Seeds of Exploitation

Many conscious consumers are used to questioning the conditions under which their food is produced, but going even farther back in the production process, have you ever considered where the seeds used to grow your food came from? India is home to a large cotton and vegetable seed industry plagued by labor rights abuses. Two recent reports published by the International Labor Rights Forum, the India Committee of the Netherlands, and the Stop Child Labor campaign found that more than half-a-million children are working under hazardous conditions in these industries in India.

"Growing Up in the Danger Fields" found a growing demand for hot and sweet peppers, tomato, okra, and eggplant seeds from India. The report highlighted that farmers hire child workers, especially girls, in order to cut costs, since most of the work needs to be done manually and requires a large work force. A total of 152,369 children are estimated to be working in the three regions that account for 95% of India's production of vegetable seeds, with peppers having the highest level of child workers and tomatoes the lowest. In addition to child labor, the report identified other problems like low wages and gender and caste discrimination. Some multinational companies operating in this sector, like Syngenta, have instituted policies and worked with multistakeholder initiatives to reduce child labor with some success.

The cottonseed industry provides a slightly more positive picture as the title of the report, "Signs of Hope," implies. Cottonseed production is highly labor intensive and children, many younger than 14 years old, are involved in cross-pollinating plants. Those children come into close contact with pesticides and labor for long hours. However, the report found a decline of 8.4% in the number of children under 18 years of age in the 2009 to 2010 harvest season compared to the 2006 and 2007 season, and the decline in labor of children under 14 years of age was 25% in the same period. The signs of progress were strongest in Andhra Pradesh due to stronger efforts on behalf of various agencies in that region to address child labor.

The report also found that programs that had been implemented by multinational corporations like Bayer and Monsanto, in collaboration with locally-based organizations along with the International Labor Organization (ILO) and local governments, were contributing to a decrease in child labor.

Another critically important improvement highlighted in the cottonseed report was that in villages that had seen a marked decrease in child labor, there was a direct increase in wages for adult workers. Lower rates of child labor on cottonseed farms also had a positive impact on the bargaining power of adult workers in other agricultural sectors when it came to demanding higher wages. This finding is incredibly important because it shows how child labor negatively impacts the wages and bargaining power of adult workers and leads to poor working conditions for all workers.

The companies that benefit from India's seed industry, many of which are based in the U.S. and Europe, should strengthen their efforts to support seed farmers and work collaboratively with local organizations and government officials in order to reduce child exploitation and improve opportunities for decent work for adults.

Photo credit: flydime