Modern slavery: Pakistan's latest climate change curse

[Uncle Joe]

As Pakistan finds itself in another unpredictable monsoon season, vulnerable farming communities face a resurgence of indentured servitude and other forms of modern slavery.

People wait their turn to get free food distributed by volunteers during rain outside a camp of internally displaced people from coastal areas due to Cyclone Biparjoy approaching, in Sujawal, Pakistan's southern district in the Sindh province, Thursday, June 15, 2023 [Pervez Masih/AP Photo]

This spring, I spent time with farming families across rural Sindh and the Kacchi Plains of Balochistan, the two worst-hit regions by last summer’s super floods that submerged a third of Pakistan, displaced eight million people, and saw millions more lose their livelihoods.

Six months after the monsoons, I saw field after field still under water. Elsewhere, the soil was too damaged for sowing seeds. Yet, the small and landless tenant farmers I spoke with, facing another lost crop cycle, were as concerned about being stripped of their liberty as about displacement and hunger.

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At COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh last November, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif made a poignant case for debt relief and compensation for a nation that, while facing a major external debt crisis, was just starting its long recovery from one of the most catastrophic floods in recent memory. No doubt this informed the creation by the end of the conference of a climate loss and damage fund for vulnerable countries, the result of an admirable political mobilisation in the Global South around climate justice. But if greater access to climate financing is to address the full costs of global warming in Pakistan, the politics around climate action at home has to be more inclusive, too.

It will require significant political will for the state to act against large landlords in Sindh and Balochistan, many of whom are either elected to provincial assemblies or are otherwise important local powerbrokers. Everywhere I went in Sindh and Balochistan, communities were bristling with anger and ready to speak out. They need support from the press, activists, the legal community and civil society at large to turn that anger into public pressure on the government to apply laws against bonded labour, people trafficking and certain types of debt.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/9/1/modern-slavery-pakistans-growing-climate-change-curse