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.
The globalisation of supply chains, facilitated by technologicaldevelopments and spurred by firm’s attempts to maximise profitsthrough lower labour costs, shorter lead times and weaker labourprotections in developing countries, has contributed to ...Read More
The ASEAN-Australia Counter Trafficking is a 10-year partnership funded by the Australian Government (2019-2028) that supports ASEAN Member States to implement and report on their obligations under the ASEAN Convention against Trafficking in Persons...Read More
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
This report presents the findings and recommendations arising from an 18-month research project, conducted between February 2021 and July 2022, which used feminist, participatory, action research methods to investigate the vulnerability to modern sl...Read More
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