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.
Author: Thi Hoang, GI-TOC Decades of wars and internal conflicts have driven generations and millions of Afghan families into impoverishment, illiteracy, unemployment, and displacement, rendering them unable to provide for their household members...Read More
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has placed mil- lions of indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh citizens from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR or Uyghur Region) into what the government calls “surplus labour” (富余劳动力) ...Read More
Year-on-year, the number of migrant fishers crewing United Kingdom-flagged fishing vessels is seemingly increasing. Primarily from European states, the Philippines, and Ghana with fewer numbers of fishers from Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka, there ...Read More
Authors: Hannah Darnton, program manager in ethics, technology and human rights at Business for Social Responsibility.Thi Hoang, analyst at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. There is a growing need for the developmen...Read More
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