Why Conservatives should Engage in Climate Change Policy: Combatting Human Trafficking and Child Marriage (1/2)

by Catalina Margarita Udani, ACWPS Fellow

Setting aside disagreements about the causes of climate change, conservatives can be a powerful voice in policy debates about its effects on the family.

In a small, hot conference room in the middle of Dhaka, I listened in a language I did not understand to six young women and men explain to me how they had been trafficked. I needed translation for their Bangla, but when they addressed me in English, they described themselves as both survivors and activists, ready to tell their stories and warn others of their ordeals. When survivors paused to gather their breath, or to hold the hand of their friends beside them, the blare of gridlock traffic in the streets outside punctuated the silence in between.

Their experiences were both unique and frighteningly similar: Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and Dhaka the world’s most densely populated city. The country swells with desperate job seekers left behind by the changing economy, and its agricultural sector, which employs nearly half the country’s population, faces environmental crisis after crisis, from rising sea levels and water salinity destroying fields and fisheries to intensifying cyclones battering the coast. Young people flock to the cities, to the borders, and to employment agencies that send them far overseas. Some find themselves unpaid, locked in quarters packed with others, their passports confiscated by their employers, often beaten—or worse—enslaved, by every modern definition. The survivors I spoke to were the rare few who had found help.

Human trafficking and climate change

When I spoke to a slew of international humanitarian NGOs across the city, organizations that had been watching these crises unfold for decades, they described ever more forms of human trafficking. In rural villages across the country, nearly all of which are agricultural economies, families who had been doing the same work for generations were increasingly falling into poverty as the environment failed them. The rising Bay of Bengal, combined with poor infrastructure, erodes low-lying cropland. Increasing salinity kills the country’s many shrimp farms and fisheries. Farming and fishing families find themselves in intractable poverty, and many increasingly see their daughters as an economic solution.

Each of the organizations told me the same story: child marriage is increasing due to climate change. Rural families are forcing their daughters into marriages, often before their teens, to alleviate the financial burden female children place upon families that are no longer able to sustain their agricultural work. Though child marriage is illegal, 51 percent of girls in rural Bangladesh are married before they turn eighteen, and 16 percent of all women in the country are married before they turn fifteen. Only one step away is forced prostitution. Many young women and girls in these communities are prostituted to support their destitute families.

Though social taboos and Bangladesh’s limited infrastructure make it difficult to estimate the prevalence of human trafficking and its various forms, including child marriage or forced prostitution, the organizations I spoke to were adamant: trafficking is on the rise, particularly in traditionally agricultural populations, and climate change is a driving factor. Bangladesh is not alone. Roughly 2.5 billion people, or a third of the world’s population, depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. Up to 80 percent of the population of the world’s low-income countries still depend on agriculture for employment. These populations are incredibly vulnerable to any climate hazards, either slow-onset changes over decades or natural disasters. Research abounds on predictions of the negative effects of a changing global climate on the world’s agriculture, and the data show that the frequency of natural disasters is on the rise. Rural villages like the hometowns of some of the trafficking survivors I met—dependent for generations on farming or fishing—don’t stand a chance. And as government capacity in low-income countries to improve agricultural development, provide education, and direct young people to alternative employment is limited, we will see waves of yet more urgent job seekers willing to go to any lengths to provide for their families. Many may find themselves enslaved.

In my next post I will examine the way conservatives are weighing in—especially to combat human trafficking and slavery.

Catalina “Mica” Udani is a Fellow at American Council on Women Peace and Security, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on empowering and protecting women, their families, and communities. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania...

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