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Coffee: Slavery, Destruction and Shortage
What Coffee Drinkers Must Know
Coffee is one of our everyday products that appear in the 2018 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor worldwide.
The list also shows that labor and human rights abuses are currently taking place in 17 coffee-growing countries, mostly against vulnerable coffee farm workers and their families.
An in-depth investigation of the world’s largest coffee-growing nation, Brazil, discovered children and adults working under “conditions analogous to slavery” in some coffee farms. The investigative report revealed that these workers often are exposed to health and safety risks, including for using toxic pesticides, lacking protective equipment, and for living in poor conditions at coffee farms. And yet, their work is seriously underpaid, as usually “less than 2% of the retail price” goes to the coffee farmers, according to the DanWatch report, what makes them unable to afford a decent living.
These work conditions are terribly unfair and sometimes illegal — but it’s happening in the plain sight of major coffee retailers.
Two giant coffee companies, Nestlé and Jacobs Douwe Egberts, admitted that coffee from Brazilian farms where slavery-like labor conditions were discovered may have ended up in their supply chains. Yet they claimed not knowing the names of all farms and farmers that grow and supply the coffee they sell.
Slave labor evidence was also found at a Starbucks-certified Brazilian coffee farm, although the company says it hasn’t bought coffee from that farm in recent years.
These cases show that labor abuses can be occurring even in coffee farms “certified” and prized for commitments to sustainable practices.
Nevertheless, there is another bitter side of how coffee is being produced worldwide.
