Children victims of globalisation
By: Father Shay Cullen
Weimar Dec. 10 Human Rights Day 2004
Dear Friends,
Everyday I meet the victims of Globalisation,
recently I was in one of the many prisons from where we rescue children
and found two children 9 and 10 years old. They were both locked inside
a tiny cell with adult criminals and 35 other young boys for two months.
There are an estimated 20,000 children jailed in Philippine prisons
suffering pain and hardship. These are just some of the child victims of
globalisation. I will refer in particular to the Philippines as that is
my area of work but the process of globalisation is similar world-wide
and the example can apply to most developing nations. The impact on
children is similar and devastating in its results.
Globalisation is an economic movement through which wealthy
nations and corporations are spreading throughout the world controlling
the world economy. They dominate more and more the agriculture,
pharmaceutical, telecommunications financial and manufacturing sectors
as well as the service. Nothing is left untouched by the power and
influence.
At the same time they are working to penetrate and integrate the world
markets and dominate them. They create monopolies of manufacturing and
supply. This form of globalisation is presented as beneficial to poor
countries but on the contrary it causes more poverty than every before
and the children are the prime victims.
The strongest evidence of its negative impact on children is
found on the city streets of the developing world. UNICEF estimates that
a 100 million children world-wide live on the streets in abysmal
conditions. In the Philippines according to Government figures from 1991
to 1999 the number of street children rose from 223,000 to 1.5 million.
During these years, the Philippines began to liberalise its economy,
reduce import taxes suffered a huge deficit so that social services
began to fail and many local manufacturing plants closed. Thousands were
unemployed.
There is no social welfare for the poor in the Philippines. If
one is poor and sick he/she is likely to die, if unemployed and hungry
they have to beg. If homeless they must live on the streets or in slums.
Hundreds of thousands of street children live in boxes, push carts and
hovels unfit even for animals. They eat left over food from the garbage,
beg at street corners and are sold into prostitution and child labour on
an unprecedented scale.
Child labour is epidemic in the Philippines
with 1.2 million children working. UNICEF and civil society estimate
60,000 to 100,000 children and youth, some as young as 8 year old, are
exploited in the sex industry which has gone global. There are hundreds
of thousands of sex tourists traveling to poor countries for sexual
gratification with children every year.
* 100 million children world-wide live on the streets in abysmal
conditions. (Unicef)
* 60,000 to 100,000 children and youth are sexually exploited in the
Philippines (Unicef)
* 20,000 children jailed in Philippine prisons suffering pain and
hardship. (Newsweek)
* World-wide, more than 1 million children are in prison.
* 1 in every 5 children in the developing world has to work that is 246
million child workers.
* 5.7 million Children work in especially horrific circumstances,
one million in Prostitution Some as young as 8 and 9
* There are around 500,000 child soldiers in Africa
* Between 8,000 and 10,000 children are killed or maimed by land
mines every year.
From 1991 to 1999 the Philippine economy came under the intense
influence of a world economy that was going global at breakneck speed.
Multibillion corporate mergers were creating global behemoths that now
span the globe and are wealthier than many nations. They are beyond the
jurisdiction of many judicial systems. They are a law unto themselves.
Globalisation hurts the poor because unfair trade agreements
brokered by the World Trade Organisation, Implemented with the help and
pressure of the World bank and the IMF frequently results in creating
unfair competition and driving down production costs and wages in poor
countries when the trans national corporations (TNCs) and their products
are allowed to dominate the markets. These global business elite invest
where they can pay the lowest wages and non regulated working conditions
and environmental regulations are not enforced.
They maximise their profits. TNCs as they are called are in the
developing world for their own interest and profit. They are not agents
of development. There are 416 of these corporations in the Philippines.
The biggest of such investors are Japanese (41%), American 13% they
overshadow all Filipino investment which is 17%.
TNCs demand low tariffs and taxes and
governments embracing globalisation accommodate them. But the realties,
a huge budget deficit. The first services to be cut are education and
health. Children suffer first. The massive interest payments on the
foreign debt cripple the economy. Almost one third of the national
budget it paid out to the global financial institutions as a matter of
Philippine law.
Health and education for children are the first to go. Spending
on education dropped from 19.11 % of the national budget in 1999 to
16.06% by 2003. Spending on health was down from 2.55% of the budget to
1.6%, Social Services were down from 26.52 % to 22.2% and so on. 40 % of
rural families are impoverished and the World Bank report says that
rural poor increased by 300,000 between 1997 and 2003. The 416 TNCs did
nothing to stop the growing poverty. That's because all their profits
are not invested in the country but are send back to the headquarters.
Unequal trade agreements. The globalisation of the Philippine
economy is made possibly by the signing of unequal trade agreements.
These agreements have opened the door for foreign investors and global
corporations to manufacture branded products,. They cut wages, fire
employees, slash benefits and sell their branded products below cost.
The local manufactured products are wiped out more unemployment follows
As soon as they get a monopoly of the market they increase their prices.
In 2003 everyday 186 Filipino workers were lost their jobs because of
Globalisation
Migration - 7 million Filipinos working abroad. As globalisation
spreads the middle class see no hope, no future for their children. They
migrate to the North where the greatest wealth, much of it made in the
south is found. Their children are again the victims. They are left
behind to grow up with grandparents and relatives. The result is broken
homes and abandoned or dysfunctional children. The migrants are sending
back money, $14 Billion in remittances. This is what is keeping the
Philippine economy afloat not a beneficial globalised economy.
Patenting plants These corporations have the backing of many
governments to help them in patenting the bio-diversity of developing
nations. These unique natural resources belonging to indigenous people
are turned into life saving medicines or valuable by-products from which
the original people gain nothing. Frequently they are sold back to the
poor nations at huge costs -a worst form of exploitation.
Anti-Viral drugs Before they were forced to change policy the
global Pharmaceutical industry refused to reduce the cost of anti-viral
drugs for Aids sufferers. They refused to allow them to be manufactured
under license at lower cost to save lives. Thousands of children and
other victims died as a result. Corporate greed knows no limits.
Globalisation and Human rights violations Iraq Sudan, Burma Military force. When negotiation and manipulation cannot achieve their goals then military force is resorted to. In Iraq the war is all about power influence and oil. The close ties economic between the politicians ordering the war and the global corporations benefiting from it is outrageous. They helped to finance the invasion, occupation and so called reconstruction. 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died thousands of them children and youth.
In the Sudan global corporations are accused of
paying huge sums of money to the corrupt and genocidal regime to get
control of their oil and minerals. The corporate money funds the
murdering militia that carries out ethnic cleansing in Darfur, murdering
children and families by the thousands. These global economic interests
can even influence the United Nations to hold back from imposing
sanctions and an oil embargo on Sudan.
Global dumping of subsided commodities. While developing nations
are being forced to reduce their trade protection tariffs under the
rulings of the World Trade organisation the developed nations do not do
likewise. They continue to pay their farmers huge subsidies to produce
cotton, sugar beet, corn and other crops that are dumped at low prices
on the world market and good quality cotton and products from the
developing nations are blocked from reaching the world market.
In 2000 the Institute for Agriculture and Trade policy (IATP) reported
that the US export price for a bushel of wheat was $3.50 but it cost
$6.24 to produce. In 2001 US exporters dumped corn at 33% below
production cost; Soya beans sole at 29% below cost, cotton at 57% and
rice at 22%. Poor farmers in the developing world can't compete the
economic subsidies given to American farmers by the supra-power of the
US economy.
Protest and Resistance. Only when the
developing nations came together in Cancun last year to protest and
resist this unjust situation did the WTO rule to outlaw such unjust
subsidies and trade practices yet they will not be enforced for many
years.
We need to have global protest, justice and equality. This mans a
sharing of wealth and international enforcement of just laws and more
strict prosecution of tyrant's genocidal war criminals and international
traffickers of children.
These are lessons for our time. We cannot allow a day to pass
where human rights are violated and not speak out and more so when the
victims are children. So many are vulnerable and defenseless before the
might and oppression of their own government and the forces of
globalisation. We have to work to protect their rights to a life of
social justice and stability. This we can do by helping children
participate in our global awareness campaigns for human rights.
We can never do enough to empower and enable the children and youth to
have a voice and the right to appeal to the convention on the rights of
the child for protection when their rights are violated. We must all
work to establish a protocol that their will be an Individual complaints
procedure for abused and violated children. This is already the practice
in other conventions. Why not for children?
We have to continue working for a better world of justice and peace, one
based not on military might, revenge taking, maximizing profit,
selfishness, exploitation and global corporate greed. We need to build a
world safe for children where they have a life of equality, dignity and
happiness. [End]
