ISEAL Alliance

By David Dudenhoefer

Rafael Melgar, general manager of the Santa Adelaida Cooperative, an organic and Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee farm in El Salvador’s Cordillera del Bálsamo, has seen life improve for young people in the area. “Before, children began working at a young age, and for low wages. They would lose their youth, unable to get an education, and would stagnate,” he said.

Melgar explained that the 860 hectare (2125 acre) Santa Adelaida Cooperative, which is owned and operated by 180 families that benefited from El Salvador’s 1980 agrarian reform, hasn’t hired anyone under 15 since the farm became Rainforest Alliance Certified in 1998. The cooperative has since introduced free day-care for workers’ children and coordinated with the charity Plan International to get scholarships for local students.

The changes at Santa Adelaida reflect a nascent trend in El Salvador, where the problem of child labour is finally being addressed by the government. According to Ada Lazo, who heads the Labour Ministry’s office for the elimination of child labour, 178,855 children were working in El Salvador in 2008, when the ministry conducted its last survey. She said the number has steadily decreased from 220,000 in 2001, when El Salvador became a signatory of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 138, which establishes a minimum age of 14 and restricts the jobs that workers aged 14-18 can perform.

Lazo admitted that El Salvador has a long way to go, noting that tens of thousands of children work in the country’s sugarcane and coffee industries alone. She said one of her allies in the battle against child labour on farms is SalvaNATURA, El Salvador’s leading environmental group and a member of the Sustainable Agriculture Network.

Since 1999, SalvaNATURA has been working with Salvadoran coffee growers to get their farms Rainforest Alliance Certified. Last year, its sustainable agriculture department came up with a seemingly childish, but effective way to educate farmers and parents about child labour – a comic book.

The comic book, which has the ungainly title of Good Work: a Guide to Best Practices Regarding Child Labour and Coffee Cultivation, is packed with colourful drawings that illustrate a conversation between two people as they walk though a Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee farm – the farm’s owner and her neighbour, whose farm has not been certified and who knows nothing about child labour regulations. As the two of them stroll past workers picking coffee and birds fly overhead, the owner of the certified farm explains why children shouldn’t work and how Salvadoran laws and the sustainable agriculture standard prohibit child labour and restrict the use of teenage workers.

“The comic book has helped us to get the message to some of the most remote corners of the country,” Lazlo said. “It speaks to people in an uncomplicated manner and lets them understand what we want to change.”

According to Guillermo Belloso, national coordinator of the biodiversity conservation in coffee project at SalvaNATURA and one of the comic book’s authors, the project grew out of conversations among SalvaNATURA staff and experts from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) about how to reduce child labour. “We all knew it was a tough issue,” said Belloso. “Not only do we need to educate the farmers, we also need to raise the awareness of workers.”

He noted that children have participated in the coffee harvest since the crop was introduced in El Salvador in the early 20th century. Coffee is picked by some of the country’s poorest citizens, who flock to the highlands during the harvest season, and because they are paid by the bushel, parents often want their children to help out.

Belloso explained that the sustainable agriculture standard – which farmers must comply with to get their property Rainforest Alliance Certified – prohibits them from hiring children younger than 15 and requires that workers aged 15-18 have written permission from their parents and work only when school is not in session, and then no more than six hours per day. The standard also prohibits teenage workers from carrying heavy loads, handling pesticides, or performing other jobs that could endanger them.

Belloso noted that whereas Santa Adelaida and the more than 300 other Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee farms in El Salvador have adopted the sustainable agriculture standard, many Salvadoran farmers continue to hire under-aged workers.  He added that even though a mere fraction of the country’s coffee farms are Rainforest Alliance Certified, they include some of its largest farms, so approximately ten per cent of all land planted with coffee in El Salvador is certified.

Belloso explained that child labour has long been a concern at SalvaNATURA, which also conducts scientific research, runs an environmental education program, promotes community tourism and co-manages two national parks with the government of El Salvador. As he and his colleagues investigated the subject, they realized that El Salvador’s child labour legislation was not only weaker than the sustainable agriculture standard, it didn’t even fully comply with ILO Convention 138. SalvaNATURA consequently participated in a work group with the Labour Ministry, the ILO, farmers and other stakeholders to provide suggestions for improving the law. The result was the Law for the Protection of Children and Adolescents, which was passed in April 2009 and goes into effect this April 2010.

SalvaNATURA produced the comic book in order to educate farmers about the new law and the sustainable agriculture standard. SalvaNATURA agronomists have distributed the booklets in one of the country’s main coffee growing areas and have given PowerPoint presentations with the same information to about 500 coffee farmers at training workshops.

Lazo said that SalvaNATURA’s efforts complement government outreach. She added that the growing momentum of such efforts has her optimistic that El Salvador will attain its goal of eradicating child labour by 2020.

“I believe that the comic book is spearheading efforts to reach people in rural areas,” said Lazo. “It raises awareness, it opens their eyes, and it will help us to eliminate child labour on the farms.”