deaf ear to the solutions offered by working children themselves. Excluding them from the debate and criminalising their means of livelihood without offering any viable alternatives, the ILO now resorts to issuing Red Cards to child Workers around the world and kicks this off with a football match in the presence of Football stars who “kicked the ball” against child labour, in a match with children from the Geneva International School and the Signal de Bernex Football Club, two sets of very privileged human beings who will never experience or understand the complexity of their lives, the ensnarement of poverty and the pain of working children who know that they have no choices.  

Footballers are shown the red card for misdemeanours they have committed, but working children were shown this card by the privileged for no fault of their own. They work because of the political and socio-economic conditions that prevail and which the world that is zealously engaged in ‘Globalising’ our planet on corporate lines is too busy to find solutions.

To quote Palagunmi Sainath in, Everybody Loves a Good Drought; “Development is the strategy of evasion. When you can’t give people land reform, give them hybrid cows. When you can’t send children to school, try non-formal education. When you can’t provide basic health to people, talk of health insurance. Can’t give them jobs? Not to worry, just redefine the words “employment opportunities[4]”. And one may add ‘if you don’t want to really solve the causes of child labour – just ban it and hope it will go away’.

Interestingly the Millennium Development Goals did not include the elimination of Child Labour, but made a strong call for “fair globalisation” and “full and productive employment and decent work for all, including for women and young people” and combined this with a central objective of “poverty reduction strategies”. The MDG went further to resolve to “ensure full respect for the fundamental principles and rights to work”.

With the inclusion of Social Clauses in GATT, the world trade organisations donned the mantle of the ombudsperson of human rights. This is like the local money lender becoming the protector of human rights.

The irony is that while MNC are demanding more deregulation of industry and the lowering of labour standards to give them more freedom to be ‘efficient’; they are also clamouring for increased regulation of child labour laws to reduce competition from domestic industries.  Neither is acceptable. On the one hand deregulation can lead to corporations being able to undermine basic social and human rights; while on the other overbearing regulations with regard to child labour give too much power to a few that leads to unfairness in trade and basic human rights.

To quote Ha-Joon Chang in Kicking Away The Ladder[5]: ‘How did the rich countries really become rich?’

“The short answer to this question is that the developed countries did not get to where they are now through the policies and the institutions that they recommend to developing countries today. Most of them actively used ‘bad’ trade and industrial policies, such as infant industry protection and export subsidies—practices that these days are frowned upon, if not actively banned, by the WTO. Until they were quite developed (that is, until the late nineteenth to early twentieth century), they had very few of the institutions deemed essential by developing countries today, including such ‘basic’ institution as central banks and limited liability companies.

“If this is the case, aren’t the developed countries, under the guise of recommending ‘good’ policies and institutions, actually making it difficult for the developing countries to use policies and institutions they themselves had used in order to develop economically in earlier times?

“It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith, and of the cosmopolitical tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations.”

Huligamma remembers a time in her village when they had news of the ‘golden road’ or ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ that was being built some four kilometres away. The family decided to go on a picnic to see this marvel. They packed their rotis and chutney and went to view it. They ate their lunch on the divider. Huligamma stared into the distance. It seemed like a mammoth black serpent had uncoiled itself slithering over villages, fields hills, lakes and forests.

At dusk as they were returning home in their bullock cart they passed rows and rows of women were defecating along the road. Villages here had no toilets and no water and no sanitation. Women had to wait until dark to relieve themselves and the road was the safest place. Huligamma thought back to what she had seen that day, the golden road,  and wondered at the incredible creation. How it had subdued nature and humankind! If Mother India was capable of this why had she not bothered with the numerous problems her community suffered? Was Mother India too busy, or too tired? Had she no affection for them?

The Chief Economist for the World Bank, Larry Summers, (and later U.S. Treasury Secretary, under the Clinton Administration), who was an ardent supporter of Structural Adjustment Policies wrote a leaked internal memo in 1992 that exposed the extent to which international policies have an impact on countries around the world:

 “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?… The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that… Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City… The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand[6].”

This is in an era where there is immense wealth in increasingly fewer hands. “20% of the world’s people in the highest-income countries account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures — the poorest 20% a minuscule 1.3%” according to the 1998 United Nations Human Development Report.

Huligamma coughs and tries to cover her mouth against the exhaust fumes. She often has a bad cough, but this time it does not seem to be going away. She suddenly tenses; she had heard the corporation van approaching with a convoy. This signals the periodic round up by the labour department in cooperation with the municipality and police. She grabs her brother and sister and rushes for a gap in the wall of an old house where a multi-storeyed office complex is being constructed. She ducks behind some rubble. Just in time! They have managed to escape! What a relief! If not they would have been taken to the beggars colony and would have had to buy themselves out by paying Rs. 200 each. She did not have that kind of money.   

The Canadian Government website says that “Child labour is not an easy issue to resolve; while it seems noble to immediately withdraw investments and cooperation with firms and factories that employ child labour it may do more harm than good. Many of these children are from very poor families and work to pay for their family and/or their education. Depriving them of this income has led to some children seeking different, lower paid work, and even prostitution in some cases. Other ways with schemes to help children would likely be needed so that this labour can be phased out. A gradual phase out is said to be a more preferable solution”.

Shyamal Majumdar in a piece titled ‘Child labour ban: If wishes were horses...’ in the

Business Standard of August 2006[7] reflects on a recent piece of child labour legislation banning children from working as domestic servants or at hotels, tea shops, restaurants and resorts. This ban is just an extension of the existing Child Labour Act of 1986. 

The report asks; “Will the ban work? The answer is quite obvious, going by the track record so far. “If wishes were horses, law could change men’s minds,” says a former official in the Maharashtra labour department. That legislation can have only a negligible impact is apparent from the fact that child labour is nothing but a by-product of grinding poverty. These children are holding out a slim lifeline to impoverished families, or are just trying to keep themselves from starvation

“The dilemma is similar to that of the ban on dance bars in Mumbai on the grounds that it would put an end to the exploitation of these women. What happened to those 70,000-odd bar girls after the ban? Some became prostitutes, some went back home only to be ostracised and some committed suicide.

“As long as alternative sources of income are not found for families whose children work in the banned sectors, the law would continue be flouted.”

Huligamma’s dream of becoming a teacher is fast fading away. She stares at the new ad for jeans, a bare chested man with his hand inside the waist band of his faded and frayed jeans. She looks down at herself, torn and faded skirt and loose fitting blouse, two sizes too big. She wonders how she fits in. Are these two sides of the same world? Will they ever become one?

She watches her little brother and sister sharing a banana, each one making sure the other has had an equal share. Why didn’t others do the same? They who had so little were so giving? What future did her siblings have, she wondered? What would become of them? They had no options and no choices. Each day was a struggle for survival and things were changing so fast.

She and her siblings, like millions of other children around the world, will live on the fringes of society, never really counted, never considered an economic or social asset, never becoming one of the mindless consumers that are central to the new age economy. She will remain one of the ‘Excluded and Invisible’, a mere embarrassing statistic to be hidden amid the folds of political rhetoric.

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