The Relationship between Poverty and Exploitation

According to the UN, poverty is the severe and intense deprivation of “basic human needs,” including (but not limited to) sanitation, safe water, food, general health, access to information, and educational opportunities. For this reason, poverty, while income-related, has just as much to do with a lack of access to necessary services like schools and medical care.  Based on this definition, the connection between poverty and exploitation is not a difficult one to trace.

Developing or third-world nations are frequently at the center of debates regarding poverty-based exploitation, debates that usually focus on the role these countries play in the global economy.  Economically depressed countries frequently become the site of manufacturing facilities, built by Western-based multinational corporations, seeking to lower costs.  These operations are referred to as “sweat shops” because of the harmful working conditions and excessively long-hours workers face. In addition, these companies frequently commit human rights violations, exploiting workers with unsafe and potentially fatal working conditions.

Another exploitive industry born out of poverty is human trafficking.  Human trafficking recruits, transports, transfers, harbors, or receives persons by means of threat, force, coercion, deception, abduction, and/or fraud.  According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), some 2.5 million people are victimized by human trafficking each year.  Sexual exploitation is the most common form of human trafficking (79%) followed by forced labour (18%).  The rise in human trafficking has been sourced to poverty in three ways.  First, the past 30 years have seen a rapid, unchecked population increase without corresponding economic opportunities.  This has created a global labor market flooded with desperate and impoverished people.  Second, is modern agriculture.  Factory farms dispossess traditional farmers; this forces already poor farmers into debt.  Because rural communities are already known for poverty based upon lack of educational opportunities and information, this makes dispossessed agricultural families targets for trafficking.  Last, changes in the global economy have given rise to the development of organized crime.  Organized crime is the primary perpetrator of human trafficking, and its strength and development result from (as well as create) the weakening of social values that once acted to protect even the most vulnerable members of at-risk communities.