US to launch competition for projects to end modern slavery

The United States will launch a competition in the coming weeks to find projects that will reduce modern slavery, which by one estimate affects nearly 46 million people around the world, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced Wednesday. She told a U.N. Security Council meeting focusing on the scourge that the initiative will seek to raise $1.5 billion, partly from the U.S. government but mostly from foreign governments and the private sector, to help countries break trafficking rings and support survivors. Haley said groups that receive funding "must target a 50 percent reduction" in the people they seek to help escape slavery.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said armed conflicts "are especially virulent breeding grounds" for human trafficking resulting in forced prostitution, sexual slavery, forced marriage, trade in human organs and forced labor.

According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index that ranks 167 countries, an estimated 45.8 million people are subject to some form of modern slavery which it defines as "situations where one person has taken away another person's freedom - their freedom to control their body, their freedom to choose to refuse certain work or to stop working - so that they can be exploited."

Guterres quoted International Labor Organization statistics saying 21 million people globally are victims of forced labor and exploitation.

"Annual profits are estimated to be $150 billion," he said.

The secretary-general said much greater priority is being given to drug trafficking which is "an awful crime, but to traffic in human beings is, I must say, much worse."

"Global supply-chains have transformed many lives for the better - but not always without costs," Guterres said. "Clothes, food, smartphones, jewelry and other consumer goods may bear, wittingly or unwittingly, the traces of exploitation. Gleaming new skyscrapers may owe some of their shine to the sweat of bonded laborers."