Children and women of the farming families including the tribal are being sold out because they are the poorest and most vulnerable. And the more that gets sold off, the more who get sold out, the greater the amount of cash that changes hands, the easier it is for the misinformed to swallow the deceit of bogus notion of ‘growth’, as we know as the GDP of a country. Inequality breeds this vulnerability for the poorest because nobody is present to protect their rights. I’m not despising… Look at India. Doesn’t the Nobel this year remind us that “India has 60 million child slaves”, of which, a Nobel is achieved for saving some 80,000 children, which isn’t just a proverbial drop in the ocean?
Before we realise it, the culture, politics and the economy of the countries having most slaves have become colonised by powerful private interests and the world is cast in their image. The prevailing inequality and the economic systems in those soon become cloaked with an aura of matter of factuality, an air of naturalness, which is never to be viewed for the controlling dominion culture or power play that it really is.
Persons, organisations and entities that are profiting from the slavery help maintaining the inequality status quo, and all achieving control by altering mindsets via advertising, clever PR or by sponsoring major global events, by funding research in public institutes and thus slanting findings and the knowledge paradigm in their favour or by securing key positions in international trade negotiations in an attempt to structurally readjust retail, construction, food production and agriculture etc. They do it by many methods and means.
The issue demands an answer but we perhaps know who the villain in the room is. Should we go on ponder through as to whether growth and inequality reduction go hand in hand or not, whether one has to be considered prior to the other, or whether a policy focus on inequality reduction weakens or strengthens the growth objectives of countries producing maximum number of slaves?
As always, there are two ways to look at these questions, if we go through the middle-of-the-road. One might first be tempted to discount recurring incantations that have little impact on actual policies and results in terms of inequality reduction and conclude that this is wasted time and resources at an era when growth concerns loom large all across the world and resource constraints call for demonstrable value-for-money. Or one might conversely consider that the legitimate frustration with insufficient results does justify more research and more debate (but no action), possibly differently, about the issues, because this is where value-for-money lies as the best way to go on learning about these unmet challenges and to help change mindsets and policy incentives and priorities, however slowly.
Always With a Smile 
Pingback: Inequality breeds vulnerability for the poorest to be in slavery | Always With a Smile