Life is tough when you're poor in West Africa, but it's particularly tough if you're a kid. And thanks to a disconnect between local traditions and trade policies imposed by the West, it's only getting tougher.

Rich countries and groups like the World Bank have encouraged poor country governments like Ghana's to eliminate tariffs on foreign food imports. For this reason, imports like rice from the United States are cheaper to buy in Ghana than rice grown locally. In turn, Ghanaian farmers are making less and less for the crops they grow.

But local tradition has not changed to recognize that fact. In rural Ghana, the number of children a man has is a measure of his status. Men marry many wives. One girl I know has 75 brothers and sisters!

But as food prices have fallen, men have been less and less able to pay for all those children. Inevitably children, particularly girls, are squeezed out of the home. I've reported on such children in diamond and gold mines, in households, on cocoa plantations, in prostitution and, in this story, in Ghana's fishing industry.

All the child slaves I've met have shared a haunting sadness. They're too young to understand why they're in the situation they're in, or to be angry with anyone. All they know is that their parents have abandoned them and that they're hungry and suffering.

I had my first child, a son, three months ago. Revisiting the story of Never and his siblings now, it's really hit home to me just how wrenching a predicament these parents are in when they decide they have no other choice but to sell or abandon their own children.