Debt bondage
[2][4][5] The practice is still prevalent primarily in South Asia and parts of Western and Southern Africa, although most countries in these regions are parties to the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery.
[1][8] Important to both East and West Africa, pawnship, defined by Wilks as "the use of people in transferring their rights for settlement of debt," was common during the 17th century.
[15] Debt peonage was practiced as "an illegal form of contemporary slavery... well into the 1950s" in "Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and other parts of the Deep South."
Civil authorities would arrest "colored men off the street and in their homes if they were caught not working," charge them with vagrancy, assess fines equal to several weeks of pickers' pay, and compel them "to pick fruit or cut sugarcane to work off the debt.... Those captured were hauled to remote plantations ..., held by force, and beaten or shot if they tried to escape.
[19][20] In the 19th century, people in Asia were bonded to labor due to a variety of reasons ranging from farmers mortgaging harvests to drug addicts in need for opium in China.
[14] When a natural disaster occurred or food was scarce, people willingly chose debt bondage as a means to a secure life.
[14] A greater demand for labor was needed in Asia to power exports to growing industrial countries like the United States and Germany.
[14] Cultivation of cash crops like coffee, cocoa, and sugar and exploitation of minerals like gold and tin led farm owners to search for individuals in need of loans for the sake of keeping laborers permanently.
[23] Chinese-Moro mestizo historian Samuel Kong Tan wrote that on his home island of Siasi, the native Moro Muslims and Chinese had good relations.
As a matter of law, a person subjected to paramonē was categorically free, and not a slave, but in practice his freedom was severely constrained by his servitude.
[38] Solon's reforms occurred in the context of democratic politics at Athens that required clearer distinctions between "free" and "slave"; as a perverse consequence, chattel slavery increased.
Nexum was abolished by the Lex Poetelia Papiria in 326 BC, in part to prevent abuses to the physical integrity of citizens who had fallen into debt bondage.
[40] Roman historians illuminated the abolition of nexum with a traditional story that varied in its particulars; basically, a nexus who was a handsome but upstanding youth suffered sexual harassment by the holder of the debt.
[41] Cicero considered the abolition of nexum primarily a political maneuver to appease the common people (plebs): the law was passed during the Conflict of the Orders, when plebeians were struggling to establish their rights in relation to the hereditary privileges of the patricians.
Throughout the reign of Tsar Alexander II, Russia was dominated by reforms; Serfdom was abolished in 1861 after decades of subjection, granting over 23 million serfs their freedom as well as obtaining citizenship, marriage without permission, property rights along with business ownership.
Moreover, the outward urban migration of the population from rural areas only made this more difficult to achieve, with peasants enduring similar, albeit greatly reduced, hardship as a result.
[46] It has also been documented that many serfs remained heavily indebted, bound by their superior landlords, having acquired no significant liberty irrespective of the abolition reforms that were recently introduced.
[47] Regardless of the Tsar's intentions, some have argued that the emancipation enactment merely benefitted the landowners as an extension of the nobility, in that dedicated compensation secured for the aforementioned greatly overestimated market value of their property.
[50] Though the figures differ from those of the International Labour Organization, researcher Siddharth Kara has calculated the number of slaves in the world by type, and determined that at the end of 2011 there were 18 to 20.5 million bonded laborers.
[6] Bonded laborers work in industries today that produce goods including but not limited to frozen shrimp, bricks, tea, coffee, diamonds, marble, and apparel.
[14][55] Families, including children, work day and night to prepare the rice for export by boiling it, drying it in the sun, and sifting through it for purification.
[56] Additionally, this region includes Mauritania, the country with the highest proportion of slavery in the world as an estimated 20% of its population is enslaved through methods like debt bondage.
[56] The Environmental Justice Foundation found human rights violations in the fisheries on the coasts of South and West Africa including labor exploitation.
[64] Though the employers actively take part in accruing the debt of laborers, buyers of products and services in the country of manufacturing and abroad also contribute to the profitability of this practice.
The reason for this includes convoluted supply chain management that crosses many international borders, ineffective labor laws, corporates claiming plausible deniability, global political-economic restructuring and well-intended consumers.
This effort to eradicate modern day slavery resonates with well meaning individuals who purchase fair-trade items, hoping they are making a difference.
It persists nonetheless especially in developing countries, which have few mechanisms for credit security or bankruptcy, and where fewer people hold formal title to land or possessions.
India was the first country to pass legislation directly prohibiting debt bondage through the Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, 1976.
[70][71] In many of the countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Mauritania, and Ghana in which debt bondage is prevalent, there are not laws that either state direct prohibition or specify punishment.
[7] In addition, though many of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have laws that vaguely prohibit debt bondage, prosecution of such crimes rarely occurs.
