How to recognize food and clothing produced by slaves (even children)

There are those who try to read the future in the dregs of coffee cups and those who, by investigating carefully, have found something else entirely. For example, eight-year-old children in Guatemala work on plantations for almost 40 hours a week in exhausting conditions to harvest the precious brown beans of Arabica or Robusta. The daily wage is equivalent to a few cents, the minimum needed to buy a cup of milk. By looking carefully among the threads of the t-shirts we wear we could instead find the faces of doctors and teachers from Turkmenistan who for paltry sums are forced to collect 20 to 30 kilograms of cotton a day.

We can call it forced labor or more bluntly “contemporary slavery”. The phenomenon is widespread throughout the world and sees over 27 million people forced into inhuman and degrading conditions, including over three million minors. The European Parliament has just voted on a law to prevent products resulting from these constraints from being sold on the European market, but applying it with effective results could prove more difficult than expected.

Children at work 9 hours a day

For coffee, as well as in Guatemala, clues to exploitation have also been found in Honduras, Guinea, Brazil, as well as in Kenya and Mexico. Compared to other crops such as rice or sugar cane, coffee requires much more labor and those who take care of the harvest in Latin America are the Jornaleros, people who migrate for weeks or months to obtain a paltry daily wage from coffee. In the case of Guatemala, those who migrate are mainly families of indigenous farmers, who bring their children, even newborns, with them to the plantations. The pickers, as Slow Food explains in a report, are placed in Galeras, precarious accommodation often without electricity or gas and with terrible health and hygiene conditions. During the week, only half a day is “free” and one stays on the plantations for no less than 9 hours a day. In short: you work and you sleep. The conditions that apply to adults are identical to children. No school, no games. Only struggle with the bitter aftertaste of coffee, the same one that ends up in our cups.

Global slavery

However, this is not about pointing to a single product or country. According to data from the UN labor agency (ILO), the phenomenon of forced labor affects approximately 27.6 million people in the world, of which 3.3 million are minors. Over half are located in the Asia-Pacific region. Scrolling through the list drawn up in 2022 by the United States Department of Labor we find 159 different goods from 78 countries and areas. Cocoa from Nigeria, sesame from Paraguay, rice from the Philippines, beef and corn from Brazil appear. Agriculture is the sector that presents the most critical issues on all continents, but there is no shortage of other examples, such as silver from Bolivia, bricks from Egypt, cotton from China, Pakistan and Turkmenistan. Solar panels and electronic components also appear, without forgetting toys. Coming from the People’s Republic of China, they are still too often assembled by the hands of children, who instead of playing with them assemble them by touching dangerous chemical products.

New chains

Chains are not necessary to talk about forced labor. According to the International Labor Organization, threats, sexual abuse, unsustainable working conditions and when people’s vulnerability is taken advantage of, damaging their dignity, are sufficient. “Much of forced labor takes place in countries considered ‘poor’, but it is also widespread in states with authoritarian regimes such as China. The sectors where the risk of forced labor is very high concern consumer products such as technological and agricultural ones All goods that easily end up on the European Union market”, Anna Cavazzini, a German Green MEP, explained to Today.it. The parliamentarian contributed to the drafting of the regulation which provides for a ban on the marketing of products made with forced labor on the European Union market, as well as their export to third countries. The regulation was adopted by the EU Parliament on 23 April with 555 votes in favour, 6 votes against and 45 abstentions. A very large majority, also the result of a series of compromises. The intent is noble, but the regulation has some gaps and weak links.

The scope was reduced first and foremost by the painstaking work of some EU governments, such as France and Germany, terrified at the idea of ​​burdening their companies with too many burdens or undermining relations with an economic pillar such as China.

Chinese compromise

Beijing turned up its nose as soon as Brussels presented a draft of this law, fearing direct repercussions on exports of products from Xinjang, at the center of numerous international investigations. In this region of the People’s Republic, according to human rights activists, around one million people work in slave conditions, in particular from the Uighur minority, together with members of other minorities such as the Kazakh one. The cotton harvested is destined for major clothing brands, various reports claim. While Washington has adopted a specific law to ban imports from this area, European Union governments have wanted to avoid specific rules irritating Beijing. A specific ban for the People’s Republic of China could also run afoul of the World Trade Organization’s anti-discrimination laws.

Shein and Temu: what we pay to have everything (almost) free

The proposed law gives the national authorities (identified by each State) or the Commission, if the products come from third countries, the task of investigating suspected cases of forced labor in supply chains. In the event that the suspicions are confirmed, “the offending products will be promptly withdrawn” both from the physical market and from online sales, as well as from customs. However, fines are foreseen for responsible companies. The mechanism is not easy to implement. Contrary to what MEPs had requested, governments in March this year achieved that the burden of proof, rather than on companies, falls on the national authorities or civil society organizations that report. The latter will have to demonstrate that a product is the result of slavery or child labor.

The site where you can find banned and risky products

Brussels has also committed to creating a “Single Portal on Forced Labor”, where citizens will be able to find updated information on banned products, as well as sectors simply at risk. The database will be a point of reference for European companies that want to act ethically and responsibly, in order to avoid suppliers suspected of exploiting workers and children. However, acting on the supply chain costs more than cleaning up one’s image. Among the sources of information, the competent authorities will also be able to use complaints from journalists and non-governmental organizations. If investigating the supply chain from raw materials to European physical and online stores is an extremely expensive process and requires a lot of resources and energy, a small rescue loophole has been created: if all the necessary evidence were to be missing, for example due to the lack of collaboration by a company or the authority of a third country, the EU will be able to adopt the ban even only on the basis of the data already available.

Victims without compensation

The main issue concerns production chains, which are increasingly complex to reconstruct. Many companies in South-East Asia, such as those in Thailand, Cambodia or Vietnam, which export goods worth billions of euros to the European Union (especially clothing and footwear), source raw materials mainly from China, where carrying out checks is almost impossible. Despite the pressure exerted, compensation for victims as a mandatory element remained a pipe dream. “It is important for us that the legislation does not limit itself to blocking the import of goods, but also encourages a system of compensation for victims. However, our request to include reparation as a condition for lifting the ban was not accepted by the Council during the last negotiations”, Saskia Bricmont, a Green MEP also involved in this dossier, explained to Today.it. In the end only a definition of “repair” was included, the same one also present in the directive on due diligence (business responsibility), the other law that reminds companies of their responsibilities with respect to the goods they produce and import. The two regulations travel in parallel together with the law on deforestation. The real challenge will be to make this “package” operational and prevent it from being just a nice range of human rights to be opened up to look at oneself in the mirror, deluding oneself into always being on the side of the “good”.