Friday, June 21, 2013

The slave trade

Sugar and cotton production fueled the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the Americas.

The US State Department released its annual report on human trafficking reported that even in 2013, slave labor is still embedded in the global food system. As many as 27 million men, women, and children are estimated to be trafficking victims at any given time.

The agriculture sector has an ugly track record when it comes to labor abuses.  Polaris Project, an anti-slavery organization, notes, agricultural work today is often isolated and transient, with peaks and lulls in employment due to changing harvest seasons. These conditions leave workers vulnerable, creating opportunities that farmers and food factory owners continue to exploit. Malian children transported to Cote d'Ivoire for forced labor on cocoa farms, and ethnic Indian families forced to work in the Bangladesh tea industry, to name a couple.  Shrimp farms and processing plants in Thailand are heavily reliant on migrant workers from Laos, Burma and Cambodia. Thai labor activists have documented abuses of Burmese migrant workers who work in the shrimp-peeling sheds.

Forced labor, including debt bondage, also continues to sustain palm oil plantations in Malaysiaand Indonesia. (Palm oil is used in lots of processed foods such as  Dunkin Donuts) Cargill, the largest importer of palm oil and trader of 25 percent of the world's palm oil supply, says it has a policy of not using any slave or child labor. But the Rainforest Action Network has alleged that one of Cargill's palm oil suppliers used slave labor on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

The U.S., food workers aren't exempt from abuse and even slavery. Men with intellectual disabilities who worked at an Iowa turkey-processing plant suffered severe verbal and physical abuse for over 20 years. Labor groups have documented cases of enslaved migrants working in Florida's tomato industry.

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