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Of the approximately 1.1 billion workers active in agricultural production worldwide, nearly half are in wage labour. Many millions of these workers earn wages that place them on the bottom rung of the rural poverty. ladder and even below the minimum subsistence level, in spite of rising agricultural trade and labour productivity worldwide, says the International Labour Organization (ILO) in a report issued on 23 September.

Significantly, the share of women in agricultural employment is increasing, accounting for 20 to 30 per cent of total agricultural wage employment. Child labour is pervasive, amounting to as much as 30 per cent of the work-force in some developing countries.

Agricultural wage workers, the report indicates, spend as much as 70 per cent of their incomes for food. A subsistence wage - defined as an hourly wage sufficient to buy 1 kilo of the lowest-priced staple cereal - was found lacking in 40 per cent of sample countries. This means, in effect, that the working time required to obtain this kilo of cereal "ranges from less than 5 minutes (in Sweden) to over six hours (in Central African Republic), with the median working time being 37 minutes, which corresponds to the position of India". In five countries, mostly in Asia and Africa, "the working time is over 3 hours".

Another ILO report says that more than 45 per cent of all the world's women are now economically active. Although some progress has been made towards wage equality, women still earn 50 to 80 per cent of men's wages. In most developing countries, women's employment is still concentrated in a narrow range of"female" occupations with low-paid and low-skilled jobs predominating. The ILO's International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour is now active in more than 25 countries.

A call for the inclusion of a person under 25 years of age representing a youth organization in every national delegation to the United Nations was one of the recommendations set out in the final document of the World Youth Forum, which ended in Vienna on 29 November.

More than 600 participants from youth organizations in 150 countries took part in the Forum, which is the second such gathering organized by the United Nations, the first having taken place in Vienna in 1991.

When a disaster such as a cyclone or a war strikes, communications links are often one of the first things to be lost. Initially, this isolates the area, making it very hard for relief operations to ascertain...