Agriculture employers worried at large number of working children

In rural areas from Moldova, the number of the children compelled to work is worriedly large, and this endangers the country's future, the executive manager of the National Federation of Agriculture and Food Industry Employers (NFAFIE), Alexandru Suslari, said on Thursday, Info-Prim Neo reports. The danger consists in the fact that often children work to the detriment of their studying and will have to suffer in the future, and this will have ricochets not only on the person and family, but on whole society, he said. NFAFIE gathered for a sitting on the occasion of marking, on June 12, the 7th edition of the World Day Against Child Labor with the slogan : “Education: the Right Response to Child Labor”. According to Eugenia Ganea, a NFAFIE member, often children are involved in works in hazardous conditions as working with pesticides or in a noisy environment or with machinery dangerous for their physical development. This often happens because employers and even parents are not aware of the legislation and they violate it. According to NFAFIE, the children should work, but only according to the legislation. The National Center on Preventing Child Abuse (CNPAC) and three ministries of Economy, of Social Protection, Family and Child and of Education and Youth Thursday signed an Accord of preventing child labor. The document provides for applying, in five areas -- Chisinau, Balti, Sangerei, Ungheni and Orhei – , methods of monitoring the child labor, in order to prevent exploiting them and withdrawing them from forced labor, prostitution, pornography, illicit, hazardous work, trafficking etc. The accord has been signed as part of an initiative backed by the International Labor Organization through the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC). With the support of this organization, the children in difficulty and the children withdrawn from severe forms of child labor will benefit of psychological, social and educational services offered by ILO-IPEC specialists to decrease the vulnerability of these children to trafficking and other severe forms of child labor