This video on CNN talks about slave usage in the
shrimp and tea industries, specifically in Bangladesh. Because the oceans have
been rising, many of the rice farms in Bangladesh were flooded but fortunately
for the farmers, they found that because they were flooding and the tides were
coming in, they were bringing more shrimp into the areas. Farmers can make a
lot more money harvesting shrimp than they can rice so many have begun to
harvest shrimp instead. Unfortunately, getting all of the shrimp is labor
intensive and many of the farmers have started using slaves to do the work and
exploiting the workers.
There has also been a use of slaves in
the tea industry for a longer amount of time. They said that on some of the
plantations, the people that were slaves there, had multiple past generations
that had been slaves there. They said that it was a vicious cycle and the slaves
earn so little that they basically have zero chance of ever making it off of
their farms.
The slave usage in the shrimp
industry in Bangladesh is fairly recent so it is not as widespread as in the tea
industry, where the usage of slaves has been going on for hundreds of years.
The conditions of the slaves are horrible also. People of all ages are slaves;
children, teenagers, adults, and elders. Sometimes the hours are so long and
exhausting that people are found randomly sleeping places because they were so
tired they just collapsed. They also only get paid maybe fifty cents to a
dollar fifty for working a twelve to eighteen hour day.
Considering America’s slaves were
freed in the 1860’s I found the fact that there still are slaves to be surprising.
I suppose this is a bit naive but when something like this was outlawed almost
a hundred and fifty years ago, it just tends to become an out of sight out of
mind phenomenon I guess.
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