FAO steps up antichild labor efforts with new guidebook

THE FOOD and Agriculture Organization on Tuesday released a new guide book aimed at preventing child labor in agriculture, which affects 100 million children worldwide.

According to the FAO, three-fifths of child laborers worldwide work in agriculture.

The United Nations agency said the 100-page Handbook for Monitoring and Evaluation of Child Labor in Agriculture seeks to address shortcomings of many agricultural development programs that fail to monitor or evaluate the impact they have on child labor.

The initiative is trained particularly on communities where increased labor demands are met through child workers.

“In recent years, we have seen an increase in awareness of child labor and its role in producing export crops such as cocoa, coffee and cotton,” Rob Vos, director of FAO’s Social Protection Division, said in a statement.

“As a result, we see much more effective action to prevent child labor in these value chains,” Vos added. “However, child labor on family farms not connected to international commodity markets has remained largely untouched. The new guide tries to fill this void.”

According to the International Labor Organization, also of the UN, the number of child laborers is pegged at about 168 million—reduced by a third from 246 million in 2000.

Still, half or about 85 million child laborers are engaged in “hazardous work, dangerous to their health, safety or moral development.”

In the Philippines, there are some 3 million child workers—aged 5 to 17 years—almost all of whom are doing hazardous work.

According to the ILO, agriculture remains the sector with the most Filipino child laborers, but children also work in mines, on the streets, in factories, and in private homes as child domestic workers.

Developed in partnership with the Berlin-based Humboldt University, the FAO’s handbook offers “an easily accessible toolkit of research and data collection methods for assessing child labor in agriculture and the impacts that various types of development programs can have.”

Also, the FAO said its guide aimed to encourage the identification and use of good practices to prevent child labor.

Such practices include the promotion of labor-saving technologies while also offering practical advice on how to collect information to track the impact of child labor on school performance and health.