Meltem is bent over, picking sun-ripened red peppers, her small hands clad in bright rubber gloves. It rained in the Karataş region of Adana the night before, and her black plastic slippers are caked in mud as she looks out at the giant field of peppers, all patiently waiting to be picked, sold and turned into paste.
“I’d like to save the world,” she says with confidence. She’s only thirteen, yet highly aware of her talents despite the hardships she faces. “I want to be a police officer, or a lawyer, or an attorney. Even here, I want to intervene when people argue. But I’m too young for that.”
Meltem’s fourteen-year-old sister is working in the row behind her. Their father stands close – a blue basket in hand – waiting for his daughters to fill it over and over again. The sisters have many cousins – young girls just like them – who also work in the fields. As a family from Turkey’s southeastern Şanlıurfa province, they converse in Arabic and make jokes among themselves while they pick peppers.
It's hard work. They start as early as 6 am and finish no earlier than 4 pm, regardless of the season. Whether it's one of Adana's notoriously hot and humid summer days or a January morning that sends shivers through their bones, they work.
‘Seasonal’ work
Adana, the largest city in Turkey’s Mediterranean region, is situated in the heart of the fertile Çukurova plain and is well-known for the bountiful crops its rich soil produces. A haven for farming, plants are sown and harvested back-to-back year-round.
That means a seasonal worker could work almost all year here. In the case of Meltem and her siblings, including her nine-year-old brother who often stays alone in their tent, that means they only go to school for maybe two months out of the year.
While illegal in both international and local regulations, child labor has long been used in Turkey’s agriculture sector due to weak enforcement. Today, the issue is aggravated by tough economic conditions that have further forced some families to prioritize survival over schooling.
According to Turkish Statistical Institute’s 2019 data, the most recent comprehensive figures on the topic, 36.8 percent of the 720,000 working children in Turkey aged 5 to 17 were employed in agriculture.
That’s more than 220,000 children working in the fields – in hazelnut orchards in the northeastern Black Sea region, in tobacco farms in the southeastern Adıyaman province, or here in Adana, picking peppers, lemons and watermelons.
“Watermelons are the hardest,” Meltem said. “We really have very hard lives.”
Meltem went on to say she missed school and would always choose to be in class – if it were up to her. She says her teacher from Şanlıurfa called the other day and asked her where she was. “I told her I’m working. She told me not to worry. That she wouldn’t fail me.”
With a smile on her sun-kissed face, Meltem conveys her admiration for her teachers and says they care for her, too. Her favorite classes are painting and mathematics, but she confesses she rarely finds the opportunity to study anything. Instead, today she stands under the sun, her hair covered with a black cloth, and picks one pepper after another – time seemingly standing still.
Her father stresses the situation weighs heavily on him. “But I can’t afford to keep them in school and meet the payments,” he says with frustration. For about ten months a year, each of his children makes 800 liras, about 23 dollars, every day. Money that without, the family would have a difficult time making ends meet.
The agricultural intermediary between farmers and seasonal workers, known as the elçi (envoy), says he’s also worried about the children being in the fields instead of classrooms this Monday morning. The school year has recently begun. “But what can the parents do?” he asks. “They didn’t choose this life either.”
Meltem’s father, who is 41, says he and his parents before him all grew up working in the fields. As seasonal agricultural workers, they used to pick cotton.
For someone from Adana, once a thriving center for cotton and now a bustling hub for citrus, this story is all too familiar. It’s common knowledge that children work in agriculture here. However, the 20-kilometer distance between where the seasonal workers live and the city center makes their plight easier to overlook.
Hidden consequences of poverty or a blind eye?
The workers live in makeshift tents of blue and white plastic, clustered along a narrow two-way road that serves as a thoroughfare for trucks and mini-busses speedily carrying workers to the surrounding fields. Children run unattended across the road towards laundry drying on a fence.
Their lives function at a bare minimum. Without access to proper shelter when it rains, as it had the previous day, water drips down on their heads. Even in Adana, the winters feel freezing cold without amenities, Meltem says. And on a sweltering summer afternoon, it’s unbearable. Inside the tent, there is minimal privacy. Families are crowded into small spaces not much larger than a shipping container.
The scene is reminiscent of a war or disaster-torn encampment. But it is a consequence of neither of these.
According to Ertan Karabıyık, who is the founder of Development Workshop, a non-profit cooperative that has monitored the conditions for seasonal agricultural workers across Turkey since 2002, it’s a consequence of centuries-old systemic poverty and insecurity that remains out of sight, out of mind.
Karabıyık says that compared to the living conditions for seasonal migratory agricultural workers in other countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, Turkey’s public institutions have been inefficient in setting a standard, which he implores the companies must provide.
When it comes to child labor, the government is fully responsible, Karabıyık says, pointing out that Turkey ratified the International Labor Organization (ILO)’s Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention in 2001, the UN Convention on The Rights of the Child in 1995 and has numerous laws in place to protect children.
However, despite the international conventions and the ten national regulations in place to combat child labor, including education and labor laws, the problem persists in plain sight as the government simply does not enforce the laws.
According to both the UN and ILO conventions, anyone under 18 years of age is considered a child. The UN Convention stipulates that parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation, from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous, to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.
The ILO Convention states all ratifying countries are obligated to take immediate and effective measures to ensure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor as an issue of urgency.
The Turkish Primary Education and Education Law No. 222 states compulsory education consists of 12 years. Those of primary education age who do not attend compulsory primary education institutions cannot be employed, in all manners, in any official or private workplace, either for paid or unpaid work.
Seda Akço, a children’s rights lawyer and co-founder of the children-focused consultancy firm Humanist Bureau, says this is really a problem of workers’ poverty and that fair wage standards set by the Council of Europe’s European Social Charter – of which Turkey was an early member – are not being upheld.
“Seasonal agricultural workers work very long hours and still can’t provide dignified lives for themselves and their families,” Akço says.
In an attempt to keep children in school, the above-mentioned Education Law imposes a fine to families of 15 liras for each day a child is absent.
Meltem’s father said no government personnel has ever spoken to him about sending his kids to school. But Akço and Karabıyık both agreed the minimal fine (less than 50 cents) isn’t where the disincentives lie anyway.
Failing economy, failing policy
The situation is further exacerbated by the ailing Turkish economy, which is making the lives of ordinary citizens more difficult by the day. Although the country’s annual official inflation fell just under 50 percent for the first time in a year this September, with prices for basic goods and housing continuing to skyrocket, the real annual inflation rate exceeds 88 percent, according to the Independent Inflation Research Group (ENAG).
For Meltem’s father, the elusive inflation means their lives are exponentially harder. He says he receives 1,500 liras, around 44 dollars, of financial aid each month, but for a family of five, that does little to improve their financial situation.
Late this summer, the Turkish government began a new initiative to address child labor. According to the Ministry of Education’s Circular No. 52, authorized on Aug. 6, committees and governorships have been given new mandates to combat unschooling among seasonal agricultural workers across Turkey. The roadmap outlines steps to improve prevention and detection as well as methods to provide follow-up assessments and compensation.
Shortly after, in mid-August, workers for the Family and Social Services Ministry visited some of the tents where the seasonal workers in Adana live. The authorities urged families to send their children to school, according to local news reports.
Turkey recap requested interviews from the Ministry’s local office for this report, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Recent – though limited – government data from 2023 found the labor force participation rate for minors age 15 to 17 was 22.1 percent. This is up from 18.7 percent in 2022 and 16.4 percent in 2021. (NK/VK)
*The name of the minor in this report has been changed to protect her identity.
This article was originally published on Turkey Recap and is re-published on bianet with permission.