About Slavery | Facts About Slavery Today...

Slavery is often hidden in the shadows, which makes it easy for governments, corporations and the public to ignore or be unaware of it despite its global scope. But slavery has a human face, and every slave is an individual whose life has meaning and value.

Although it can be difficult to tease out slavery’s role in opaque commodity markets, it is the moral responsibility of all those who benefit or profit from slavery—including corporations, governments and consumers—to investigate, identify and root out this illegal activity from all supply chains.

Since slavery is now illegal throughout the world, much of it has gone underground, which, coupled with its violent and dangerous nature, frustrates efforts to establish exact statistics about slavery’s scope and impact. However, it is well established that there are more slaves today than at any point in human history, but because of global population growth, only a tiny percentage of the human race is now enslaved.

Current resources are insufficient to meet the demands of research needed to create global meta-analysis of the statistics about slavery that do exist. A frequent flaw in existing statistics is that many states only count the numbers of trafficking victims, but in order to be considered a trafficking victim, the individual needs to participate in prosecution of the traffickers—but many refuse to do so for fear of further endangering themselves and their families.

The result is that the statistics about slavery that we refer to here are only the tip of the iceberg.

• There are at least 27 million slaves in the world today. They can be found in both the poorest and the wealthiest nations—including in the United States, the Middle East and Europe.

• The vast majority of slaves are found in agriculture and mining, growing and extracting raw materials that sustain our modern lives, including cotton, coffee, carpets, sugar, shrimp, fish, charcoal, gold, gems, pig-iron (a key component in steel), and tantalum (a rare metal used in cell phones). They are also involved in the production, smuggling and distribution of illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

• According to Oxfam, if all cotton subsidies were removed, the price of this raw material would increase by 14 to 17 percent globally, potentially eradicating the need for child labor in the six countries that do not subsidize cotton.

• At the time of the transatlantic slave trade, the price of a young male agricultural worker on U.S. soil was the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s money. Today you can illegally purchase a male laborer in the United States for $300.

• Slavery produced an estimated $91.2 billion in profits in 2007, second only to drug trafficking among global criminal enterprises, according to researcher Siddharth Kara. According to the United Nations, profits within Europe from trafficking in persons now exceed profits generated from trafficking in illegal drugs.

• Moises Naim in his book Illicit states that illicit trade, of which the trafficking in people is a part, accounts for 10 percent of global trade.

• Moises Naim also says that the selling of children is the fastest growing global crime.