Global solution needed to eradicate human trafficking, says expert

By Micheline R. Millar

HUMAN TRAFFICKING today is a multi-billion dollar industry and a major human rights concern that requires the collective effort of the global community to be successfully eradicated, according to a senior official of the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

“The U.S. Justice Department ranks human trafficking as the third largest criminal enterprise worldwide, generating an estimated $9.5 billion per year in terms of profit,” the fund’s Executive Director Noeleen Heyzer said during a recent lecture on gender, migration and human trafficking, hosted by the Asian Development Bank.

Trafficking of persons includes prostitution, debt bondage, forced labor and slavery, and exploitation of children as workers, soldiers or sex slaves, said Heyzer. Data from the International Labor Organization show that the migrant population currently stands at 120 million, of which around 12.3 million are enslaved in forced or bonded labor or sexual servitude at any one time, she said.

The magnitude of the human trafficking problem facing the world today has prompted the Group of 8 countries to issue a communiqué identifying the phenomenon as the dark side of globalization, she said.

“Population movements, whether voluntary or forced, are not new. What has changed in our world today is the regulation, as national borders and their control are tightening. Those who fail to meet entry criteria become illegal, giving rise to people smuggling and trafficking. And this has in turn increased the involvement of organized crime,” she said.

Heyzer traced the dramatic growth in migration and trafficking flows to so-called “push and pull” factors. Push factors would include uneven economic growth, war and armed conflict, natural disasters, high levels of gender inequality, and family violence. Prosperity and stability in medium and high growth countries and regions act as pull factors creating increased demand for imported labor in what Heyzer termed as the “global workplace.”

Migrant workers are cast under two categories: highly skilled professionals demanded by the new global economy and technologies; and the much larger group composed of semi-skilled and unskilled workers willing to take low wages, insecurity and dangerous work, said Heyzer.

“We need to understand and realize that many people are not sharing in the benefits of globalization,” she said, noting that despite the expanding global economy, the concentration of wealth remains with a few. “The figures I have is that the richest 2% of the global adult population today owns half of global wealth, whilst the bottom half of the world’s population in fact owns barely 1%,” she lamented.

The Asia Pacific region is an example of such lopsided distribution of resources, said Heyzer. The region includes countries with some of the world’s highest growth and some of the worst poverty, the highest human development with some of the deepest and greatest exploitation and deprivation, she pointed out.