Today, 27 million people are enslaved, more than at the height of the transatlantic slave trade.

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Saturday September 04, 2004 14:08 by redjade

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Slaves are cheap these days. Their price is the lowest it's been in about 4,000 years. And right now the world has a glut of human slaves - 27 million by conservative estimates and more than at any time in human history.

Although now banned in every country, slavery has boomed in the past 50 years as the global population has exploded. A billion people scrape by on $1 a day. That extreme poverty combined with local government corruption and a global economy that leaps national boundaries has produced a surge in the number of slaves - even though in the developed world, that word conjures up the 19th century rather than the evening news.

[....]

Yet despite this new largely unacknowledged slavery epidemic, Dr. Bales is optimistic. While the real number of slaves is the largest there has ever been, he says, it is also probably the smallest proportion of the world population ever in slavery. Today, he adds, we don't have to win the legal battle; there's a law against it in every country. We don't have to win the economic argument; no economy is dependent on slavery (unlike in the 19th century, when whole industries could have collapsed). And we don't have to win the moral argument; no one is trying to justify it any more.