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.
I remember one particularly bad factory in China. It produced outdoor tables, parasols, and gazebos, and the place was a mess. Work floors were so crowded with production materials that I could barely make my way from one end to the other. In one ar...Read More
Cyber slavery is emerging as a form of organized crime of unprecedented severity and scale. Conservative estimates suggest that tens of thousands of victims are held captive in scamming compounds. While getting spammed with fraudulent messages i...Read More
According to recent reports, the global palm oil market is expected to reach USD 92.84 billion in 2021. Palm oil and palm-based ingredients are found inapproximately 50 percent of supermarket products making them ever present in our daily consumptio...Read More
As the Global Reporting Initiative currently provides the most widely used set of voluntary sustainability reporting standards, the question arises as to the extent to which the Initiative's multi-stakeholder governance is helping towards ending mod...Read More
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