Businesses
Buying into Slavery
All over the world slaves are forced to work and supply us with the things we buy. Raw materials and commodities like cotton, sugar, iron, gold, diamonds, coffee, timber, fish, cocoa, as well as goods like clothing, shoes, toys, and bricks come from slave labor. These commodities and goods flow into the global product chain and arrive in our homes. Businesses can help stop slavery by taking responsibility and cleaning up their products chains. As consumers, the last step in that product chain, each of us has to take responsibility as well. The challenge of getting slave-made goods out of our lives hinges on the fact that slaves make only a small proportion of any particular thing we might buy. Yes, there is slavery in cotton, but the total amount of cotton tainted with slavery is a very small part of the global cotton crop. How do we uncover the slave-grown cotton, free the slaves on the cotton farm, get slave-made goods out of our lives and ensure the slavery doesn’t happen again? | | We think of ending slavery and freeing slaves as expensive, but Kevin Bales explains that there is actually a "Freedom Dividend". |
The answer is to stop slavery where it occurs. Most profits of slavery are kept by the slaveholder, the criminal that actually holds and uses slaves. Since there are many more farmers that don’t use slaves, boycotts of goods that might be made with slave-made materials like cotton can hurt honest farmers. If we all stop buying cotton clothing the impact on poor farmers around the world would be devastating. The answer is to work with honest farmers and local governments to attack slavery at its source. One way to do that is to get everyone who benefits from a commodity or product to work together to clean up its “product-chain.” We have to work across borders and find ways to obey local as well as international laws. One way to do this is shown in the Cocoa Protocol– an agreement between the chocolate industry, human rights groups, labor unions, and consumers, that pledges they will all work together to remove child labor and slave labor from the product chain. Working together, the chocolate industry has provided more than $10 million to stop slavery where it occurs on the farms of West Africa. Much more work remains, but the Cocoa Protocol has proven that region-wide anti-slavery work is possible and effective, and provides a model upon which businesses and the anti-slavery movement can improve. Fair Trade coffee is available at Caribou Coffee, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Safeway, Giant Foods, Target, Dunkin’ Donuts and many other shops. You can also order specially roasted Fair Trade coffee from outlets like Peace Coffee. |
It is also possible to avoid slave-made goods by buying from companies that are part of the “Fair Trade” movement. Fair Trade means that farmers get a living wage for their crops so they can afford to send their children to school. It also means that they are less likely to be tricked into slavery. Fair Trade chocolate, coffee, sugar, clothing and many other goods are available now, and the supply will increase as more consumers choose to support this way of ensuring a clean product chain.
|