by MITA Q. SISON-DUQUE

THE discoveries and inventions of the 21st century has extended and bettered life in contemporary times. It has therefore become incomprehensible adn unpardonable that the same world tha constantly seeks to better herself has quietly become a world of working children. Child labor, most often concealed and cloaked under the label of family economic survival is widespread across the globe.

While adults uncover and device ways to save energy, cut down on costs and conserve our resources, as the answer to the needs of overpopulation, the most important human resource, the child, has been overlooked and at times of crises has been deliberately set aside as last priority and an expendable item. Unfortunately, what is the most formidable resource for the future has been put back far enough. These small people, the adults of tomorrow deserve more importance than just extra hands to help in farms and factories for families. More important, the child has to be given the chance to develop his own potentials, be educated and allowed to mature under optimum conditions to maximize his potentials.

In many parts of the world whether it be in the Pacific Area or elsewheree in farms or factories, the child bereft of proper time and funds for education is put to work by adults unmindful of time value. In a research completed by the International Labor Organization of Child Labor (ILO/IPEC) in looking particularly into tobacco producing countries, the extent of child labor in tobacco plantations in Asian countries particularly Indonesia and even here in the Philippines is surprising. Child labor in tobacco plantations is practiced widely to help increase income from tobacco planting.

In Norway to Africa numbers of children wake up at the crackk of dawn or earlier to tend to agricultural lands instead of sleeping snug in their beds for nature to enhance their growth and development before their day schooling. These same children who are expected to do equal through seemingly lighter work in the plantations, are in no official position as the benefits and regular wages for these laborers are denied them. In some cases, a few children were hired as part-time workers, but were part of the parents’ contract and were not considered daily part-time workers entitled to any benefits or wages.

In the plantation, tobacco fields are divided into small plots, each of which have labor allotment assigned to a contracted worker. Most often, a man has a family. As the tobacco plant does through stages of cultivation and restructures, and the tedious hand for one person, job openings surface for children. In the study children do not volunteer or offer to help, but worked anyway as a way to help parents. From ages 5-18 years, the time when most of them should be in school, a great number of them drop out due to economic reasons, and star work in tobacco fields at an early age, the majority of them remain uneducated. Although economics is the main reason for the negligence, the fate of these children is carelessly thrown aside, ignorant that in them and their potentials lay the solution of given education.

Tobacco is a valuable crop, the most widely grown non-food cash crop in the world, produced in approximately 100 countries in every continent. Producing tobacco, a plant grown for its leaves, has its special needs unknown to other crops. The plant grows to a height of one and a half meters. Labor-intensive, the cultivation of tobacco involves safety and health hazards. The process goes through clearing of area, field cultivation and creation of ridges for the crops, sowing seeds first in the nursery, later transplanting the seedlings in the field, irrigation, watering, weeding and also, use of insecticides. Then comes harvesting, done by hand except in highly industrialized countries or the U.S.A. and Canada.

After the harvest, the leaves are cured in barns with hot air and smoke from fires passed along large pipes called flues. A process that takes a number of days under close supervision, the cured leaves are then graded and bundled together and wrapped in waterproof tobacco paper lined with tare, a highly flammable paper. Health hazards as injuries from cutting tools, or contact of entanglement or marking of being hit by motorized vehicles poses a long term health problem. Children suffer from exposure to pesticides, heat exhaustion or high levels of sun exposures, which may result in skin cancer, snake and insect bites, muscular injuries from forceful and repeated bending and lifting of heavy loads. And common, is the green tobacco sickness caused by nicotene and absorbed through the skin with wet tobacco leaves.

In a summary released by the Foundation for the Elimination of Child Labor in Tobacco in Malawi, the following have been assumed, in tobacco estates 78% of children ages 10 to 14 worked either full or part time worth their parents. One in five children less than 15 years work full time. Children are not usually employed but work anyway as part of the family quota. Children between 6 and 14 years 8% worked regularly in male-headed households while 27% in female headed households.

And alas, as early on, there is discrimination between male and female children as far as child labor is concerned. If children work, how about protection from injury, from the natural elements being exposed at work such as warm clothing during the rainy and cold seasons. Many times due to the lack of boots, they are injured by thorns, tree stumps, especially walking barefoot in thorny woods to secure wood for curing tobacco. They suffer headaches, sunburns and sometimes fungal infections in toes and fingers. However, the main source of accidental injury are from fires at curing, and the use of sharp instruments. Children are known to suffer from tuberculosis due to tobacco fumes and smokes from burning logs in curing sheds, skin problems from handlling fertilizers, exposur to excessive heat, and worst, chest pains and other respiratory problems from inhaling fertilizer dust. Children regularly worked from 8-14 hours a day, with shifts of 18-20 hours during harvest time. A U.S. Department of Labor report.

Christ, after His day’s labor called out for children to come to Him. “Let the children come to me…and do not prevent them for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as them.” Matthew 19:14. When He does call, do we say, “Sorry God our children are out in the tobacco fields and factories, working. We put them there.”