LETTER TO THE EDITOR Malnutrition, Poverty, and Climate Change Are Also Human Rights Issues in Child Labor

摘要

Athena Ramos’s paper “Child Labor in Global Tobacco Production: A Human Rights Approach to anEnduring Dilemma” highlights the critical issue of human rights for working children, especially thoseworking in hazardous tobacco farming, where agriculture is intricately connected to global business interests.1 The author includes an extensive review of the literature on child labor in tobacco farming and thehuman rights that are ignored in, as she writes, “an almost invisible population,” particularly children whoare part of the “invisible underclass, perpetuating the cycle of poverty.”I would like to highlight two further issues that should be considered in the discussion of child labor intobacco and other large-scale industrial monocropping: the first is the relationship between child workers’malnutrition and poverty, and the second is the impact of climate change on agriculture and livelihoods.Focusing the discussion here on Malawi (the case used by Ramos), we see a tobacco-dependent country thatis the world’s sixth-largest tobacco producer and that earns 60% of its GDP from tobacco farming—a cropthat, in some quarters, is promoted as a solution to poverty.