Fat profits on the one hand, starvation wages on the other: The inequalities along the supply chains for our food are enormous. Dieter Schwarz, owner of Lidl and Kaufland, earns the annual income of a farmworker on a pineapple plantation in Costa Rica every six seconds. While German supermarkets earned record profits during the pandemic, farmworkers on the plantations supplying produce for the supermarket shelves had to work for wages that barely suffice to feed a family.
Especially precarious is the situation facing migrant workers in agriculture. Without them, the supply chains for numerous foodstuffs would collapse. For a number of products, migrant workers represent half the workforce or more. Many of them leave their homeland to earn a living as seasonal workers. In return, they often must accept exploitative working conditions. For many migrants, these conditions nevertheless amount to the best of several bad options, given the difficult circumstances in their homelands.
Newsletter Announcement can be found here. ABOUT THE AWARD The Stop Slavery Award was launched by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, as an action resulting from the 2015 Trust Conference. The initiative recognises companies that have taken concrete...Read More
The Home Office routinely detains people who are subject to immigration control only to release them again back into the community, causing them significant harm in the process. This includes survivors of trafficking and slavery. Survivors are detai...Read More
The NPR article highlights ongoing forced labor and human trafficking in the global seafood industry, especially in Thailand. In response, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch launched the Seafood Slavery Risk Tool to help retailers assess an...Read More
The risk of forced labour in global supply chains remains one of the most significant human rights issues for companies – and their investors – worldwide. At least 25 million people are currently estimated to be victims of forced labour, coerced...Read More
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