Turkey tackling child labor in hazelnut harvesting
Most of the world’s hazelnuts come from Turkey: In 2014, it earned $2.3 billion from 252,000 tons shipped to 110 countries, according to the Turkish-based Hazelnut Promotion Group. One third of Turkey’s crop comes from Ordu Province.
But the industry is hard to regulate. Hazelnuts are grown on a dense patchwork of small family-run farms. Children have long worked in agriculture in Turkey and past government efforts to crack down have failed to curb the practice, particularly among seasonal workers. In Ordu, 12,000 out of 20,000 of these workers are primarily Kurdish migrants.
Since hazelnuts are harvested in summer, children are out of school. But the nature of migrant farm labor means that even when schools reopen, children are often in the fields or helping with other tasks. Families say that they enroll their kids in school when they return home at the end of the season. Still, a 2014 report by Support to Life, a Turkish humanitarian agency, found that about half of agriculture workers under the age of 18 had dropped out of school.
While there are visible efforts to raise awareness against child labor in the hazelnut sector, legal loopholes remain. Crucially, Turkey’s labor code doesn’t protect children who work in enterprises with less than 50 workers. That means that most cases of child labor occur in areas that technically fall outside the jurisdiction of labor inspectors. Turkey, with a population of 75 million, has roughly 1,000 inspectors.
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