Fertile Fringes: Population Growth Near Protected Areas

“Protected areas are the backbone of biodiversity conservation strategies,” so it is critical to examine how population growth is affecting them, said Justin Brashares of the University of California, Berkeley, at “Fertile Fringes: Population Growth at Protected-Area Edges,” an October 22, 2008, meeting sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP). “Biodiversity conservation objectives are being impacted by higher deforestation rates, [natural resource] offtake rates, [and] increasing pressure on the protected area” due to high local population growth, explained George Wittemyer of Colorado State University. Brashares and Wittemyer, who recently co-authored an article on population and protected areas in Science, were joined by Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau.

To Stay or To Go?

“Many of the protected areas that we have today in sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America are carryovers of areas set aside by colonial governments,” said Brashares, “and for many researchers and for many communities, the creation of parks is seen to come at the cost of local communities.” Yet certain features can encourage people to move near protected areas, including:

• Services made available by foreign assistance, such as health care, education, and livelihoods programs;
• Employment opportunities as park staff or in the tourism industry;
• Better ecosystem services, including food, water, wood, and traditional medicine;
• Easier access to markets, due to roads built to attract tourism; and
• Improved security provided by park guards and government staff.

Other features of protected areas deter migrants, including:

• Land-use restrictions;
• Conflict with wildlife (e.g., attacks on livestock and crops);
• Disadvantages associated with tourism, including higher cost of living and potential loss of cultural heritage;
• Isolation from urban centers; and
• Conflict with park staff, government representatives, or rural militias.

Higher Population Growth Near Protected Areas

Brashares and Wittemyer examined IUCN Category I and II protected areas in Africa and Latin America—which limit human activity within their boundaries—and excluded potentially confounding urban, marine, and new parks. Using UN Environment Programme population data from 1960-2000, they compared population growth in a 10-kilometer “buffer zone” surrounding each protected area with average rural population growth for that country. In 245 of the 306 parks they examined—and 38 of the 45 countries—population growth at protected-area edges was significantly higher than average national rural population growth.

Brashares and Wittemyer found three factors correlated with higher levels of population growth: more money for parks (as measured by protected-area funds from the Global Environment Facility); more park employees; and more deforestation on the edges of protected areas. Brashares emphasized, however, that there could be equally relevant correlations between population growth and employment in extractive industries, but that “the timber industry won't give us their data and the mining industry and the oil industries aren’t so happy to share.” Thus, the study might inadvertently penalize NGOs and international organizations for their transparency.

Some researchers hypothesized that because protected areas are usually located in ecologically dynamic areas, this ecological wealth might be attracting new residents, rather than the protected areas themselves. But Brashares and Wittemyer found that proximity to a protected area, not general ecological abundance, was driving the trend. Others suspected that population grows at protected-area edges because the people who have been displaced by the creation of a park move to the park’s border. But population growth rates within the parks have been mostly stable or positive, so Brashares and Wittemyer doubt this is driving the trend.

Implications for Conservation

Brashares and Wittemyer outlined several policy implications of their research:

• Emerging infectious diseases are a serious risk in areas with high human density close to wildlife populations, so governments and international organizations should try to limit potential outbreaks near protected areas.
• If the effectiveness of a protected area is measured by its ability to preserve biodiversity for generations, then community development programs must be executed carefully. For instance, roads and schools should not be built in an ecologically fragile corridor between two parks.
• Multi-use buffer zones that make core areas less accessible can allow individuals to continue to benefit from their proximity to nature while protecting biodiversity. “Some of the best protection of biodiversity is through isolation,” said Brashares.

Bremner took issue with some of Brashares’ and Wittemyer’s methods and conclusions; his full critique is available on the New Security Beat. Although Bremner agreed that migration—not natural increase—is likely driving higher population growth around protected areas, he believed the authors did not provide adequate evidence to demonstrate that this migration is driven by investments in conservation. “I hope that publishing this conclusion here in Science doesn't provide our detractors, those who don't want us to be spending on conservation, with the means to limit future spending for international conservation,” said Bremner.

Photo: Justin Brashares. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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Field Trips: Success Stories from PHE Programs in Kenya, DRC, and Madagascar

People in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) cut down trees “not because they want to destroy the forest, but because there is a lack of energy” and jobs, and they need the wood to make charcoal to use for themselves and to sell for income, explained Dario Merlo of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Community-Centered Conservation program in the DRC (DRC-CCC). Merlo was joined by Janet Edmond of Conservation International (CI) and Sam Weru of the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Eastern African Marine Ecoregion Programme at the October 23, 2008, event “Field Trips: Population-Health-Environment Projects in Kenya, DRC, and Madagascar,” the sixth meeting in the “PHE: Building the Foundation for the Next 10 Years” series sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.

Improving Health, Conservation, Livelihoods in an Insecure Region

According to Merlo, charcoal production, illegal mining, poaching, and ongoing conflict have converged to create a punishing environment for conservationists in Landscape 10, a 50,000-square kilometer region in eastern DRC that is home to 90 percent of all eastern lowland gorillas, 80 percent of the country’s intact forest, and the largest headwaters in the Congo basin. Nevertheless, the DRC-CCC program has successfully promoted environmentally sustainable economic development; stronger local governance; and access to health care, including family planning.

For instance, a micro-hydroelectric power plant in Kasugho village—backed by the DRC-CCC and built and maintained by local residents—has increased energy security, generated sustainable jobs, and reduced pressure on the surrounding forest. To support alternative livelihoods, the DRC-CCC program has also invested in agriculture and livestock and purchased equipment for the 300 community eco-guards and park rangers who patrol approximately 40 percent of the surrounding forest. In addition, the program has provided training for health care workers and has refurbished formerly defunct clinics.

The DRC-CCC program uses radio to reach rural audiences with its conservation and family planning messages. “These people in remote places,” said Merlo, “when they are working they listen to radio, walking, everything they do, they listen to radio…it helps us to spread the conservation messages, but also the family planning aspect.

Healthy Communities Lead to Healthy Environments

“People on the forefront [of conservation] need to be healthy…in order to be able to accomplish conservation,” argued Edmond. “Our main objectives are to reduce population pressure on natural resources and the environment,” she said. “We do that by providing access to family planning, reproductive health services,” as well as other basic health services often lacking in rural communities. CI has partnered with local health and development NGOs to bring these services to rural communities in areas of high biodiversity in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Madagascar. Meanwhile, CI has achieved its conservation targets by promoting sustainable livelihoods like agroforestry and improved rice production, as well as by rehabilitating habitats by planting trees. “We really built the capacity in the community—in the people—to be, basically, our agents of change. They're the ones who are integrated. Now they know how to do the family planning, the health, the conservation,” said Edmond.

A Dose of a Vaccine, a Dose of Conservation

“Although we protect marine turtles on our side of the border, they are butchered across the border” in Somalia, explained Weru—one of the many challenges stymieing conservation efforts in the Kiunga Marine National Reserve on the northeastern coast of Kenya. Other threats include the growing global demand for fish, unsustainable mangrove harvesting, use of illegal fishing nets, and oil and gas exploration.

In Kenya, WWF has combined its conservation programs with efforts to meet local needs in order to generate goodwill and build healthier communities that are better prepared to manage their natural resources. By initiating mobile health clinics, WWF has vaccinated children and expectant mothers, while at the same time spreading the message of conservation. “You’d get a dose of your vaccine, and then you also get a dose of the science of conservation,” Weru quipped.

WWF implemented a fishing-gear exchange program to reduce the incidence of illegal gear; improve fishermen’s income by using legal, larger mesh nets that catch bigger fish; and bolster the health of the environment. WWF has also supported beach cleanup by creating programs where local residents turn flotsam like flip-flops into art—in some instances increasing household income by US $130 per month.

“By and large, the conservation world is practiced by biologists, and therefore we may not know how to deal with changing peoples’ behaviors and attitudes,” Weru said. To be truly effective in implementing a PHE program, “you need skills beyond the biological, the ecological skills—you need social skills.” 

Photo: Sam Weru. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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United Nations Observes International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict

Each November 6, the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict passes by, largely unnoticed. But as the UN General Assembly noted in 2001 when it gave the day official status, “damage to the environment in times of armed conflict”—including poisoning of water supplies and agricultural land; habitat and crop destruction; and damage resulting from the use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons—“impairs ecosystems and natural resources long beyond beyond the period of conflict, and often extends beyond the limits of national territories and the present generation.”

In a written statement issued today, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon points out that although natural resources are often exploited during war, they are also essential to establishing peace:

The environment and natural resources are crucial in consolidating peace within and between war-torn societies. Several countries in the Great Lakes Region of Africa established trans-boundary cooperation to manage their shared natural resources. Lasting peace in Darfur will depend in part on resolving the underlying competition for water and fertile land. And there can be no durable peace in Afghanistan if the natural resources that sustain livelihoods and ecosystems are destroyed.

As the Development Gateway Foundation’s Environment and Development Community emphasizes, “[e]nvironmental security, both for reducing the threats of war, and in successfully rehabilitating a country following conflict, must no longer be viewed as a luxury but needs to be seen as a fundamental part of a long lasting peace policy.”

Some of the United Nations’ most important contributions to illuminating the links between conflict and environmental degradation are the excellent post-conflict environmental assessments that the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Disasters and Conflicts Programme has carried out in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Sudan, among other countries. UNEP is currently preparing to conduct an assessment of Rwanda’s environment.

Photo: A Kuwaiti oil field set afire by retreating Iraqi troops burns in the distance beyond an abandoned Iraqi tank following Operation Desert Storm. Courtesy of Flickr user Leitmotiv.

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Support Grows for Integrating Environment, Energy, Economy, Security in U.S. Government

A new presidential administration always gives rise to a certain amount of bureaucratic restructuring. But for months now, momentum has been building behind the notion that governments need to improve the integration of their environmental, energy, economic, and security policies. Last month, Edward Miliband was named head of the UK government’s new department of energy and climate change. Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper tapped former industry minister Jim Prentice to lead a new ministry of environment, economy, and energy security. “I think that, as more and more countries are coming to realize, we cannot separate environmental and economic policy,” said Harper.

Yesterday, Grist’s David Roberts, noting that responsibility for addressing climate change is currently spread among the departments of State, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Energy, offered several possibilities for restructuring the U.S. government to improve its ability to address climate change and energy, including creating a cabinet-level Secretary of Climate; expanding and empowering the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency; or—my favorite—appointing “some kind of czar,” because “[e]verybody loves a czar.”

Initiatives linking these challenges are popping up in Congress, universities, and the military. Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) frequently speaks of the interrelated challenges of energy, environment, security, and economic growth “[O]ur addiction to foreign oil is a threat to our economic security, environmental security, and national security,” he said last year. The University of Colorado Law School recently established the Center for Energy and Environmental Security, which develops practical solutions to help move the world toward a sustainable energy future. In addition, the 2008 National Defense Strategy explicitly links energy, environment, and security: “Over the next twenty years physical pressures—population, resource, energy, climatic and environmental—could combine with rapid social, cultural, technological and geopolitical change to create greater uncertainty.”

A few small-scale initiatives to integrate environmental, economic, energy, and security policies within the U.S. government already exist. Yesterday, Carol Dumaine, deputy director for energy and environmental security at the Department of Energy, delivered a talk at the Harvard University Center for the Environment where she discussed a fledgling project to use unclassified data and a global network of experts in government, industry, and NGOs to identify interrelated environmental and energy security threats. Dumaine presented on the same project at a September 2008 conference on open-source intelligence sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will continue this and other ongoing projects, or instead launch new projects of its own on these issues.

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Guest Contributor Jason Bremner: Probing Population Growth Near Protected Areas

Justin Brashares and George Wittemyer’s recent article in Science, “Accelerated Human Population Growth at Protected Area Edges,” presents data showing that average population growth at the edges of protected areas in Africa and Latin America is nearly double average rural population growth in the same countries. The authors argue that this phenomenon is due to migration, as people from surrounding areas are drawn to the health-care and livelihoods programs made available to people expelled from the parks.

It’s not news that high population growth rates have implications for conservation, both in terms of land-cover change and biodiversity loss. Yet at last month’s World Conservation Congress, I heard scarcely a mention of population growth or other demographic factors. So I appreciate that the authors are urging us to look at this aspect of conservation. In addition, by studying a large number of countries and protected areas, their work helps move our thinking beyond the inherent limitations of case studies focused on a single protected area.

I feel obligated to take issue with a few of the authors’ assumptions, methods, and conclusions, however. For instance, the authors compare growth rates for individual protected areas with national rural rates, and find the former are significantly higher in the vast majority of cases. I wonder why they don’t make the comparisons with the rural population growth rates for the region the protected area is located in, since that seems as if it would make for an even more compelling argument.

My second issue is a note of caution regarding gridded population data. The creation of a gridded population layer depends both on the size of the population data units and the way in which the population is distributed. Given the inherent inaccuracies in this process at detailed levels of analysis, how can we be sure that the populations for the 10 km “buffer areas” surrounding the protected areas are accurate? Is there any way to validate these data, and how would errors impact the authors’ analysis? This issue is particularly important because rural areas tend to have large administrative units and sparse populations.

My third issue is with the authors’ examination of infant mortality rates as a proxy for poverty. The authors analyzed poverty in an attempt to determine whether poverty-driven population growth was informing their result; they concluded it was not. Measures of infant mortality are notoriously poor at the local level, and the authors need to go further in assessing what portion of growth is due to migration and what portion due to natural increase. While such an analysis would take time, it is necessary, given the documented high fertility in remote rural areas.

Despite my reservations about how the authors came to their conclusion, I tend to agree that migration is driving higher population growth in areas of high biodiversity and around protected areas. The reasons for migration, however, are diverse, and my fourth issue is that I don’t think the authors provide adequate evidence to demonstrate that conservation investments are driving migration to these areas. My three main reasons for taking issue with this finding:

1. The number of protected areas in the world has grown rapidly over the last 40 years, and they are generally located in sparsely populated areas. During this same period, the populations of most African and Latin American countries have doubled at least once. Thus, people have migrated to new frontiers—often near protected areas—seeking available agricultural land.
2. Extractive industries—including timber, mining, oil and gas, and industrial agriculture—often provide lucrative jobs near protected areas. These jobs offer migrants far greater economic benefits than the meager amounts spent on conservation. Tourism is likely the only industry than can compete with these industries in attracting migrants, and only in areas with high numbers of visitors.
3. The correlations the authors found between population growth and Global Environment Facility spending and population growth and protected area staff could, as the authors note, simply mean that conservationists are wisely spending their limited dollars on the protected areas facing the greatest threats.

Based on these points, I must disagree with the authors’ conclusion that international donor investment in conservation could be fuelling population growth. I hope that publishing this conclusion in a high-profile journal like Science won’t provide detractors with the means to limit future spending for international conservation.

Jason Bremner is program director of the Population Reference Bureau’s Population, Health, and Environment Program.

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Reading Radar-- A Weekly Roundup

In “Who Cares About the Weather?: Climate Change and U.S. National Security” (subscription required), Joshua Busby argues that although advocates have overstated some of climate change’s impacts, it nevertheless poses direct threats to conventional U.S. national security interests, and therefore deserves serious consideration by both academics and policymakers.

An article in the Economist examines the melting Kolahoi glacier, which could soon threaten water supply and livelihoods in the Kashmir valley.

“Marauding elephants in northern Uganda have added to the challenges faced by civilians trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of 20 years of civil war, destroying their crops and prompting some to return to displaced people’s (IDP) camps they had only recently left,” says an article from IRIN News.

In an EarthSky podcast interview, Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado, Boulder, discusses her work researching how HIV/AIDS affects families’ use of natural resources.

Payson Schwin of the World Resources Institute recently interviewed Crispino Lobo of the Watershed Organization Trust about his work helping rural Indian villages escape poverty by managing their natural resources sustainably.

A research commentary from Population Action International explores family planning trends in Pakistan, as well as the relationships between demography and security in this critically important country.

Despite—or perhaps because of—its extremely high population density, Rwanda has launched a series of initiatives to protect its environment and reduce poverty, reports the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Population Reference Bureau has released two new policy briefs examining population, health, and environment issues in Calabarzon Region and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.

Stalled Youth Transitions in the Middle East: A Framework for Policy Reform proposes changes to education, employment, and housing that would offer Middle Eastern youth additional opportunities. “Young people in the Middle East (15-29 years old) constitute about one-third of the region’s population, and growth rates for this age group are the second highest after sub-Saharan Africa,” say the authors. “Today, as the Middle East experiences a demographic boom along with an oil boom, the region faces a historic opportunity to capitalize on these twin dividends for lasting economic development.”

An October 2008 brief from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs uses examples from Africa and Latin America to explore ways to ensure that non-renewable resource revenues contribute to sustainable development.

Video is now available for “Breaking Barriers: Family Planning, Human Health and Conservation,” a session at this month’s Conservation Learning Exchange conference in Vancouver.

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Cutting Liberian Conflict Timber’s Destructive Impact on Stability, Sustainability

Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor, a Liberian environmental activist and 2006 Goldman Environmental Prize recipient, was recently named one of Time magazine’s 2008 Heroes of the Environment for his work uncovering the illegal export of Liberian conflict timber. In 2003, Siakor exposed the illegal timber trade orchestrated by Liberian President Charles Taylor and successfully lobbied the UN Security Council to ban its export in an effort to halt the destruction of one of the “last significant virgin forests in West Africa” and bring an end to the devastation that violence and poverty were wreaking upon his country.

Taylor relied heavily on the timber industry to “export logs and import guns, financing several internal and external conflicts during his six-year presidency,” said Global Witness director Patrick Alley at a 2005 Wilson Center event. Exotic timber proved to be an easily exploitable and profitable natural resource, generating “upwards of $20 million of annual revenue—roughly 25 percent of its GDP,” said Scott Bode of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Taylor is currently on trial in The Hague for war-crimes charges linked to his role in the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone.   

In 2005, presidential hopeful Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf adopted forest conservation and poverty alleviation as central policies, and when she was elected, she signed Executive Order #1, which canceled all timber concessions. “The importance of that one act to Africa’s ecology is difficult to overestimate,” Alex Perry writes in Time, as Liberia's forests, which cover nearly 12 million acres, play “an important role in the battle to slow climate change.” 

Siakor continues to promote conservation and poverty alleviation in Liberia through his organization, the Sustainable Development Institute of Liberia. “In terms of biodiversity conservation, Liberia’s forests are quite critical. We have some of the rarest species of plants and animals in that region,” he said in a 2006 interview with National Public Radio.  In addition, millions of impoverished people depend on the land for their livelihoods, so conservation is often “about saving lives and defending those most vulnerable to economic exploitation,” Siakor told Time, emphasizing the need to look at conservation “from a human perspective.”

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PODCAST - Wouter Veening on Environment-Security Linkages

Environmentalists from around the world gathered in Barcelona from October 5-14, 2008, to discuss issues impacting a sustainable world at the World Conservation Congress. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko interviewed Wouter Veening, co-founder and chairman of the Institute for Environmental Security (IES) in The Hague, following his discussion of “Environment and Security Challenges for Change.” In this podcast, Veening discusses the impact of climate change on traditional security threats and the global implications of failing to effectively address this issue. Dabelko analyzes related environment-security links in a chapter in IES’s Inventory on Environmental and Security Policies and Practices, as well as in numerous Grist dispatches from the IES 2004 Hague Conference on Environment, Security, and Sustainable Development.

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Rebels Overrun Government Troops in Eastern DRC; Thousands Displaced, Including Virunga's Gorilla Rangers

Renegade General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters seized Virunga National Park headquarters at Rumangabo on Sunday, overtook the town of Rutshuru yesterday, and continue to advance on the regional capital of Goma, facing little resistance from either Congolese government troops or MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force. Thousands of local residents have fled the fighting, including 53 gorilla rangers who were in the park when it was taken by Nkunda’s rebels. Twelve of the rangers made it back to the relative safety of Goma today, after more than two days dodging bullets in the forest with no food or water, but the rest remain missing. Almost nothing is known about the condition of the park’s mountain gorillas, which represent half of the world population of 700.

The last time the rebels controlled the park’s Gorilla Sector, in March 2008, they set up a parallel gorilla tourism industry, charging tourists to view the gorillas. They were blamed in the killings of 10 mountain gorillas in 2007.

Approximately 4 million people died because of conflict in the DRC between 1998 and 2004, mostly due to war-related disease and starvation. The latest spasm of violence threatens to lead to a similar pattern; in the camp in Goma where the families of gorilla rangers have been living for the past several weeks, there has already been a cholera outbreak. Medical supplies and emergency services are nearly nonexistent, as many UN and NGO staff have been evacuated.

In Congo: Securing Peace, Sustaining Progress, Anthony Gambino, former director of USAID’s DRC mission, provides an incisive analysis of the problems plaguing eastern DRC and the country as a whole, and outlines policies the United States and its allies can implement to help strengthen security, tamp down on corruption, boost economic growth and alleviate poverty, and protect DRC’s globally significant environmental resources. For more insight into the tensions between the needs of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in eastern DRC and the need to preserve the natural resource base upon which they all depend, listen to this recent podcast interview with Richard Matthew of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. 

Photo: As a result of heavy fighting in the nearby Masisi mountains, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people gather in refugee camps outside Goma. Courtesy of Flickr user cyclopsr.

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Prostitution, Agriculture, Development Fuel Human Trafficking in Brazil

Modern-day slavery, also known as human trafficking, is the third most lucrative form of organized crime in the world, after trade in illegal drugs and arms trafficking. Today, 27 million people are enslaved—mostly as a result of debt bondage. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns found that Brazil is the third-largest source of human trafficking in the Western hemisphere, after Mexico and Colombia. According to the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2008, 250,000-500,000 Brazilian children are currently exploited for prostitution, both domestically and abroad. NGOs estimate that 75,000 Brazilian women and girls—most of them trafficked—work as prostitutes in neighboring South American countries, the United States, and Europe.

In addition, notes the Trafficking in Persons Report 2008, 25,000-100,000 Brazilian men are forced into domestic slave labor. “Approximately half of the nearly 6,000 men freed from slave labor in 2007 were found exploited on plantations growing sugar cane for the production of ethanol, a growing trend,” says the report. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the “agricultural states of the north, like Piaui, Maranhao, Pará and Mato Grosso, are the most problematic.” Agriculture and development have also been linked to sex trafficking. A 2003 study by the Brazilian NGO CECRIA found that in the Amazon, sexual exploitation of children often occurs in brothels that cater to mining settlements. The study also highlighted the prevalence of sex trafficking in regions with major development projects.

In response to growing awareness of the magnitude of this problem, the Brazilian Ministry of Justice has stepped up its efforts to combat human trafficking, adopting the ILO and UNODC’s “three-P” approach: prevention, prosecution, and protection. Prevention measures in Brazil focus on sexual exploitation, the most common type of forced labor for trafficked Brazilians. These measures include educating vulnerable populations about avoiding human trafficking, as well as drawing tourists’ attention to criminal penalties under Brazilian law for patronizing prostitutes.

Prosecution efforts in Brazil are also improving: In 2004, Brazil ratified the Palermo Protocol (pdf), the main international legal instrument for combating human trafficking. A year later, the country adopted a National Plan to Combat Human Trafficking, which aims to train those responsible for prosecuting traffickers and protecting victims—primarily police and judges. In addition, notes the Trafficking in Persons Report 2008:

The Ministry of Labor’s anti-slave labor mobile units increased their operations during the year, as the unit’s labor inspectors freed victims, forced those responsible for forced labor to pay often substantial amounts in fines and restitution to the victims, and then moved on to others locations to inspect. Mobile unit inspectors did not, however, seize evidence or attempt to interview witnesses with the goal of developing a criminal investigation or prosecution because inspectors and the labor court prosecutors who accompany them have only civil jurisdiction. Because their exploiters are rarely punished, many of the rescued victims are ultimately re-trafficked.

The U.S. Department of State established a four-tiered assessment system to rate countries’ compliance with international trafficking mandates. In 2006, Brazil was listed on the Tier 2 Special Watch List, the second-worst rating, despite recognition that the government made “significant efforts” to combat human trafficking. Brazil recently moved into the Tier 2 category, however, due to more concerted interagency efforts, as well as greater compliance with international guidelines. Yet one wonders whether Brazil will be able to achieve Tier 1 status any time soon, given the Brazilian government’s focus on biofuel- and agriculture-fueled economic growth and the fact that the global financial crisis is likely to drive people into increasingly desperate economic straits.

By Brazil Institute Intern Ana Janaina Nelson.

Photo: A poster warns African women of the dangers of human trafficking; Brazilian women are subject to similar dangers. Courtesy of Flickr user mvcorks.

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