World Cup location will also feature human trafficking!

human trafficking at World Cup
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REUTERS, 20/05 17:10 CET

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Roman Catholic nuns backed by Pope Francis on Tuesday raised the alarm over increased risks of human trafficking, exploitation of workers, forced prostitution and sexual tourism at the soccer World Cup in Brazil next month.

The nuns, whose campaign is also backed by the U.S. embassy to the Vatican, announced an international campaign called “Play in Favour of Life – Denounce Human Trafficking,” on the risks they say will be associated with the June 12 – July 13 tournament.

“We need to make people conscious of what happens on the margins of big world events such as the FIFA World Cup and the suffering of those who are trafficked,” said Sister Carmen Sammut, a Maltese nun and one of the campaign organisers.

“Without this awareness, without acting together in favour of human dignity, the World Cup finals may turn out to be a terrible shame instead of a feast for humanity,” she told a news conference at the Vatican.

Sammut said the initiative had the full backing of Pope Francis, an avid Argentine soccer fan who has called several conferences at the Vatican to study ways of combating human trafficking.

Sister Gabriella Bottani, an Italian nun who works in Brazil, said human traffickers and others took advantage of large events like the World Cup to exploit the most vulnerable.

She said young people from the countryside are lured with the promise of a job and forced into prostitution. Children in rural areas may be kidnapped and taken to cities hosting the venues and forced to beg.

Others who are already being exploited as sex workers may be forced to move to one of the 12 venue cities because they would be more profitable to their pimps.

In countries like Brazil, she said, large events could also give rising to kidnapping for adoption. “It is amazing how so many forces of evil can converge to cause so much harm against human freedom.”

The nuns said statistics showed that sexual exploitation rose 30 percent in connection with the World Cup in Germany in 2006 and 40 percent at the World Cup in South Africa in 2010.

The nuns will be raising awareness of the dangers of human trafficking and other crimes connected to the World Cup through their blog http://gritopelavida.blogspot.com.br/, their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/jogueafavordavida and other social media.

Volunteers will be handing out leaflets in cities in Brazil and other Latin American countries, warning of human trafficking and how to spot it. Several demonstrations are planned.

Catholic nuns have for years been in the front line in the fight against human trafficking.

They have formed the International Network of Consecrated Life Against Trafficking in Persons, known as Talitha Kum (Little Girl, Arise), a phrase in Aramaic taken from the Bible. It has members in more than 30 countries.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

euronews provides breaking news articles from Reuters as a service to its readers, but does not edit the articles it publishes.

Copyright 2014 Reuters.

-I may not advocate religion, but I do despise human trafficking to it’s core and will support any organization that can keep even one person from being taken into slavery! 

Hows about we stop ignoring this and do something?

I drifted thru this ambiguous world of trying to make a living and avoiding mom’s boyfriends!

I’m sorry for acting like I had no beef against the established god.  I had learned to be a fundamentalist from my mother who believed that all who did not accept Christ were going to burn and be eternally tortured. I did have a massive chip on my shoulder and hated her god for years, even when I didn’t believe in him anymore. I just chased it’s imaginary ghost. I barely escaped molestation and even death at the hands of the street people that my parents left me to, you know, the God-fearing parents. I was self-sufficient at 12 years old and had learned to be quite the grifter at 13. I did anything that I had to to survive and lived in every homeless shelter from Florida to California searching for a way to fit in. I’m lucky to still be alive. How does anyone see a $100,000 income and a lofty degree as a trade off? I learned to survive!

Stop Human Trafficking!!!!

Report Lists Worst Countries for Human Trafficking Abuses 

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Wall Street Journal

Updated

Twenty countries received the worst possible ranking on the 2013 Trafficking in Persons Report released Wednesday by the U.S. State Department, meaning the department doesn’t think their governments are in full compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to get in compliance.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during an event releasing the annual Trafficking in Persons Report at the State Department on Wednesday, June 19, 2013.

China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Algeria, Central African Republic, Libya, Uzbekistan, Syria and Sudan are among the nations given the lowest Tier 3 ranking, the report said. Trafficking victims are forced to work as sex slaves, or lured to countries with the promise of legitimate jobs only to be forced into situations where they are forced to work long hours in factories, processing plants, on farms or fishing vessels for low or no pay and made to live in poor conditions where they are subject to beatings and rapes if they speak out against their conditions or try to escape. In some cases, children are forced to become soldiers.

Countries listed as Tier 3 are subject to certain sanctions, including the withdrawing or withholding of nonhumanitarian, non-trade-related aid.

China responded to the report on Thursday, with a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry saying the U.S. needs to take an “objective and impartial view of China’s efforts and stop making unilateral and arbitrary judgments.”

In a daily press briefing on Thursday, China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the U.S. “should take an objective and impartial view of China’s efforts and stop making unilateral and arbitrary judgments.”

“The Chinese government attaches great importance to fighting all trafficking crimes and protecting the rights of victims. We have been constantly improving our domestic legislation, strengthening our law enforcement and judicial measures and cooperating with all countries, including our neighbor countries,” spokeswoman Chunying Hua said.

Countries listed on the Tier 2 Watch List are those that don’t fully comply with the Act’s minimum standards but are working to come into compliance but still retain significant numbers of trafficking victims or other significant issues. Watch list countries include Chad, Cambodia, Rwanda, Lebanon, Albania, Honduras, Bahrain, Belarus and Thailand, which is on the watch list for the fourth consecutive year.

Tier 2 countries are those that don’t meet full compliance under the act but are taking important steps to become compliant. Japan, Jamaica, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Iraq, Hong Kong, Romania, Singapore, Nigeria, Bahamas, Turkey and Egypt are among the countries receiving this designation.

“Ending modern slavery must remain a foreign policy priority. Fighting this crime wherever it exists is in our national interest,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in the report’s introduction. “Human trafficking undermines the rule of law and creates instability. It tears apart families and communities. It damages the environment and corrupts the global supply chains and labor markets that keep the world’s economies thriving.”

Thailand recently has been in the news following the release of reports detailing alleged human rights and trafficking abuses in its seafood processing and fisheries industries. The Environmental Justice Foundation, which released the report on Thailand’s fisheries industry, said the report shows urgent action is needed from the Thai government and from the seafood supply chain to eliminate these abuses.

“The fish caught by these vessels, crewed by trafficked workers, is used to supply fish to the shrimp industry and provide for fish markets in Europe and the United States,” Steve Trent, the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement. “Thailand needs to address this issue head on, by rooting out corruption, prosecuting offending boat owners and companies, and ensuring a rigorous inspection regime. Meanwhile seafood businesses need to urgently investigate their supply chains to ensure that no products linked to human trafficking are present.”

Write to Ben DiPietro at ben.dipietro@dowjones.com, and follow him on Twitter@BenDiPietro1.

Pollution from Giant Livestock Farms Threatens Public Health

Waste lagoons and manure sprayfields — two widespread and environmentally hazardous technologies — are poorly regulated.

Giant livestock farms that are known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs house thousands of cows, chickens or pigs and produce staggering amounts of animal manure. The way these wastes are stored and used has profound effects on human health and the environment.

A giant factory farm in North Carolina; the brown rectangle at left is a waste lagoon.

On most factory farms, animals are crowded into relatively small areas; their manure and urine are funneled into massive waste lagoons. These cesspools often break, leak or overflow, sending dangerous microbes, nitrate pollution and drug-resistant bacteria into water supplies. Factory-farm lagoons also emit toxic gases such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and methane. What’s more, the farms often spray the manure onto land, ostensibly as fertilizer — these “sprayfields” bring still more of these harmful substances into our air and water.

Yet in spite of the huge amounts of animal wastes that factory farms produce, they have largely escaped pollution regulations; loopholes in the law and weak enforcement share the blame. NRDC has fought, and won, a number of courtroom battles over the years to force the federal government to deal with the problem of factory farms, but more protections are needed to adequately protect public health and the environment from CAFO pollution.

Threats to Human Health

People who live near or work at factory farms breathe in hundreds of gases, which are formed as manure decomposes. The stench can be unbearable, but worse still, the gases contain many harmful chemicals. For instance, one gas released by the lagoons, hydrogen sulfide, is dangerous even at low levels. Its effects — which are irreversible — range from sore throat to seizures, comas and even death. Other health effects associated with the gases from factory farms include headaches, shortness of breath, wheezing, excessive coughing and diarrhea.

Animal waste also contaminates drinking water supplies. For example, nitrates often seep from lagoons and sprayfields into groundwater. Drinking water contaminated with nitrates can increase the risk of blue baby syndrome, which can cause deaths in infants. High levels of nitrates in drinking water near hog factories have also been linked to spontaneous abortions. Several disease outbreaks related to drinking water have been traced to bacteria and viruses from waste.

On top of this, the widespread use of antibiotics also poses dangers. Large-scale animal factories often give animals antibiotics to promote growth, or to compensate for illness resulting from crowded conditions. These antibiotics are entering the environment and the food chain, contributing to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and making it harder to treat human diseases.

Threats to the Natural Environment

LAGOONS AND SPRAYFIELDS

Some people hear the word “lagoon” and picture blue water, surrounded by palm trees, perhaps, or with mountains in the background. A visit to a factory farm would quickly erase this beautiful image from their minds.

At factory farms, “lagoon” means an open-air pit filled with urine and manure. Lotsof urine and manure — some lagoons are larger than seven acres and contain as much as 20 to 45 million gallons of wastewater. The waste is collected with scrapers, flushing systems, or gravity flow gutters, and then stored in lagoons. Opportunities for disaster abound. The lagoons can leak or rupture, for instance, or they can be filled too high and overflow after a rain. But even if none of these problems occur, the lagoons still release gases. Their horrible stench and toxic chemicals harm workers and nearby residents.

Sprayfields are yet another threat. Manure is periodically pumped out of lagoons and sprayed on fields. Although manure can be an excellent fertilizer when it is applied at rates that crops can absorb, it must be safely — and sensibly — applied. But factory farms produce far more manure than their land requires, and they often overapply it to fields as a way to get rid of it, causing it to run off the fields and into rivers and streams. Farmers may also spray when it is rainy or windy, or with little regard for adjacent property. In addition, the act of spraying wastes increases evaporation and vaporization of pollutants.

The natural environment also suffers in many ways from factory-farming practices. Sometimes the damage is sudden and catastrophic, as when a ruptured lagoon causes a massive fish kill. At other times, it is cumulative — for example, when manure is repeatedly overapplied, it runs off the land and accumulates as nutrient pollution in waterways.

Either way, the effects are severe. For instance, water quality across the country is threatened by phosphorus and nitrogen, two nutrients present in animal wastes. In excessive amounts, nutrients often cause an explosion of algae that robs water of oxygen, killing aquatic life. One toxic microorganism, Pfiesteria piscicida, has been implicated in the death of more than one billion fish in coastal waters in North Carolina.

Manure can also contain traces of salt and heavy metals, which can end up in bodies of water and accumulate in the sediment, concentrating as they move up the food chain. And lagoons not only pollute groundwater; they also deplete it. Many factory farms use groundwater for cleaning, cooling and providing drinking water.

Better Alternatives Exist

Practical remedies to these problems do exist. But implementing them will require some important changes in factory farm practices and government oversight:

• Regulation and accountability. Factory farms are industrial facilities and should be regulated accordingly. They must obtain permits, monitor water quality and pay for cleaning up and disposing their wastes.
• Increased transparency. The public should know where CAFOs are located, how CAFOs in their neighborhoods dispose of their waste, and what waterbodies or drinking water sources may be at risk. There is not currently a comprehensive database of this critical information, which should be collected and made publicly available.
• Public awareness and participation. Local governments and residents must have a say in whether to allow factory farms in their communities. The public is also entitled to review and comment on the contents of pollution reduction plans and to enforce the terms, where a factory farm is in violation.
• New technology. Factory-farm technology standards must be strengthened. The EPA must consider recent technology advances that significantly reduce pathogens.
• Alternative farming practices. States and the federal government should promote methods of raising livestock that reduce the concentration of animals and use manure safely. Many alternative methods exist; they rely on keeping animal waste drier, which limits problems with spills, runoff and air pollution.
• Pollution-reduction programs for small feedlots.Voluntary programs must be expanded to encourage smaller factory farms, which fall outside of the regulations for industrial facilities, to improve their management practices and take advantage of available technical assistance and other resources.
• Consumer pressure. Individuals can help stop factory farm pollution by supporting livestock farms that use sustainable practices. In the grocery store, this means checking meat labels for “organic,” “free range,” “antibiotic-free,” or similar wording, which indicates meat raised in a more sustainable manner. Many sustainable livestock farms also sell directly to consumers or through local farmers’ markets.

  Two extremely useful tools that will help you use your buying power to support alternatives to food from factory farms are the Eat Well Guide and Sustainable Table.

RELATED NRDC WEBPAGES:

Facts about Pollution from Livestock Farms

NRDC Report: Cesspools of Shame

How factory farm lagoons and sprayfields threaten environmental and public health.

RELATED WEBSITES:

GRACE Factory Farm Project

Updates on animal agriculture issues and efforts to replace factory farms; good links

Waterkeeper Alliance: Pure Farms, Pure Waters

Information on Waterkeeper’s campaign against factory farms.

Scorecard’s Animal Waste Pollution Locator

Lets you look at the amount of animal waste produced in your state and the trends over time; good links as well

Sierra Club: Clean Water & Factory Farms

News, reports and fact sheets from the Sierra Club’s campaign

The U.S. EPA’s Animal Feeding Operations Page

Information on Clean Water Act permitting and factory farms