The Chain of Trafficking:
Supply and Demand

Madam Chair, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The International Organization for Migration greatly appreciates
this opportunity to address this Conference, and wishes to extend
its thanks to the Governments of Belarus and the Philippines as
well as Vital Voices and UNODC for organizing this important
event.  Today’s conference being part of the Global
Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking and Slavery, we wish to
express our hope that this Initiative will be led by a coalition of
Organisations with expertise in the fight against trafficking in
persons such as IOM and others.

As we all know, the feminization of international migration is a
major emerging trend in the field of migration, and that nearly 50%
of the world’s migrants are now women. Many women today
migrate independently of their families to pursue opportunities of
their own, rather than those of their husbands and children only,
and this we should applaud as evidence of the greater autonomy and
self-determination enjoyed by increasing numbers of women the world
over. But while we are encouraged by this general empowerment of
women through migration, we must be conscious that migration also
has a darker side that disproportionately affects women by as much
as 80%. Human trafficking is one of the great scourges of our time.
It ensnares and enslaves hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
people every year, and inflicts on its victims devastating and
often irreversible physical and mental health trauma. Contrary to
the commonly-held view that it is a relatively new phenomenon, the
origins of human trafficking can be traced back at least several
centuries, and despairingly credible comparisons of scale and
suffering may be drawn with the transatlantic trade in Africans in
the Americas in which more than 12 million people were forcibly
transported over the ocean in four hundred years. It is to our
great shame that if today’s statistics are correct, and 700,
000 people are now being trafficked across borders into slavery
annually, we will have equalled that total in a mere 20 years.

I generally prefer to speak of the many positive aspects of
international migration, but I will address, today, this
contemporary form of slavery which feeds on the vulnerability of
women and girls, as well as men and boys, with a specific focus on
the mutually-supporting pillars of supply and demand that hold
together the chain of human trafficking. Suffice to say, human
trafficking has been with us for far too long.

But before discussing supply and demand specifically, I think it
is important that we all share the same understanding of human
trafficking, as it is often confused with other forms of irregular
migration. To paraphrase from the Palermo Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and
Children, human trafficking is the action of recruiting and
transporting people by means of deception, or force for the purpose
of exploiting them. To concretize this definition, I would like to
share an example of trafficking from my own continent that captured
the attention of former South African President Nelson Mandela:

Saartjie Baartman was a twenty-one year old South African Griqua
woman employed on a farm near Cape Town. She was already past the
traditional age of marriage among her people, and had few, if any,
prospects of improving her condition. When a visiting English
surgeon, Dr. William Dunlop, promised her fame, fortune, and
freedom in a far away land, Baartman readily accepted his offer,
and traveled with him, by ship, to London in 1810.

What awaited her in London was neither fame, fortune nor
freedom; the doctor had had something quite different in mind.
Fascinated by her physiology, which differed from that of Europeans
at the time but was common to people of the Cape, Dunlop exhibited
her to large crowds of Londoners, and later, Parisians, who paid
one shilling each to gawk at the crudely-labeled “Hottentot
Venus” from Africa.

Whether Baartman herself received any of the profits of her
exploitation is doubtful, and after her novelty had worn off in
Britain and France, she was abandoned and left to fend for herself
without family or friends, or the linguistic and cultural tools
that she needed to survive in Europe. She died only six years after
leaving Cape Town, at which point her body was dissected, her
skeleton was removed, and her organs preserved and displayed in the
Musee de l’Homme in Paris for the next 160 years.

Sadly, Saartjie Baartman’s experience of recruitment and
transportation by means of deception, for the purpose of her
exploitation for her trafficker’s profit, is one that is all
too common for hundreds of thousands of women, men and children
today. Typically lured by promises of well-paying jobs, marriage,
or educational opportunities abroad, many people are easily seduced
by the attractive offers made by agents of criminal networks
without realizing the full nature of their future employment, or
the conditions in which they will work. Once firmly trapped within
an illegal migration environment, or otherwise disoriented and
disadvantaged by their foreign surroundings, they are controlled
most commonly by violence or threats of violence, either to
themselves or their friends and family members, by unconscionable
contracts and debt arrangements, or by having their identity
documents withheld – all to facilitate their exploitation for
the benefit of their traffickers.

Regrettably, there is a tendency by some to consider a
trafficked person naïve. How, you might ask, can someone be so
easily duped, especially with the abundance of information
campaigns and similar initiatives to raise public awareness of this
crime in many parts of the world? Surely she should have known
better! But if we look beyond this easy stereotype, we find a human
being looking for employment, just like many of us here today have
done from time to time. When you are looking for work, you ask your
friends and colleagues, you scan the newspapers and websites, you
make phone calls, send applications, and subject yourself to
interview. Many trafficked persons do the same. They may also sign
what appear to be bona fide employment contracts, and otherwise
make reasonable decisions based on the information available to
them. How many of us here, when looking for work, call chambers of
commerce to confirm the existence of a prospective employer? Double
check with embassies to verify what the employer has said about
immigration and work permits? Insist on purchasing your own airline
ticket when the employer has offered to pay? Or interrogate the
contract beyond the basics of salary, benefits and duration? Very
few, I suspect. Trafficked persons are, on average, no more
trusting or gullible than any of us here, so why, we ask, are so
many people trafficked?

The traditional response to this question has been to look at
source countries for the root causes of human trafficking, and
characterize as root causes issues such as poverty; economic
deprivation and lack of opportunities; gender discrimination;
perhaps political upheaval or instability. But are these really the
roots of human trafficking? Are poverty and gender discrimination
so much more prevalent today than ever before that they are the
causes of a corresponding, and exponential, growth in the trade in
human beings? No. Whereas poverty and other circumstances
constitute vulnerability factors that put individuals at risk for
being trafficked, the fact that many people are poor before being
trafficked does not make poverty the cause of trafficking, nor is
poverty even a necessary condition for trafficking to occur. Also
telling is that so many people who were seeking better
opportunities prior to being trafficked would not otherwise have
been considered impoverished. Although poverty, gender
discrimination, and political upheaval can create vulnerabilities
in origin countries, they are only important contributing factors,
rather than root causes, of human trafficking today.

Unfortunately, this misallocation of root causes has encouraged
us to focus our counter-trafficking efforts disproportionately on
the supply end of the human trafficking chain. As with the
international drug trade, which is one of the other global criminal
enterprises of similar scale with which we are engaged, we tend to
focus on source control to combat human trafficking. For over ten
years now we have discussed, and in many instances implemented,
awareness raising campaigns and income generation projects
targeting vulnerable groups in source countries; the establishment
of protection mechanisms that provide everything from legal
frameworks to medical, psychosocial and reintegration support;
training of law enforcement and judiciary and so forth. All
certainly worthy activities which have, in many cases, produced
significant results. But to me the litmus test of our success in
combating human trafficking is measured by the answer to the
following question: Over the past ten years, have we significantly
decreased the scale of the problem? Given the complexities of
compiling data to measure global trends, the answer is not certain,
but the indications are that human trafficking is as widespread
today as it was ten years ago. From a practical perspective, with
the supply so plentiful, cheap, and unrestricted to any country or
region, it may be very well impossible in the short to medium term
to break the human trafficking chain at source. So rather than
focusing so intensely on the supply end of the trafficking chain,
let us instead look to the other end, at the demand for labour and
services in destination countries.   This was one of the
themes addressed at last October’s Conference on Cooperation
between Source and Destination Countries on Trafficking in Persons
organised by the Government of Belarus and IOM in Minsk.  A
report prepared for that conference is available here today, and I
take this opportunity to congratulate the Government of Belarus on
its efforts and achievements in combating human trafficking.

We are seeing today, along with globalization, a major shift in
demographics. Aging populations and falling birthrates in many
industrialized countries are combining with population growth and
an oversupply of labour in developing countries. New labour markets
open as service industries and employment opportunities are
established in new places. In most cases, economic growth has not
been matched by the evolution of migration policies that are able
to facilitate and satisfy this demand. While trade barriers fall to
facilitate the freer movement of goods, services, and capital,
which in their turn create employment opportunities, migration
policies have generally become more restrictive and rigid. It is
this tension between the intense demand for labour and services on
the one hand, coupled with too few legal migration channels on the
other, that creates opportunities for intermediaries. When the
demand is for cheap labour and cheap services specifically, the
human trafficker steps into the breach. A recent statement by the
Alliance Expert Coordination Team, of which IOM is a member along
with key intergovernmental agencies and several NGOs, noted that
the demand for labour and services in sectors that seem
particularly prone to exploitation - such as construction,
agricultural and food processing, domestic and care work, hotels
and hospitality - is for employees who are invisible, unprotected,
excluded, vulnerable and disempowered. The AECT statement also
indicates that several of these sectors, particularly those that
are labour intensive, might not survive without cheap and
unprotected labour. Is this, then, the reason human trafficking
persists? Is it because many destination countries may be reluctant
to take decisive action that might destabilize certain sectors of
their economies? Perhaps, as Moisés Naïm notes in his
book, Illicit, in failing to enforce existing labour laws,
“…the current de facto policy in effect provides
government subsidies in the form of tax and social security
payments waivers to industries employing millions of [so called]
illegals”.

Why is there so often an apparent disconnect between our words
and our actions in relation to this problem? While some countries
have been quick to draft legislation and plans of action to combat
trafficking, which is a necessary step, they still threaten
compulsion or deportation of trafficked persons who are reticent
about assisting in the investigation and prosecution of their
traffickers. Others have generously funded prevention activities in
source countries -- and this is to be commended -- but have been
slower to extend protection of labour laws to migrants within their
own borders. To be clear, I am not suggesting that too much
attention has been paid to the supply side of human trafficking.
Not at all. In fact, it is critical that we attempt to prevent
human trafficking at its source. But I do believe that the
attention we have given to supply is disproportionate because the
root causes of human trafficking are more likely to be found on the
demand side of human trafficking - specifically, in the willingness
and capacity of some employers in destination countries to pay for
exploited labour, and the unwillingness or incapacity of some
governments to protect migrant labour.

The debate about the root causes of human trafficking, and
whether they lie more with the supply at source or with the demand
at destination, will not wait for consensus and resolution.
Destination countries can, and should, act now to:

• Ensure that informal and unregulated work activities are
  brought within the protection of labour laws so that all workers
  enjoy the same labour rights;
• Encourage the creation of ethical employer associations which
  will adhere to codes of conduct that guarantee protection of the
  rights of its workers, regardless of origin;
• Develop guidelines and public awareness campaigns to assist
  consumers in identifying goods and services that have not been
  produced through exploitative and forced labour.

While these are examples of actions that destination countries
can take unilaterally, there are also areas for cooperative
intervention between source and destination countries, and between
intergovernmental agencies, and here we return to the field of
migration management. There is a clear need for opening and making
accessible more legal channels of migration in order to balance the
demand for labour and services with the supply. This is
increasingly taking place through bilateral agreements, and when
coupled with a strong legislative framework and inspection system
of recruitment mechanisms in the source country, and access by
migrants to the protection of labour laws in the destination
country, there is a good chance of squeezing the trafficker out of
the process. I’ll provide here just a few examples of good
practices in this area:

Under an overall Government of Canada programme, IOM assists
employers’ associations in Quebec in recruiting seasonal
agricultural workers from Guatemala. We also facilitate the travel
of Colombian workers to Spain. Italy has had quotas for migrant
workers for some time, and IOM is currently providing pre-departure
orientation and training to migrants in Sri Lanka and Moldova.
Korea is another for which we assist in recruitment abroad, and IOM
has established information campaigns in Belarus, Bulgaria,
Croatia, Kazakhstan and Moldova to inform their nationals how to
access available jobs safely in the Czech Republic. These
programmes have targeted both women and men, but there is certainly
room to increase the focus on developing safe and orderly labour
migration programmes specifically for women who, after all,
constitute approximately half of the world’s migrants and
often end up exposed to work in informal, unregulated, unprotected
and often illegal sectors.

International organizations also need to do more to coordinate
their activities and ensure a holistic approach to
counter-trafficking. In this regard, I am pleased to note the
progress made in the creation of the Inter-agency Cooperation Group
Against Trafficking in Persons (ICAT) in Tokyo, Japan, in September
2006. ICAT members, which consist of IOM and its UN partners,
agreed to: establish a platform for the exchange of information,
experiences and good practices; ensure comprehensive implementation
of existing international instruments and standards of relevance,
and; promote effective and efficient use of existing resources that
draw on the comparative advantages of ICAT members and, using, to
the extent possible, existing regional and national mechanisms. We
wish ICAT much success in this new venture.

It goes without saying that all migrants – as human beings
– have the right to basic protections, and with this I will
conclude. Although there is considerable variation in the profiles
of trafficked women and girls, as well as men and boys, and in the
profiles of their traffickers, the tactics used to recruit,
transport, and exploit victims remain similar and eerily
reminiscent of the transatlantic slave trade which has been so
unreservedly condemned. But it took a multi-pronged approach to
condemn the transatlantic slave trade to the dustbin of history,
and included, significantly, the enactment and enforcement of
legislation that prohibited the owning of slaves in destination
countries. When the demand for slaves collapsed in the Americas, so
too did the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps there is a lesson
for us here. By ensuring the rights of migrants, and enabling them
to earn decent pay and enjoy decent working conditions, their
productivity will contribute to the host country’s economy as
well as to that of the country of origin where a considerable
portion of the earnings are likely to be sent. In short, this kind
of migration management environment would benefit both the migrant
and society, which is the goal to which IOM aspires.