Additionally, prostitution, although illegalized in the new 2007 constitution, still remains widespread. It has been popular in the country at least sincethe early 1800s, and grew rapidly during the Vietnam War (1955-1975). Today, thousands of women remain trafficked in Thailand.3Prostitution is considered to be an easy way to make money, and is a commercial industry for Thailand, with many foreigners coming to Thailand solely for that purpose.

For example, 148 countries have signed on to the Palermo Protocol, the international effort headed by the United Nations to combat trafficking,

approximately 100,000 of those victims are in the United States.

Human trafficking is flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Iran, with little effort by the countries' governments to combat it, the U.S. State Department said Monday.

"a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor."

approximately 100,000 of those victims are in the United States.

For example, 148 countries have signed on to the Palermo Protocol, the international effort headed by the United Nations to combat trafficking, Ambassador Luis CdeBaca said, and 130 countries around the world have enacted laws criminalizing all forms of human trafficking.

“We have a culture that normalizes the sex industry so that it is seen as a benign, ‘victimless’ crime,”

New report estimates almost $100 billion annual profits in sex trafficking alone.

International Labor Organization (ILO) suggest that human trafficking—essentially, coercing people to work under unjust, often inhumane, circumstances—is a growth business.

ILO’s study suggests that what often pushes people into bonded labor is not a constant level of grinding poverty, but a sudden financial setback.

An estimated 80,000 Filipino Muslims without legal status, including 10,000 children, reside in Sabah, with some vulnerable to trafficking.

Thailand, Malaysia and Venezuela promote themselves as modern, fast-developing countries, but their Tier 3 ranking puts them among the world’s most lawless, oppressive and dysfunctional.

The downgrades could cause some multinational companies to reconsider investments in industries accused of using trafficked labor such as fisheries, a lucrative business in Thailand, the world’s largest exporter of shrimp.

U.S. State Department's 2014 Trafficking in Persons Report as they did not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.

The U.S. State Department downgraded Thailand, Malaysia and Venezuela on Friday to its list of the world's worst centers of human trafficking, opening up the countries to possible sanctions and dumping them in the same category as North Korea and Syria.

At the close of this past century a number of factors gave a huge boost to human trafficking, giving it a global scale, and making it the fastest growing criminal enterprise at this time. Three overriding events created a ‘perfect storm’ for this crime to flourish.

Traffickers are opportunistic hunters. In the past few decades the opportunity for profit has skyrocketed, and the risks of being penalized have greatly diminished. It is estimated that human trafficking accounts for more than 32 billion dollars in illegal profits every year, more than Nike, Google, and Starbucks combined. Yet it remains an almost invisible crime.

Prostitution is an institution akin to slavery, one so intrinsically discriminatory and abusive that it cannot be fixed--only abolished.

Today, sex trafficking is a high-tech, globalized, electronic market, and predators are involved at all levels, using the same methods to control prostituted women that batterers use against their victims: minimization and denial of physical violence, economic exploitation, social isolation, verbal abuse, threats and intimidation, physical violence, sexual assault, and captivity

Prostitution is widely socially tolerated, with the buyers socially invisible.

Victims of trafficking can be any age, and any gender. However, a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking both as victims and as culprits. Female offenders have a prominent role in human trafficking, particularly where former victims become perpetrators as a means of escaping their own victimisation. Most trafficking is carried out by people whose nationality is the same as that of their victim.

In UNODC's Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, sexual exploitation was noted as by far the most commonly identified form of human trafficking (79%) followed by forced labour (18%).

Thousands of schools across the U.S. rushed last year to stop feeding their students meat that contained the ammonia-treated beef, known by industry as lean finely textured beef.

Schools in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Texas have now done an about face and also put in orders with the USDA for ground beef that may contain the product, government data obtained by POLITICO reveal.

Considered by the beef industry to be an impressive innovation, lean finely textured beef is made from the remnant scraps of cattle carcasses that were once deemed too fatty to go into human food.

This freshness not only affects the taste of your food, but the nutritional value which declines with time

Because the produce will be handled less, locally grown fruit does not have to be “rugged” or to stand up to the rigors of shipping

food often travels to our plate creates environmental damage that outweighs the benefit of buying organic.

conomic reason to stay open and undeveloped.

less susceptibility to harmful contamination.

When businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction