Prostitution needs to be legalised in South Africa ahead of the several hundred thousand football fans expected to arrive for the 2010 Fifa World Cup.
Child and human rights organisations have warned that human trafficking could worsen in the country ahead of the World Cup, with "trafficked" women and children being forced into the sex industry.
The experts say that the only way to prevent this is to decriminalise prostitution and promulgate trafficking laws.
This comes after a seminar by the Human Sciences Research Council and the International Organisation for Migration in Pretoria this week.
Professor Vasu Reddy, the acting director of the gender and development unit at the HSRC, said that if South Africa did not expedite the decriminalisation of the sex industry, it would have a ripple effect on human trafficking.
Reddy said South Africa should be preparing itself for a thriving sex industry during the event and called for the National Prosecuting Authority to fast-track and "prepare itself legally".
He said because South Africa was "fertile ground for human trafficking... we need to ensure that by 2010 we have laws governing prostitution in order to regulate it, and laws to govern human trafficking".
"We need proper legislation. At the moment our laws view human trafficking as extortion or kidnapping and this makes it impossible to track down and prosecute."
Reddy said because of the World Cup coming to South Africa, human trafficking syndicates, who force women and children into sex, saw the country as a viable option.
He said that delegates attending last month's conference by the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women and Children in Bangkok, Thailand, raised concerns about the trafficking and smuggling of vulnerable women and children ahead of the tournament.
Delegates revealed that the trafficking of Thai women to South Africa had doubled in recent years.
Thai authorities also complained that South Africa did not have anti-human trafficking laws.
According to delegates at the HSRC seminar, South Africans overlooked the issue of human trafficking in the context of the abuses against women and children.
They said men, women and children were brought to South Africa by close friends, family members and even siblings under false pretences and lured with the promise of jobs, only to be forced to provide sex services or slave labour.
Reddy said it was impossible to put a number to those trafficked into SA because "statistics are not reliable".
"Statistics are anecdotal evidence because cases of human trafficking are rarely reported and the victims who have been trafficked don't report it to the authorities. There is still a need for evidence-based research."
Delegates said that although the South African government was doing something about the scourge of the "comodification of women's and children's bodies", it would continue if nothing drastic was done.
"As we embark on another annual campaign of 16 Days of Activism Against Violence Against Women and Children, it is worth asking why human trafficking should warrant attention.
"Gender, politics, border patrols and crime mobilise around what can be termed severe forms of trafficking," said Mariam Khokhar, IOM's programme officer in Irregular Migration.
The spokesperson for the 2010 local organising committee, Tim Modise, said: "We are concerned about any emergence of problems in our society as a result of the World Cup. The LOC is part of the South African society. The World Cup is a national project.
"The 2010 project is not there to encourage criminality, but there are people out there who want to take advantage of an event of this magnitude."
Modise said the LOC would put its trust in regional, local and international authorities "to take appropriate measures to ensure that human trafficking, or any other form of criminality, does not take place as a result of 2010".
"Not only are we working with security people within the LOC, but we are working with other law enforcement agencies internationally, because such problems are not only South Africa's concern."