Human Costs of the Tumult

Posted April 3, 2009
Updated April 22, 2009 

Listen to a special podcast about human trafficking with David Feingold from UNESCO

Last year, a Cambodian trafficking broker convinced Chhon Khao to illegally work abroad. “He told me he could find me any job in Thailand,” says the 29-year-old, who comes from a farming family in Takeo province, two hours outside of Phnom Penh. Mr. Chhon crossed the border at Poipet where he was promised a wage of up to 6,000 baht (about $170) per month to work on a Thai fishing boat. He never saw a penny. After two men on the boat were shot and thrown overboard because they were too sick to work, Mr. Chhon and his fellow laborers pleaded in vain with the Thai captain to let them go back to shore. Starved, beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with weapons for two months, Mr. Chhon finally managed to escape.

Each year, around the world, millions of men, women and children are trafficked and exploited as forced or bonded laborers in factories, fisheries, fields, streets and brothels as part of a business that is raking in more than $30 billion in profits annually. Southeast Asia, where an estimated 200,000 to 450,000 people are trafficked each year, is a major hub for this thriving underworld.

As the global financial crisis begins to take hold in the region, experts predict a marked increase in human trafficking.  Both the supply of desperate workers from source countries and the demand in destination countries for cheap and easily exploitable laborers are growing. These are the darker consequences of the global crisis that governments should not ignore. Failure to address human trafficking now will ensure a worsening humanitarian crisis, which could negatively impact domestic security and become an impediment to the region’s development in the long run.

Human trafficking, as defined by the United Nations, is the recruitment, transfer or harboring of persons by means of coercion for the purpose of exploitation. Often, as in Mr. Chhon’s case, the initial migration is voluntary but based on false pretexts by brokers, recruiters or potential employers. Many times, the victim is unaware of the situation that awaits him or her in the destination country. Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical advisor for the U.N. Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (UNIAP) cites a 2008 study of Cambodians deported from Thailand, which shows that in 52% of the cases where Cambodians held jobs in construction or manufacturing, the worker ended up in an exploitative situation. Poverty, the lack of social-safety nets and gaps in economic wealth are among the many factors that drive workers from the poorer nations in the Mekong region to seek better opportunities in neighboring Thailand, which has an estimated 1.5 to 2.5 million illegal migrants living within its borders. The country’s per capita GDP is 12 times, seven times and 5.5 times higher than that of Burma, Cambodia and Laos, respectively. Porous borders also make it especially easy for low-wage laborers to enter Thailand illegally.

The big question now is whether or not the economic downturn will make an existing human-rights crisis even worse. Some would argue that shrinking demand for labor in certain sectors in destination countries will mean fewer opportunities for migrant workers. In other words, a shortage in jobs will alleviate levels of human trafficking. In Thailand, as a result of the current economic downturn, hundreds of factories and projects have closed, leaving thousands of workers—both Thai and non-Thai—without jobs. Unemployment is rising at a rate of about 100,000 workers a month, and may climb to 1.5 million by the end of the year.

But these figures do not tell the whole story. Some of the demand-side alleviating forces are not as strong as they initially appear. While demand for factory workers in certain sectors, such as manufacturing, may be on the decline, demand for labor in  the dirtiest and most dangerous industries—usually left to trafficked labor—may not shrink as quickly. “Most people come to Thailand to fill the jobs that Thai people don’t want to do, such as those in fisheries or rubber and orange plantations,” says Ratirose Supaporn, the information officer for Save the Children’s Regional Cross-border Project Against Human Trafficking and Exploitation. The country’s fishery industry, the Nation newspaper reports, is currently suffering from a 10,000-position labor shortage. “Thai people will be laid off, yes, but they will look for jobs that are [more suitable] for them,” says Ms. Supaporn. 

Moreover, the incentive for obtaining exploitable labor becomes greater during financially strenuous times. When there is a depreciation of income levels, consumers look for the lower-priced version of the same product. In an economic crisis, firms want “docile and cheap” labor, says David Feingold, a human-trafficking expert at UNESCO. And when the demand for this kind of labor increases, “there is a good chance there will be an increase in demand for trafficked labor.”

At the same time, increasing unemployment and the sudden evaporation of basic wage income in source countries are creating a greater supply of workers ripe for exploitation. “The logic is quite straightforward,” says Matt Friedman, regional project manager at the UNIAP. “You have factories closing, you have people losing their jobs. If enough people lose their jobs then you all of a sudden have a pool of people who are more desperate than they would ordinarily have been. That allows for brokers and traffickers to exploit them,” he says.

Cambodia, for example, is expected to have the sharpest decline in growth in the East Asia region between 2007 and 2009, according to a report released by the World Bank in 2008. More recently, the International Monetary Fund revised down its 2009 GDP growth prediction for the country to minus 0.5% from 4.9%. This kind of contraction in a developing nation that had been growing at 13.5% in 2005 will have devastating effects on the country’s working poor. The most vulnerable sectors are those that are highly dependent on exports and foreign direct investment. In the garment sector alone, more than 62,000 jobs were lost between April 2008 and October 2008, according to the Ministry of Commerce in Cambodia. Fallout from declining demand for exports is also impacting other sectors, such as construction, as local demand from exporting firms for the building of factories and offices declines.

The situation has become dire for low-income Cambodian workers. Mr. Chhon has vowed never to return to Thailand, but he may be the exception. Even those who know the risks are now thinking about going back. UNIAP recently followed up with three young men living outside of Siem Reap who had escaped from Thai fishing boats when some were still under the age of 18. Today, they break rocks to sell to construction sites near their home, and were making around $7.5 a week to support their families. But construction work on the roads outside of Siem Reap has dried up. And even though migration was disastrous the last time, they are contemplating giving it another shot because they don’t see any alternatives. “This is a dangerous thing,” says Ms. Supaporn of Save the Children, when you have “the risk of death but you have to take it because you don’t have anything to do at home.”

These powerful supply-side forces, most experts believe, will ultimately exacerbate levels of human trafficking. The most convincing evidence comes from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which also saw major job losses in the manufacturing, finance and tourism sectors. Facing sudden poverty, many migrants at the time paid brokers to take them to work sites where they would work for a quarter of their normal wages and often in poor health. Siddharth Kara, a board member of Free the Slaves, an NGO based in the United States, argues in his recent book, Sex Trafficking, that during that period, the sudden increase in rural poverty in the Mekong region—a consequence, he says, of the IMFs interest-rate policies and cuts on social-welfare programs—led to a mass migration from the hills of rural Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia into urban centers such as Chiang Mai and Bangkok. There, desperate migrants were exploited in factories, construction sites and brothels.

States and Solutions

The consequences of failing to address the human-trafficking crisis now are significant. If exploitation is allowed to flourish unchecked, organized crime groups may move in to control this business in the Mekong region—where, currently, traffickers are often opportunistic individuals working in unstructured networks. Without major deterrents, budding criminal syndicates will “vertically integrate the entire process of acquisition, movement and exploitation of slaves. Such activity with organized crime networks is certainly more prevalent in Europe, but as the response in Asia remains so anemic, their activity is increasing in the region,” says Mr. Kara.

In the long-term, the region’s ability to tackle human trafficking and other social injustices will determine the kind of image it projects to investors looking for a transparent labor system, not one overrun by criminal networks and corruption.

Left unchecked, human trafficking could hinder overall development in the region. The illegal human trade, which tends to prey on the poorer populations in the region, destroys communities and weakens crucial human capital in developing areas already suffering from a dearth of sustained development, says Mr. Kara. This in turn further exacerbates poverty and erodes the value of broader antipoverty initiatives.

As Southeast Asia scrambles to bring economic and political stability to the region, a clear leader on countertrafficking efforts has yet to emerge. The most obvious candidate to take the lead on this issue in the Mekong region is Thailand. As a destination country with better capacity and more available resources relative to its neighbors, Bangkok’s dedication to this campaign is imperative. NGOs and intergovernmental agencies (IGOs) can only do so much in terms of advocacy and awareness-raising. But in the end, governments need to take responsibility because, at its core, human trafficking is a criminal activity.

Yet here, as in other parts of the region, there is a yawning gap between what needs to be done and what is being carried out. True, the Thai government has made some progress on this issue in recent years. In 2004, it along with five other countries in the Greater Mekong Subregion signed a memorandum of understanding, drafted by a multinational task force, which established a shared work plan for countertrafficking efforts. And in the last year, Thailand has also revised its legal definition of human trafficking to include men. But overall, Bangkok’s efforts to address this issue leave much to be desired.

Despite changes in law, indifference or lack of understanding of those laws at the enforcement level have rendered them ineffective. One of the many barriers is the lack of funding for proper training of police forces. Another is alleged corruption at all levels of law enforcement. Yet another is a system that discourages exploited workers to testify against their offenders. Witness-protection programs are weak and victims who do decide to testify in court are sometimes kept in Thailand for months or even years. As a result, prosecution and conviction rates for traffickers have remained dismally low. For thousands of trafficking victims, Thailand only manages to convict a few dozen traffickers each year.

Governments in the region need to be more proactive about figuring out where the worst exploitation is taking place and then going after those sites. “Then you’re addressing the root of what allows trafficking to have life,” says UNIAP’s Mr. Friedman. Yet in much of the world, the reaction to human trafficking is generally passive., with an emphasis on only addressing the issue when a victim comes forward, he says.

But at this point, chances that the Thai government will up enforcement measures or implement new intelligence projects are slim. Plagued with its own set of deep economic and political woes, Thailand’s counter human trafficking initiatives have been put on the back-burner. “The current government has two urgent priorities: making sure Thailand survives the financial crisis and securing political stability,” says Patchareeboon Sakulpitakphon, a representative of End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).

This has had a significant impact on ECPAT’s ability to carry out initiatives. Before the 2006 military coup, the organization had been collaborating with the Ministry of Tourism on creating a National Plan of Action to address the issue of child sex tourism. But the entire process stalled soon after the ouster of the Thaksin administration. “No government official wanted to do anything long term because they were unsure of the country’s political future,” says Ms. Patchareeboon. Now, concerned with protecting the tourism industry during this economic crisis, the Ministry of Tourism has also been reluctant to restart the process, she says.

In some areas, the current government under Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is going backwards on the issue. In recent months, changes in policy have made foreign migrants even more vulnerable. In a bid to save Thai jobs, the government announced in February its intention not to register any new, foreign migrant workers and to deport those who are working in Thailand illegally. Such policies could have an exacerbating effect on human trafficking, considering that the inability to access legal means of migration is one of the problem’s root causes.

Although the efforts of individual countries are important, escalating levels of human trafficking and other crossborder issues of economic migrants underscores the region’s interconnectedness and suggests the need for concerted regional responses. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, is perhaps best suited for helping with crossborder issues and policy decisions at a high level. The so-called Bali Process, which stemmed from a ministerial meeting in 2002, was an attempt on the part of Asian nations to jump start cooperation on combating human trafficking through information sharing, border protection and a discussion of ways to tackle the root causes of illegal migration. Yet, critics claim that Asean, now approaching the 42nd anniversary of its founding, has been ineffective in addressing the illegal human trade and other human-rights abuses.

This year, the treatment of the Rohingya boat people once again highlighted the need for a more serious consideration of the underlying causes of human trafficking and the factors that drive people to foreign shores, namely persecution and the lack of economic opportunities in origin countries. There is some hope, however, that Asean will be more proactive on human-rights issues in the future. The association’s 14th summit, which took place earlier this year, was its first under a new charter it adopted in December 2008 that stipulates the setting up of a human-rights body.

In a written response, the office of Prime Minister Abhisit states that as a source, destination and transit point, Thailand should continue to play a leading role in counter-trafficking efforts. The office also writes that "if human trafficking, as a scourge with multiple dimensions and linkages to organized crime, thrives, it will add on to other crimes in the region and build up the insecurity of the region, which will be counter to the aims and objectives of Asean. It will hinder economic development and destroy the societies of region, as well as the strong Asean community we hope to build."

But while Asean has started to recognize social concerns in the region, the road to achieving improved human rights is a long one. Countries in the region are currently concentrating on tackling economic issues, but that does not mean they should forget about social ones. In the long run, only regional cooperation can tackle the kinds of horrific exploitation experienced by migrant workers like Chhon Khao and ensure that thousands or even millions more will not suffer the same fate. 

Janis Foo is a Princeton-in-Asia fellow at the REVIEW.