Child Labor: Seeking Change For A 200-Year-Old Dilemma
By Alberto Barrera
Originally published by Reuters, June 29, 2002
CANTON SAN JUAN DE DIOS, El Salvador — Every morning during El Salvador's coffee harvest, 11-year-old Javier Martinez makes the trek up steep hillsides to pick coffee cherries and earn a little over $2 a day.
Like thousands of other children in this Central American nation, Javier needs to work to help support his family.
"I don't really have time to do anything like going to school," said Javier, a fifth-grader who has to work to support his single mother and 4-year-old sister. "Sometimes I go after the harvest is over."
Now local authorities and international labor organizations are working to change all that and put people like Javier back into schoolrooms and away from the plantations, perched thousands of feet above sea level.
The International Labor Organization rates the work done by children on coffee plantations as being one of the most dangerous forms of child labor, above the garbage, fishing, sugar and fireworks industries and even the sex trade.
Deep in the brush of Salvador's coffee plantations, children are exposed to everything from insect and reptile bites to chemical exposure and dehydration. Many suffer from back problems after carrying loads of coffee beans down treacherous slopes.
Local groups claim that as many as 350,000 children work in El Salvador, many of them in the coffee industry. The Economy Ministry has placed that figure closer to 222,000.
Children have been working the coffee fields in this country since the beans were first brought here about 200 years ago. Changing that tradition will not be easy.
"This is a cultural inheritance and it will not be easy to change, although we are trying," said Porfirio Pacheco, the director of the San Juan de Dios school, 53 miles west of the capital San Salvador.
The school serves about 350 children in the highland coffee region of Apaneca-Illamatepec, although the reality is that only some of those are able to attend classes.
The beginning of the school year, in January, comes at the peak of the region's coffee harvest, which runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30 and which keeps children away from classrooms for much of the time between November and February.
UNICEF says children contribute about $124 million to household income in El Salvador a year, each one bringing home about $46 a month.
Some students, like Jaime Erazo, 14, work only on weekends for the four- or five-month harvest and attend school on weekdays.
"The biggest problem is that children stop going to school to go and pick coffee," said Italo Cardona, who leads the International Labor Organization's international campaign to eradicate child labor.
He said the program aims to help provide support to families so that their children don't have to work, providing such necessities as school lunches and academic materials.
He said the program was not trying to undermine the industry, already assailed by a 3-year-old coffee crisis, by taking away its work force.
For children like Javier, though, going to school is not even an option.
But ask him what he wants to be when he's grown up, and he'll lay out the dream of any young boy: "A soccer player, so I can earn more money."
