Chapter 5
Reading
IC3 Section
IC3 | IT | TOEFL | Best Answer
Vietnamese translation of IC3
Persian translation of IC3
Language Lessons
Assessment
Poverty Reduction/ Xoá đói giảm nghèo/فقر زدایی
Guiding Question: How is it possible for people to move out of poverty in your culture? |
Câu hỏi hướng dẫn: Có cách nào để giải thoát người dân khỏi cảnh đói nghèo? |
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سوال راهنما: چگونه در فرهنگ شما برای مردم این امکان وجود دارد که از فقر فاصله بگیرند؟
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Skills:
In this chapter you will do these things:
English Language Skills:
Reading Context
Vocabulary for Child Labor
Vocabulary for Skimming and Scanning
Skimming: Getting the Basics Out of Text
Skimming Practice
Introduction: Reading Rates and Reading Strategies
Vietnamese Language Skills:
Reading Passage
Reading Two Perspective
Agreeing and Disagreeing With Perspectives
IC3 Skills:
Nike’s Dilemma: Is Doing the Right Thing Wrong?
Research Changes Ideas About Children and Work
TOEFL
Appendix: Child Labor Glossary of Terms
Intercultural Communicative Competence
Child labor, like many large global concerns, is not a simple problem to confront. It is a messy business for those who advocate an end to the practice. There are no clear cut answers for the millions of people around the world in poverty as the following two articles reveal. In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989 and instituted as international law in 1990. The CRC is summarized on the UNICEF website in this way:
A legally binding instrument
The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the first legally binding international instrument to incorporate the full range of human rights—civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. In 1989, world leaders decided that children needed a special convention just for them because people under 18 years old often need special care and protection that adults do not. The leaders also wanted to make sure that the world recognized that children have human rights too.
The Convention sets out these rights in 54 articles and two Optional Protocols. It spells out the basic human rights that children everywhere have: the right to survival; to develop to the fullest; to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation; and to participate fully in family, cultural and social life. The four core principles of the Convention are non-discrimination; devotion to the best interests of the child; the right to life, survival and development; and respect for the views of the child. Every right spelled out in the Convention is inherent to the human dignity and harmonious development of every child. The Convention protects children's rights by setting standards in health care; education; and legal, civil and social services.
(http://www.unicef.org/crc/)
But the United States has not ratified the CRC, and a brief glance at what is happening around the world reveals that children are working. According to from the International Labour Organisation:
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Globally, 1 in 6 children work
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218 million children aged 5 - 17 are involved in child labour world wide
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126 million children work in hazardous conditions
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The highest numbers of child labourers are in the Asia/Pacific region, where there are 122 million working children
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The highest proportion of child labourers is in Sub Saharan Africa, where 26% of children (49 million) are involved in work.
(http://www.crin.org/themes/viewtheme.asp?id=3)
For Discussion—As you read the articles, think about these questions:
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Are there forms of child labor used in your country? If so, for what reasons are children working? Note that if you are from the U.S., migrant children are working.
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If all children were not to work in your country, what would be the consequences?
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What changes would have to occur in order that all children could live by the Convention of Rights of the Child?
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Why does the United States not ratify the Convention?
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Can the world live by the CRC without addressing poverty around the world?
Nike's dilemma: Is doing the right thing wrong?
By David Montero | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the December 22, 2006 edition
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1222/p01s03-wosc.html
A child labor dispute could eliminate 4,000 Pakistani jobs.
SIALKOT, PAKISTAN – In this bustling commercial hub near the Kashmiri border, fortunes seem to rise and fall with the Nike swoosh. Some 80 percent of the world's soccer balls are produced here by Nike and other top sports brands - making Sialkot, a city of 3 million, a model of prosperity in a country where poverty and extremism freely intermingle.
But there is a controversy behind this pot of gold. In November, Nike severed its contract with Saga Sports, its chief supplier, saying Saga's poor management exposes Nike to the threat of child labor and other labor violations.
The incident, observers say, highlights the moral dilemma of first-world corporations using third-world labor. And since it is Pakistan, the outcome may be more pressing than elsewhere in the world.
Many say a surge of unemployment and falling profits in Sialkot, a rare oasis, is the last thing a Pakistan struggling with militant Islam and poverty needs.
A soul-searching debate is now coursing through the country: Child labor is universally condemned, but is it fair for multinationals to cut and run when incidents arise of children working? Or do corporations have an obligation to work to fix these problems themselves?
For Nike's part, the Beaverton, Oregon-based firm stated in a November press release that it will continue working with contract factories in China and Thailand to supply hand-stitched balls. Nike's contracts with Saga will expire in March.
About Saga's 5,000 stitchers, it added: "[I]n this case, the company exhausted all options and was left with no alternative but to cease orders, despite the potential impact to workers and the near-term effect on Nike's soccer ball business."
Gloomy-looking executives at Saga Sports, 70 percent of whose work is for Nike, say they're confident they can keep the company on board. The US Embassy recently told the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce that Nike will continue its other textile operations with existing contractors in Pakistan, according to unofficial statements from American officials.
By severing its contract with Saga, Nike is likely to score moral points with its customers in the West. But it's also likely, observers agree, to sink Saga, a corporate giant that makes about 6 million of Pakistan's annual production of 40-million soccer balls.
Saga estimates that as many as 20,000 families could be affected, since 70 percent of the local market relies on them for work.
"Definitely, Saga did wrong. But does the wrong they did warrant Nike leaving?" asks Nasir Dogar, chief executive of the Independent Monitoring Association for Child Labor (IMAC), which oversees compliance at Sialkot's 3,000 soccer-ball stitching centers.
Sialkot's hand-stitched ball industry, about a century old, is big business: Saga Sports alone accounted for $33 million of the industry's $210 million total. For Sialkot's 45,000 stitchers, who earn less than $100 a month on average, soccer balls are a way of life.
But for as long as there have been soccer balls in Sialkot, the hands of children have stitched them. That is not unusual in Pakistan, where a per capita income of about $2,800 commonly drives children to work. According to UNICEF estimates, more than 3 million boys and girls below age 14 work in Pakistan.
That began changing a decade ago in the soccer-ball industry, when Nike, Puma, and Adidas, among others, worked with the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Sialkot suppliers to eradicate child labor. Today a majority of soccer-ball manufacturers voluntarily participate in IMAC's child-labor monitoring program, but some contest how effective those measures have been.
The case of Saga Sports, in which two children were found working in the home of a subcontractor in May, is not unusual, points out Mr. Dogar of IMAC. Every morning, Dogar's 12 monitors perform unannounced checks on stitching centers randomly selected by computer. Still, children are found from time to time.
"You cannot do 24-hour surveillance. You cannot cover the whole area," he says.
Nonetheless, he and many others question Nike's decision to leave, given how many families may be losing their livelihood.
"They could have found some alternative way with Saga," says Khawaja Zakauddin, who heads the anti-child labor wing of the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "To go away is the worst solution. If Nike moves from here, these people will have no work."
That's certainly a concern of Hussain Naqui, a decade-long employee in Saga's shipping department. "There will be no more jobs without Nike. I'm especially worried about my children, who are studying," he says.
Some say that Nike could have done more. Adidas maintains its own internal monitoring cell in Sialkot; Nike does not, observers say.
"They have to have a transparent monitoring mechanism. It is not just the government or local administration that should be held responsible [for monitoring]. Nike is also responsible," says Kailash Satyarthi, chairman of the Global March Against Child Labor in New Delhi.
Others disagree. "The primary responsibility lies with the government," argues Kaiser Bengali, an economist in Karachi.
Mr. Bengali hopes the incident will prove a wakeup call for the country, resulting in better enforcement of child-labor laws, which remain weak even though Pakistan has ratified ILO and United Nations conventions against child labor.
Many here in Sialkot worry that Saga's fall could chip away at a decade of progress: Low unemployment, stability, and a private sector that pours money into schools, clinics, and roads.
"There is no link to terrorist activity here, because everyone is involved in their work," says Khurram A. Khawaja, Chief Executive of Anwar Khawaja Industries, which produces soccer balls for Select Sports in Denmark. "This will create a void."
Research Changes Ideas About Children and Work
By Virginia Postrel
The New York Times, July 14, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/14/business/14scene.html
When Americans think about child labor in poor countries, they rarely picture girls fetching water or boys tending livestock. Yet most of the 211 million children, ages 5 to 14, who work worldwide are not in factories. They are working in agriculture -- from 92 percent in Vietnam to 63 percent in Guatemala -- and most are not paid directly.
''Contrary to popular perception in high-income countries, most working children are employed by their parents rather than in manufacturing establishments or other forms of wage employment,'' two Dartmouth economists, Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, wrote in ''Child Labor in the Global Economy,'' published in the Winter 2005 Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Their article surveys what is known about child labor. Research over the past several years, by these economists and others, has begun to erode some popular beliefs about why children work, what they do and when they are likely to leave work for school.
When he started working on child labor issues six years ago, Professor Edmonds said in an interview, ''the conventional view was that child labor really wasn't about poverty.'' Children's work, many policy makers believed, ''reflected perhaps parental callousness or a lack of education for parents about the benefits of educating your child.'' So policies to curb child labor focused on educating parents about why their children should not work and banning children's employment to remove the temptation.
Recent research, however, casts doubt on the cultural explanation. ''In every context that I've looked at things, child labor seems to be almost entirely about poverty. I wouldn't say it's only about poverty, but it's got a lot to do with poverty,'' Professor Edmonds said.
As families' incomes increase, children tend to stop working and, where schools are available, they go to school. If family incomes drop, children are more likely to return to work.
Some of the best data, and the most noteworthy results, come from Vietnam, which tracked about 3,000 households from 1993 to 1998. This was a period of rapid economic growth, in which gross domestic product rose about 9 percent a year.
In a paper published in the Winter 2005 Journal of Human Resources, ''Does Child Labor Decline With Improving Economic Status?,'' Professor Edmonds found that child labor dropped by nearly 30 percent over this five-year period. Rising incomes explain about 60 percent of that shift.
The effects were greatest for families escaping poverty. For those who crossed the official poverty line, earning enough to pay for adequate food and basic necessities, higher incomes accounted for 80 percent of the drop in child labor. In 1993, 58 percent of the population fell below the poverty line, compared with 33 percent five years later.
''Child labor does not appear to vary with per capita expenditure until households can meet their food needs, and it then declines dramatically,'' Professor Edmonds wrote. (His articles may be downloaded at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~eedmonds/.)
During this same period, Vietnam repealed its policy against exporting rice. That opened a big new market for Vietnamese farmers -- the country went from almost no exports to being one of the world's top rice exporters -- and significantly raised the price of rice.
This change, along with the family survey data, allowed Professors Edmonds and Pavcnik to examine what happens when household incomes rise but children's labor also becomes more valuable. Their paper, ''The Effect of Trade Liberalization on Child Labor,'' was published in the March 2005 Journal of International Economics.
In the interview, Professor Edmonds said he expected that the booming market for rice would lead more children to work in agriculture, if only on their own families' farms, because the value of their labor had risen substantially. But that was not what happened.
''Instead, it looks like what households did was, with rising income, they purchased substitutes for child labor. They used more fertilizers. There was more mechanization, more purchasing of tools,'' he said, adding, ''It was the opposite of what I expected to find coming in.''
For the minority of Vietnamese families who buy more rice than they produce, rising prices mean effectively lower incomes. That might lead to children's working to compensate. The economists did not find a statistically significant change for these families, however.
The results from Vietnam suggest that families do not want their children to work. Parents pull their children out of work when they can afford to, even when the wages children could earn are rising. Poverty, not culture, appears to be the fundamental problem.
Rather than simply banning child labor, then, policy makers should concentrate on alleviating poverty. That includes not only encouraging economic growth but also improving access to schools and to credit markets. Borrowing could allow families to buy equipment to substitute for child labor, to weather short-term declines in income and to pay school fees. (Professor Edmonds examines a striking example of the credit problem in ''Child Labor and Schooling Responses to Anticipated Income in South Africa,'' forthcoming in The Journal of Development Economics.)
''Most child labor policy even today is directed at trying to get kids into unemployment -- to limit working opportunities for kids,'' he said in the interview. But, ''if households are already in a situation where they don't want their children to be working, but they're forced to because of their circumstance, taking additional steps to prevent the kids from working is punishing the poorest for being poor.''
Virginia Postrel (www.dynamist.com) is author of The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (HarperCollins).
These exercises draw from” Poverty and the Environment: Reversing the Downward Spiral” by Alan D. Durning, “Worldwatch Paper 92”, November 1989 (40-43)
Directions: In this section you will read several passages. Each one is followed by several exercises. Choose the one best answer, (A), (B), (C), or (D). Answer all questions or exercises based on what is stated or implied in the passage.
Example:
As population swells, peasants in highland valleys are forced to expand their plots only steep forested hillsides, extending the distance women must walk to gather fuel and fodder.
As population swells, all of the following happen EXCEPT
The correct answer is D. If you are ready to respond to the following, note the time and begin.
- steeper hillsides are farmed
- farming plots have to be expanded
- women’s work increases
- the forested hillsides become more productive.
I. For the have-nots, food comes from the soil, water from the stream, fuel from the woods, traction from the ox, fodder from the pasture, reeds to make mats from the stream bank, fruit from the trees around the hut. Poor people know that to endanger any of these things is to imperil themselves, and the lives of their offspring. The economy of the rural poor is measured in the fertility and productivity of their environment.
II. Award-winning journalist Richard Critchfield, who spent a decade living in dozens of Third World villages, believes this close physical relationship with the environment creates one of the few nearly universal features of village culture: “Most villagers have a love of their native land, a desire to won land, an intense attachment to their ancestral soil a reverence for nature and toward habitat and ancestral ways.” Poor farmers with secure rights to a piece of land tend to care for it meticulously, taking a long-term view and forgoing current benefits for dependable future gains.
III. The poor knowingly harm their environment mainly when under duress. Pushed to the brink of starvation, evicted from familiar lands, driven to the frontier by the pressures of population growth, or deprived of alternatives by misguided laws, they lack access to sufficient quantities of land, water, or capital to provide themselves with a sustainable livelihood.
IV. Thus, the central pole around which the downward spiral turns is the lack of resources – the first element of the local poverty trap. Anthropologist Sheldon Annis of the Overseas Development Council in Washington, D.C., illustrates the crucial difference between poor but secure smallholders and dispossessed and insecure landless households:
(Questions 1-11)
1. The phrase “have-nots” in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to
- those who are homeless
- those who have no skills
- those who have little except what nature provides
- those who do not want to have control over their lives
- be aware of
- frighten
- put at risk
- care for
3. The work “imperil” in paragraph 1, sentence 2 is closest in meaning to
- protect themselves
- put themselves at risk
- persue wealth
- build for the good of all
4. The first paragraph implies that failing to care for the environment
- makes the lives of their children more difficult
- is nobody’s business but their own
- is a choice that is made lightly
- is of little importance
5. The word “meticulously” in the last sentence of paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to
- carelessly
- thoughtlessly
- independently
- carefully
6. According to paragraph 2, one thing that almost all village cultures have in common is
- a disregard for natural resources
- an inability to care for the land
- a close connection to the land
- a title to their own land
7. The word “duress” in paragraph 3, sentence 1 is closest in meaning to
- persuasion
- pressure
- misunderstanding
- greedy motivation
8. If poor farmers have secure rights to their land they tend to
- take good care of it
- abuse it
- over graze it
- build a fence around it
9. The word “sustainable” in the last sentence of paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to
- decreasing economic condition
- impossible situation
- able to be maintained
- improved condition
10. According to paragraph 3, all of the following are given as reasons the poor might knowingly harm their environment EXCEPT
- desire for wealth
- not enough water to sustain them and their families
- population growth
- near starvation
11. The word “spiral” in the first sentence of paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to
- wheels
- economic cycle
- increase
- production
12. The word “crucial” in paragraph 4, sentence 2, is closest in meaning to
- significant
- trivial
- of no concern
- unnecessary
(Questions 13-20)
V. “In the Guatemalan village where I lived in the late 1970s, I used to marvel at the elegance with which poor farmers could optimize every available scrap of resources - every ridge of land, every surplus hour of time, every channel of water, every angle of sunlight. Though the Indians where I lived are surely poor, they do own their own plots of land. They depend upon and care for what is theirs. When I go back to the village, I always find that my friends’ fields look just as I remembered them.
VI. Ten years ago I also worked in Guatemala’s northern Quiche province, which for many reasons is much poorer than the town where I lived. There, I recall watching in horrified fascination as an Indian farmer and his son planted their plot of corn on a forested slope. The land was so steep that the son had to be held in place with a rope looped around his waist. As he hopped from furrow to furrow, his father let out slack from around a tree stump.
VII. When I returned to that spot recently I was not surprised to find that the farmer and his son were no longer there. And neither was the hillside. What remained was a reddish, eroded nub – which looked just like the next and the next and the next former hillside.”
VIII. The dispossessed farmer that Annis watched in Quiche probably knew better than Annis himself how destructive hillside farming is, but lacking good farmland or other productive resources, he had no choice but to exploit the only land available to him.
IX. Access to a resource without control over it is calamitous. Nothing incites people to deplete forests, soils, or water supplies faster than fear they will soon lose access to them. Neither hired workers, nor hired managers, nor tenant farmers care for land as well as owners. In Thailand’s forests, for example, squatters given long-term rights to use their plots, care for the land better than squatters with no legal standing, but not as well as those who own their plots outright.
X. As the global poverty trap tightens and the world’s poor become increasingly insecure and dispossessed, the conditions for ecological degradation spread to more of the earth’s fragile lands. Two of the most common sequences by which poor people fall, or are pushed, into the downward spiral are illustrated by the situations in Nepal and Costa Rica.
XI. Nepal exemplifies the way sheer growth of human numbers feeds the spiral, when human practices at a given level of technology exceed the carrying capacity of local environments. As population swells, peasants in highland valleys are forced to expand their plots onto steep forested hillsides, extending the distance women must walk to gather fuel and fodder. Over the past decade, during which forests have shrunk to half of their original extent, women’s average daily journeys have increased by more than an hour. Pressed for time, their workday in the fields shortens, family income falls, and they have both less food to cook and less time to cook it. Not only has daily food consumption in the region fallen by 100 calories per person on average, but in village after village childhood malnutrition rates and deforestation rates are closely coupled. In the hill regions of Nepal, in other words, the health of a village’s children can be read in the retreating tree line on surrounding slopes.
(Questions 13-20)
13. According to paragraph 5 the biggest factor that leads to increased poverty is
- ignorance
- laziness
- lack of health carel
- Lack of resources
14. The word “surplus” in paragraph 5, sentence 1, is closest in meaning to
- needed
- extra
- wasted
- unwanted
15. The word “optimize” in paragraph 5, sentence 1, is closest in meaning to
- use with no thought of harm
- use in a careless manner
- destroy
- use in the best way possible
16. It can be concluded from paragraphs 6 and 7 that
- the farmer and his son didn’t know proper farming procedures
- the farmer and his son did the best they could with the little land they had
- hillside farming of this kind is sustainable
- reforestation happens quickly
17. The word “exploit” in paragraph 8, is closest in meaning to
- use carefully
- develop for its good
- ill-use
- protect
18. According to paragraph 9, land resources are best cared for by
- hired workers
- squatters
- people who own the land
- tenants given long term rights
19. The work “dispossessed” in paragraph 10 is closest in meaning to
- allowed ownership
- given power
- owned by corporations
- deprived of property or rights
20. According to paragraph 11, during the past ten years the forests in Nepal
- have decreased by half
- have increased by half
- have been heavily cut for fire wood
- have maintained themselves
ANSWER KEY
1. C |
6. C |
11. B |
16. B |
2. C |
7. B |
12. A |
17. C |
3. B |
8. A |
13. D |
18. C |
4. A |
9. C |
14. B |
19. D |
5. D |
10. A |
15. D |
20. A |
Best Answers to Guiding Questions: After you have completed the Reading, Listening/Speaking, and Writing chapters 5, how would you answer the following question?
Guiding Question: How is it possible for people to move out of poverty in your culture? |
Câu hỏi hướng dẫn: Có cách nào để giải thoát người dân khỏi cảnh đói nghèo? |
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سوال راهنما: چگونه در فرهنگ شما برای مردم این امکان وجود دارد که از فقر فاصله بگیرند؟
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