Cutting-edge headlines on the trends that Halcyon monitors. This pilot is a taster for a free weekly version, to which you can subscribe from January 2012:
Kevin Bales explains the business of modern slavery, a multibillion-dollar economy that underpins some of the worst industries on earth.
The main findings:
It's only Iceland and Greenland where we can't find any cases of enslavement around the world.
There were about 27 million people in slavery in 2010, double the number taken from Africa before slavery was abolished.
However, this is the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery.
Likewise, the 40 billion dollars that they generate into the global economy each year is the tiniest proportion of the global economy to ever be represented by slave labour.
The average price of a human being today, around the world, is about $90.
The estimated cost of not just freedom, but sustainable freedom for the entire 27 million people in the planet in slavery is something like 10.8 billion dollars.
