A showdown also looms between Jamaica’s Office of the National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons and the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, which claims the former did not consult it on a report which paints a negative picture of a programme depended on by thousands of families.
The human-trafficking threat facing the approximately 16,000 Jamaicans who go overseas for between six and eight months per year on Government-sponsored programmes with the North American states was flagged as an “emerging challenge” in the April report by Diahann Gordon Harrison, the national rapporteur on trafficking in persons.
“It is imperative that the Government of Jamaica takes effective steps towards eliminating the barriers that contribute to injuries, death and the overall vulnerability of Jamaican farm workers to exploitation and human trafficking,” Harrison wrote in the report which covered April 2018 to March 2020.
The threat to Jamaican workers was reinforced in a 2018 report by Polaris Project, a US non-profit which manages that country’s human trafficking hotline.
It ranked Jamaica fifth among the top 10 nationalities identified as victims of human trafficking on the guest worker programme in the US.
