Daily Times

For Britons everywhere this week, football was finally coming home after Team England scored its first-ever successful penalty shootout. By contrast, Pakistan never made it to Russia for the World Cup; sporting a lowly FIFA ranking of 198. Yet footie fans here are perhaps among the proudest of all.

And with good reason. After all, it is their footballs that international teams are kicking around. This has become somewhat of a tradition. During the previous World Cup in Brazil (2014), Pakistan debuted the “thermo bonded” ball. Prior to that, the country hand stitched footballs for almost all the World Cup tournaments from the 1990s to 2010.

The hub of all the action is the Punjabi city of Sialkot, which has long been known for its high-quality production of leather goods and surgical instruments. Another reason for good cheer is that there has, in recent years, been a clamp down on child labour. During the 1990s, this issue hit international headlines when it was discovered that children were being ‘employed’ to stich footballs by hand. Presently, manufacturing bigwigs insist that they have done away the concept of home-based factories.

There seems reason to believe them. Not least because the International Labour Organisation (ILO) back in 2013 gave the Sialkot business community a clean chit after the latter successfully completed the Child Labour Elimination Programme vis-à-vis the football manufacturing industry. That being said, an ongoing process of self-correction must always be in place. This is where the international community can play a positive role. Not by lecturing Pakistanis about how the West cares more for their children than we do in this part of the world. Simply because it is a misnomer.

But by introducing a fair and principled trade regime that moves beyond mere lip service to focus on abolishng the criminalised practice of child labour. By the same token, Pakistan needs to ensure it honours all its international obligations on this front. This will hopefully avoid a re-run of 2006 whereby Nike cancelled a huge order for hand stitched footballs from Sialkot. Admittedly, only after the multinational (MNCs) came under fire for promoting child labour; underscoring the need for continuous introspection. Nevertheless, with MNCs being increasingly pressurised into identifying the source of their (cheap) labour — this sets an initial equilibrium of sorts. Especially when such practices fly in the face of multi-billion-dollar advertising campaigns designed to sell mass consumerism under the banner of empowerment.

All of which should be good news for Pakistan and the children of Sialkot. *

Published in Daily Times, July 7^th 2018.