“Nearly 30 million people across the world are currently living in slavery, according to a report published Thursday. The inaugural Global Slavery Index, compiled by the Walk Free Foundation, estimates the prevalence of slavery in 162 countries, based on both internal research and data from UNICEF and the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report. According to the report (PDF), slavery is most prevalent as a percentage of the population in Mauritania, Haiti, and Pakistan.
India, China, and Pakistan are among the countries where slavery is most prevalent in absolute terms; together with Nigeria, Ethiopia, and five other countries, they account for more than 75 percent of the world’s enslaved population.
[Lila: Well, India and China and Pakistan are the most populous countries, so that would stand to reason.]
Walk Free was founded last year by Andrew Forrest, an Australian billionaire who made his fortune in the mining industry. Its index has received endorsements from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“I urge leaders around the world to view this index as a call to action, and to stay focused on the work of responding to this crime,” Clinton said in a statement provided to the Associated Press.”
Nobody would excuse the crushing problem of child-labor or the sex-trade in India.
But let’s take a closer look at these figures.
Here’s a piece on the sale of children, in Salon magazine.
The sale of children runs to 90,000 per year, it reports.
That is roughly 1/10th of a million or 1/100th of a billion. The Indian population is about 1.5 billion, so that means it’s about .05 percent of a billion.
Now that is bad enough, but given the whole complex of social ills, the vast size of the population and the general poverty of the country, I don’t find these figures terrible at all.
Indeed, I’d say they are far lower than I would expect.
In any case, when you see Rothschild entities behind a global drive, one has to be very cautious. When you have Bill Gates, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, and the Australian billionaire behind WalkFree, Andrew Forrest, be sure there is something else at work.
Look at the statistics behind the headlines.
While the newspaper I just cited headed its story responsibly and didn’t create the impression that India and China have the greatest problem with enslavement of people (i.e. proportionate to their populations), the rest of the Rothschild media was less cautious.
Here are two headlines:
“Revealed: India is home to half of the world’s nearly thirty million slaves” (LA Times)
Lila: Since India is home to about a 1/6th, if not 1/5th, of the world’s population (roughly 1.5 billion) and since it is home to more than of the world’s impoverished who are naturally desperate to work in any circumstance, in that context, the numbers are far less alarming.
15 million or so is only about 0.1% of the population.
Compare that to Mauritania’s 20% of the population.
Remember that in terms of per capita income, India is not there much ahead
of sub-h
ran Afria. In that context, the rates of domestic servitude (the correc
erm)aret
ltha t
raordiny.
Also, what is being included in the term slavery?
All of the following:
1. Debt bondage
2. Forced labor of men, women, and children
3. Forced marriage
4. The sex trade
5. Bonded labor.
6. Forced beggary.
This last is a horrible thing.
Young children are kidnapped and then mutilated and forced to beg. Giving them money only makes their exploiters greedier and more likely to kidnap another child, but not giving them money might end in the child starving. Besides, the child is forced out on the streets alone, so there’s no knowing who’s behind it.
But how many kidnapped children are there?
The report notes “by far the largest proportion of this problem is the exploitation of Indians citizens within India itself, particularly through debt bondage and bonded labour.”
The whole piece is quite misleading, in that it is lumping low-wage labor ($33 a month) in homes in the same category as the child-sex trade.
$33 a month in a country is about Rs. 2000/mth (or Rs. 24000/yr), which, while it isn’t high is certainly not starvation wages, especially since most homes also give the servants free medicine, free supplies, food, and a place to stay. Indian per capita income is nearly Rs. 6000/mth (roughly Rs. 68000/yr) or about three times that wage.
America’s per capita income is around $ 42,000/yr, so the equivalent figure in the US would be about $14,000/yr or something less than $2000/mth (versus Rs. 2000/mth for Indian “slave wages.”)
The Indian figures might have a different purchasing power, but are they really that startling?
Many professionals made that amount only a few decades ago.
The only problem is thanks to rampant money printing, the Indian rupee is at all time lows against the dollar. For that, and for the dreadful economy, the globalist “privatization” of the economy, coupled with hijacking of the financial system, is to blame.
But the propaganda is all part of the on-going psychological warfare against India, specifically, about which I blogged at and here and here, and against immigrants (see “Patrick Buchanan sings the white man’s blues”).
“”Although other countries have a greater proportion of their population in bondage, India’s estimated 13.9 million enslaved people is by far the greatest, more than four times that of the next largest country, China, with 2.9 million. Pakistan ranked third with 2.1 million people. The 162-nation survey found that modern-day slavery exists in most countries in some form, including the United States, Canada, Japan and Western Europe nations.
Much of the traffic in enslaved Indian domestic workers is organized by dubious employment agencies that are virtually unregulated despite an order from the Delhi High Court that mandated the government to set operating guidelines.”
So, there it is. The labor is UNREGULATED and that’s what’s got the globalists worried. The cheap pool of labor competes with the labor available to the multinationals and makes home-grown businesses a threat. I daresay that’s the real motivation behind this new-found interest by the power elites in domestic labor in India.
Meanwhile, what are the stats about slavery in the West?
“At the other extreme, Iceland was estimated to have just 100 slaves for a population of 320,000. And even though Canada and Western Europe ranked low on the survey, they are still home to thousands of slaves, while the U.S. had an estimated 60,000 and Japan around 80,000.”
So Iceland, the best country, has 100 per 320,000, which amounts to 1 in 3200, which is about 30 times fewer, true, but in a country whose GDP is also roughly 30 times higher.
The US at 60,000 in a country of over 300 million is at 1 in 3000.
Relative to the rates of literacy, the GDP, and the other social problems in the country, I don’t see the Indian numbers as all that remarkable at all, although still a horrendous tragedy.
Simultaneously, the NY Times on Oct. 6, 2013 had a piece about sex-trafficking in India:
“Persistent poverty is a major factor. Many vulnerable women and girls are lured by promises of employment, and some parents are desperate enough to sell their daughters to traffickers. Rapid urbanization and the migration of large numbers of men into India’s growing cities creates a market for commercial sex, as does a gender imbalance resulting from sex-selective abortion practices that has created a generation of young men who have little hope of finding female partners. India’s affluence is also a factor, luring European women into India’s sex trade. The caste system compounds the problem. Victims of sex trafficking disproportionately come from disadvantaged segments of Indian society.”
I would dearly love to know exactly how many European women are in this Indian sex trade.
This is of dubious significance and likely inserted as racial baiting.
The number s for global sex-trafficking can be found here.
They run at 4 million world-wide; in the US at 45-50,000 annually (about 1 in 6000); at about 200,000 sex-workers in cities in India (that is about 1 in 7000, which is lower than the US numbers.
Moreover, these numbers have vastly swelled since the liberalization of India in the 1990s, when the influx of multinational corporations created a huge migration from the villages to the cities, with all the attendant problems. Add to these, the vast difference in pay between foreign-employed and locally-employed or unemployed youth, the burden on the infrastructure by this huge migration, rampant corruption not simply in the government but in the private sector, and you get the picture of a country undergoing huge economic stresses. Such stresses usually exacerbate social problems.