AP

CONSIDERING it is a business that has provoked wars in centuries past, scant attention is paid to the modern slave trade. But one way to track the trade in people is the recently released annual report on trafficking in persons from America's State Department. And it makes for gloomy reading. Though there have been improvements of late, the numbers of people involved are still appallingly high. Approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders each year and millions more are traded domestically. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are at least 2.5m people in forced labour at any one time, including sexual exploitation, as a result of trafficking.

Efforts to wipe out this modern slave trade are hampered because human trafficking is a big business. It is impossible to know the exact sums involved but recent estimates of the value of the global trafficking trade have put it as high as $32 billion. The United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking describes it as a high-reward and low-risk crime. People come cheap and many countries lack the necessary laws to target traffickers, or they are not properly enforced. Worse still, it is often the victims of the traffickers that are treated as criminals.

Women suffer most in this respect: the report estimates that 80% of victims of international trafficking are women forced into some form of prostitution. Women are involved in trafficking too, though this is less common. In Europe and Central and south Asia women are often recruited by other women who were themselves the victims of trafficking. In part to avoid detection by the authorities, traffickers grant victims limited freedom while simultaneously coercing them to return home to recruit other women to replace them.

The report also casts a light on the increasingly important role that technology is playing in the trade, both in combating it and its perpetration. The internet helps to identify and track down the perpetrators but increasingly it is becoming part of the problem. Chatrooms are used to exchange information about sex-tourism sites; people are targeted through social-networking sites where pornographic records of sex trafficking are also bought and sold; victims are ensnared through instant messaging.

There are a few bright spots. Ethiopia is commended for its efforts to combat the trafficking of children by establishing child-protection units across the country. Romania's creation of a national database to identify and respond quickly to trends in trafficking is also praised as is Madagascar's campaign to wipe out sex tourism.

The report ranks countries into 3 tiers determined by how compliant they are deemed to be with America's Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. Predictably, some countries listed in tier 3, the worst offenders, have responded to the accusations with outrage. But these are not the only countries that have a problem. There is also “special watch list” of tier-2 countries that need careful monitoring.

The foreign ministry of Cuba, a country the report places in tier 3, firmly denied that the report had any value and used the opportunity for a customary jibe at America, saying that “the government of the United States has a lot to do in its own country to combat the rampant phenomenon there of prostitution, sexual exploitation, forced labour and the trafficking of people.”

Of the six Gulf states, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were listed as Tier 3 and Bahrain crept up to the tier-2 watch list. Only the United Arab Emirates made it to tier 2 on the basis of its efforts to combat abuse against foreign domestic servants and construction workers. Foreign ministers from the Gulf Co-operation Council simply said that the information in the report was wrong. They claim that America “aims to practise unjustified pressure for political ends”.

And there is some evidence they could use to back up this assertion. One country exempt from the rankings is America itself. Self-analysis is always difficult but the report, though comprehensive, might have more force if America were to turn the spotlight fully on itself.