The UN’s sustainable development goals call for an end to child labor by 2025, yet an official at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says “child labor is mostly concentrated in agriculture and is growing,” reports Inter Press Service, which focuses on “the global South.” The FAO official, Bernd Seiffert, speaking on the sidelines at a Buenos Aires conference on child labor, said, “While the general numbers for child labor dwindled from 162 million to 152 million since 2013, in rural areas the number grew: from 98 to 108 million.
The conference was headlined by a discussion of children in global supply chains. Seiffert said the majority of boys and girls work in food production. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi said children are used “because they are the cheapest labor force.” In many cases, children are an unpaid part of family farming in regions where the government has little impact.
An FAO expert on social policies, Junko Sazaki, said the introduction of better seeds and farming practices would improve family incomes and reduce the need to rely on children for help. “It is common for children to be exposed to pesticides that can affect their health,” she said.