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[haitiwebs]

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - More than 4,000 children a year are being smuggled out of Haiti and forced to work as beggars, farmers and construction workers by adults who keep their wages, according to a new study made public on Monday.

More than 2,000 of these children end up each year in the neighboring Dominican Republic, many of them smuggled across the border at the request of their parents, concluded the report by the U.N. children's fund UNICEF ( news - web sites) and the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration.

"The parents see this as a way of obtaining some additional income through the children's work. Sometimes they use the money to cover school fees and necessary materials after they return," the two international agencies found.

The problem is most prevalent in northern Haiti, the study found. While about half of the children go to the Dominican Republic for three to four months and then return to Haiti to attend school, many of the others end up staying on as low-wage farm workers, it found.

There they live "under extremely precarious conditions, in terms of housing and food, and because of their age and illegal status are prone to physical and verbal abuse," it said.

While laborers have been migrating from Haiti to the Dominican Republic for decades, "the worrying new twist is the trafficking in children," UNICEF official Alec Fyfe said.

"The families see the middlemen doing the smuggling almost as benefactors due to the extreme poverty in Haiti," Fyfe told Reuters.

Parents pay the smugglers $60 to $80 per child to take their children to the Dominican Republic, the study said. The smugglers in turn pay Dominican border guards $1 to $3 per child to sneak them across the border, UNICEF officials said.

The goal of the study was to help Haiti and the Dominican Republic work together to combat the problem. The findings were first presented last week at a workshop in Santiago, Dominican Republic.