CIGARETTE maker Philip Morris Fortune Tobacco Corp. and the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines have collaborated with the capitol for a forum on child labor prevention here yesterday.
The forum tackled the problem on child labor particularly in farming, small-scale fisheries and livestock husbandry which have a 58-percent labor force composed of minors.
Roman Militsyn, PMFTC president, said Philip Morris International and PMFTC are taking the problems of child labor seriously.
“Agriculture is very important to us because our company has evolved over the last few years from being solely a cigarette manufacturer into an agricultural company as well, with almost 5,000 directly contracted farmers. We also have many more thousands of indirectly contracted farmers through our leaf suppliers. In the municipality of Claveria, we are now supporting farmers who are planting tobacco all year round,” Militsyn said.
He said PMI is very active in ensuring that child labor is progressively eliminated from tobacco farming.
Militsyn said the cigarette maker champions this through its “good” agricultural labor practices, aimed at progressively eliminating child labor and other labor abuses from all farms where PMI’s affiliates and leaf suppliers source tobacco worldwide.
Misamis Oriental Gov. Yevgeny Vincente Emano said the capitol monitored no serious child labor case in on the province “but we should be more advanced and prevent this from happening.” (misor-pio)
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