Colleagues,
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening.
It is a pleasure to join this webinar to discuss the crucial issue of tobacco and child labour.
Three days ago, on June 12, we commemorated World Day Against Child Labour.
And this year – 2021 – has been declared by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour.
A joint report issued by ILO and UNICEF for the commemoration highlighted the fact that in the last four years – and for the first time since 2000 – the reduction of child labour stalled.
In fact, the absolute number of children forced into labour increased by over 8 million – reaching 160 million children worldwide.
Moreover, the economic crisis tied to the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to drag another 8.9 million children into labour by the end of next year.
This, of course, is a health issue, a moral issue and a human rights issue.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child declared the right of children to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous, interfere with education or be harmful to a child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.
Unfortunately, this right is not respected for children working on tobacco farms.
The ILO’s Worst Form of Child Labour Convention, which has been universally ratified, targets the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour as a matter of urgency. The Convention qualifies the worst forms of child labour as “work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children”.
Working to grow and produce tobacco is clearly harmful to a child.
Children working in tobacco are usually deprived of leisure and their right to education, and they also are exposed to serious health risks – acute nicotine poisoning, pesticide exposure and other related risks.
A major investigation by The Guardian newspaper revealed how children 14 years and younger, in countries across three continents, were kept out of school and employed in hard and harmful physical labour to produce the tobacco leaves that fill cigarettes sold internationally.
Poverty, of course, is the main driver of child labour, together with weaknesses of education systems and ingrained cultural beliefs.
While salaries at the top of the industry run into millions of dollars a year, the incomes of tobacco growers are extremely low, forcing their children into labour.
Tobacco farmers often require loans every planting season to pay for seeds, fertilizers or machinery, only to find themselves caught in an endless debt cycle.
The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, starting with its Preamble, recognizes the strong links between tobacco control and human rights in general – and the rights of children in particular.
Articles 17 and 18 of the WHO FCTC call for the provision of support for economically viable alternatives to tobacco, and for the protection of the environment and the health of people from tobacco cultivation and manufacture.
This is aligned with one of the paths of action proposed by the ILO–UNICEF report, with the aim of solving the problem of child labour in order to achieve SDG 8.7 – that calls for an end to child labour by 2025.
Another path of action in the report calls for creative resource mobilization strategies to expand government budgets.
At the national level, raising taxes on tobacco products – as per Article 6 of the WHO FCTC – could be a source of domestic funding, an approach explicitly recognized in the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda.
Also, Article 26 of the WHO FCTC calls for the mobilization of multilateral channels to provide funding in order to support tobacco control measures in developing countries and countries with economies in transition.
Finally, the tobacco industry tries – as always – to portray itself as a partner in the development agenda.
In 2014, the Altria Group, one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of tobacco and cigarettes, signed a global pledge to eliminate all forms of child labour in its worldwide supply chain as part of an initiative promoted by the Eliminating Child Labour in Tobacco Growing Foundation, a foundation created by British American Tobacco.
In reality, tobacco companies buy tobacco from leaf companies, transferring the burden of ensuring that child labour does not occur to these companies, further down the supply chain.
This is another effort of the tobacco industry to whitewash the fact that children around the world are still involved in tobacco farming.
Thank you.