"I thought I was
going to die. They kept me chained up, they didn't care about me or give me any
food…They sold us like animals, but we are not animals – we are human
beings."
21 million men, women and children are enslaved globally,
according to the International Labour Organisation. These people may have been
sold like property, forced to work under mental or physical threat, or find
themselves controlled by their "employers".
Last month the Nestle company, along with Cargill and Archer
Daniels Midland, failed to get the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a lawsuit
seeking to hold them liable for the alleged use of child slaves in cocoa
farming in the African nation of Ivory Coast.
The high court’s refusal to take up an appeal by the three
commercial giants comes after Nestle admitted in 2015 that it had bought
materials from Thailand produced on the backs of forced labor. In reporting
that it had unknowingly used such products, the company said it was entering a
new era of self-policing.
Andrew Wallis, chief executive of Unseen UK, an
anti-trafficking charity advocating for more supply chain accountability, argues
that Nestl矇’s self-reporting could also be seen as a tactic to head off or
deflate other pending civil litigation suits. This would be the same Nestle'
that continued selling infant formula to mothers in poor world slums although
they knew that using formula with dirty water would course the deaths and
morbidity of infants. And they suborned and bribed doctors and nurses to do so.
“It’s easy to own up to something that has already been
uncovered,” he says. “By the time Nestl矇 owned up to slavery in the Thai
seafood industry it was accepted knowledge. It’ll be a brave new world when
companies are actually doing the real investigation to probe into part of their
supply chains that have remained outside the public domain.”
“If you buy prawns or shrimp from Thailand, you will be
buying the produce of slave labour," said Aidan McQuade, director of
Anti-Slavery International.
A six-month investigation has established slaves forced to
work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being
used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other
European retailers. Men who have managed to escape from boats supplying Thailand-based
Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, a company with an annual turnover of $33bn (£20bn),
and other companies like it told the Guardian of horrific conditions, including
20-hour shifts, regular beatings, torture and execution-style killings. Some
were at sea for years; some were regularly offered methamphetamines to keep
them going. Some had seen fellow slaves murdered in front of them. The supply
chain works in this way: Slave ships plying international waters off Thailand
scoop up huge quantities of "trash fish", infant or inedible fish. This
fish on landing to factories is ground down into fishmeal for onward sale to CP
Foods. The company uses this fishmeal to feed its farmed prawns, which it then
ships to international customers. The alarm over slavery in the Thai fishing
industry has been sounded before by non-governmental organisations and in UN
reports. The Guardian has established how the pieces of the long, complex
supply chains connect slavery to leading producers and retailers.
Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco, Aldi, Morrisons, the
Co-operative and Iceland as customers of CP Foods. They all sell frozen or
cooked prawns, or ready meals such as prawn stir fry, supplied by CP Foods and
its subsidiaries. CP Foods admits that slave labour is part of its supply
chain. "We're not here to defend what is going on," said Bob Miller,
CP Foods' UK managing director. "We know there's issues with regard to the
raw material that comes in to port, but to what extent that is, we just don't
have visibility."
Thailand is considered a major source, transit and
destination country for slavery, and nearly half a million people are believed
to be currently enslaved within Thailand's borders. There is no official record
of how many men are enslaved on fishing boats. But the Thai government
estimates that up to 300,000 people work in its fishing industry, 90% of whom
are migrants vulnerable to being duped, trafficked and sold to the sea. Rights
groups have long pointed to Thailand's massive labour shortage in its fishing
sector, which – along with an increased demand from the US and Europe for cheap
prawns – has driven the need for cheap labour.
Capitalism is slavery ultimately. An economic dictatorship
by capital exploiting all those who make the products and profits. The reformers
are really just calling for the spoils of empire to be spread out more equally
in the first world.
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