The following article appered in The Sunday Times on 23rd September: The ‘carbon offset’ child labourers, Indians work off West’s holiday guilt.
Extracts:
Pumping furiously on a foot treadle in the afternoon heat, six-year-old Sarju Ram is irrigating her impoverished family’s field, improving the crop and – without knowing it – helping environmentally sensitive holiday-makers assuage their guilt over long-haul flights to dream destinations.
But Sarju and her four brothers and sisters working flat out in a clump of trees that provide scant shelter from the sun illustrate a growing argument over claims that British environmentalists’ efforts to curb greenhouse emissions are inadvertently fuelling an increase in child labour.
Sarju’s family is a beneficiary of Climate Care, an organisation that helps some of Britain’s leading public figures and companies to offset their carbon dioxide emissions by funding sustainable energy projects.
Customers of British Airways are among those who have been encouraged to log on to Climate Care’s website and calculate how many tonnes of greenhouse gases their flights will generate, and how much it will cost to neutralise the impact on the atmosphere. A flight to Barbados for a family of four, for example, generates 7.55 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which will cost them £56.64 to offset.
Climate Care uses the money to help persuade families such as Sarju’s to give up labour-saving diesel pumps and buy human-powered treadles instead. It claims that by using the treadle, a family will save money on diesel and hire charges, earn more from increased crops and cut the carbon emissions that would have been produced by the pump.
Last week Indian experts criticised the scheme, saying it was promoting child labour and forcing poor farmers to work harder so that wealthy air travellers could enjoy exotic holidays without worrying about the environment.
“The problem is the number of times child labour is involved,” claimed Ashutosh Pandey of Emergent Ventures India, which advises companies on clean technology.
“It’s not being monitored properly. It’s not reducing emissions. People are selling their diesel pumps to others who are using them.”
Michael Buick, a spokesman for the Oxford-based Climate Care, confirmed that children were working the pumps it promotes, but said that people had to focus on the benefits to the whole family.
He said his group was proud of its scheme, which had led to more than half a million foot treadles being sold, and had won several awards. Four reports had identified major benefits.
According to Buick, critics are mistaken in claiming that diesel pumps are better than human-powered alternatives, because they are costly to run. The treadles meant farmers could rely on increased crops.
Buick said that by “all mucking in” families were able to increase yields and earn more to pay for children to go to school. The extra income also meant fathers could stay with their families rather than leaving them to look for work in the cities.
“If mum is planting and harvesting, the daughters help out. It’s just a different way of life. The phrase ‘child labour’ is emotive. It implies factories, but these are family farms where everyone gets stuck in, watering the crops and taking a turn on the treadle pump,” he said.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
This system is a disgrace.
Here are workers in developed countries using machinery to leverage the productivity of their labour. The industrial revolution, which led to our present levels of qwealth and prosperity introduced machinery to leverage labour and increase per capita productivity.
So they think it is OK to spend a little of their considerable wealth to induce workers in developing countries to forego the opportunity to leverage their labour, so that they can assauge their guilt.
By disposing of their machinery, and hence capping their upper limit on productivity, workers in developing countries take short term money for long term loss.
This is shameful.
The Australian government is spending very large amounts of money working with farmers in developing countries to learn to change agricultural productivity practices by using modern technology, and incorporating machinery to increase productivity. Ultimately this will lead to reduction in levels of poverty, with all of the cultural and community problems that this leads to. Problems such as people trafficking, child prostitution, stalled national development. I have worked in some of these programs, at the coal face.
Let the people flying in British Airways jets work off their guilt and carbon dioxide production by working manually themselves. It won’t be long till they give up the idea.
Shame.
Well, Pete,
Seems that the rabid global warmers don’t want to consider what happens “on the ground” with their policies.
The reason is, of course, they’re aiming elsewhere. At a global “planned ecology,” to replace the failed aspirations of the Soviet ‘planned economy.’
The global warmers don’t, and will never, give a rat’s ass about human welfare, and last of all will they ever so much as pretend to care about Africans.
Africans die quiet, since they can’t afford to join Greenpeace.
The average cow in Europe receives more government subsidies than the annual income of the average African. The greenie freaks don’t want to disturb this state of affairs.