The ‘carbon offset’ child labourers (Indians work off West’s holiday guilt)

Times Online (from the Sunday Times) ^ | September 23, 2007 | Dean Nelson in Delhi

[CHEE]

Pumping furiously on a foot treadle in the afternoon heat, six-year-old Sarju Ram is irrigating her impoverished family’s field, improving the crop and – without knowing it – helping environmentally sensitive holiday-makers assuage their guilt over long-haul flights to dream destinations.

But Sarju and her four brothers and sisters working flat out in a clump of trees that provide scant shelter from the sun illustrate a growing argument over claims that British environmentalists’ efforts to curb greenhouse emissions are inadvertently fuelling an increase in child labour.

[CHEE]

Cause and effect. Cause and effect.

[SoFloFreeper]

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!?

(Get Meryl Streep to start crying!)

But hey, if it'll make Al Gore richer and feel better, I say it is WORTH IT to make young children work in sweatshop-like conditions.

[Matchett-PI]

bttt