While this decision is disappointing and a blow to the six men’s case, it is not the sweeping corporate immunity that Cargill and Nestle’s lawyers had argued for. Instead, the court decision seems to further clarify just what kind of situation the Alien Tort Statute applies to. In this case, “the companies provide funding, planning, marketing, pesticides, education… that all occurred in the United States,” as Terry Collingsworth, one of the lawyers who crafted the case, explained on our “For a Better World” podcast. In their ruling, the Supreme Court stated that, “allegations of general corporate activity—like decision-making—cannot alone establish domestic application of the [Alien Tort Statute].” Multinational corporations have developed these long supply chains of suppliers and contractors across many industries. This decision chooses to overlook the massive power that these big corporations have to set the conditions in their supply chains. Instead, it reaffirms the value of having supply chains out of sight and keeping abuses offshore.

Corporate Solutions Are Failing to End Child Labor

The case, officially Cargill, Inc. v. Doe I, spans over 15 years, and too many continuing failures of voluntary commitments to end child labor in the cocoa industry. The case was initially brought in 2005 as the chocolate industry missed its first deadline to voluntarily address child labor under the Harkin-Engel protocol. Now, this verdict comes just a week after the International Labor Organization’s latest report warns that the rate of child labor is up for the first time in 20 years – and that growing inequality fueled by the global response to the pandemic is on track to increase that rate by an additional 9 million children by 2022. Regardless of the outcome of this specific Supreme Court case, it is high time for meaningful action on child labor.

It has been 20 years since the cocoa industry pledged to tackle child labor as part of the Harkin-Engel protocol, a voluntary deal struck to avoid binding legislation. In that time, we have seen numerous corporate social responsibility programs rolled out. Our “For a Better World” podcast spoke to people at the front lines of the rollout of those corporate pledges, and advocates and lawyers tracking the results. The resounding conclusion is that these corporate-led solutions have had limited effectiveness. Pledges to end child labor have not been coupled with meaningful efforts to pay a living income and tackle the root causes of child labor: poverty. Indeed, the number of cocoa-growing families in poverty is not declining. Just 9% of cocoa farmers in Ghana earned a living income, according to the 2020 Cocoa Barometer report. Recently, 35 organizations from across the globe, including Fair World Project, signed onto a statement calling on the chocolate industry to take real and meaningful action to address those root causes, dubbing the industry’s collective silence “shameful and inappropriate.”

It’s pretty clear that Nestle and Cargill are willingly and knowingly profiting off of forced child labor. Their arguments before the Court emphasized the threat this case posed to their “competitive advantage.” The Supreme Court did not go so far as to endorse that argument. Yet the Court’s ruling that those abuses are just a consequence of “general corporate activity” is an indictment of their whole business model. Real solutions are needed that are fit to tackle the systemic scope of the problem.

Real Change Means Real Accountability

We need to transform our food and farming systems so that forced child labor isn’t a norm in global supply chains, one that is deemed regrettable but allowed to persist. The fair trade movement has long advocated for a vision of global supply chains that enrich communities and support fair livelihoods for families. Yet voluntary commitments and ethical labeling are not going to bring about the sort of transformative change that is needed. A market-based approach to change cannot compete in a market where the competition can bank on the worst forms of abuse to keep their costs artificially low. While we may ambitiously speak of a world that puts people and planet before profit, that’s actually contrary to the shareholder primacy that’s baked into our current economy. Corporations’ responsibility is to their shareholders and to maximizing profits. Transformative change also requires real accountability and raising the cost of corporate abuses.

The U.S. Needs Meaningful Human Rights Due Diligence Legislation

This Supreme Court decision establishes the U.S. as an outlier around the globe, choosing to narrow the scope of corporate accountability. Meanwhile, countries around the world are moving towards mandatory human rights due diligence legislation, legislation that puts the onus on corporations to proactively address abuses in their supply chains instead of waiting for brave people to speak up and find their way to international courts of law.

Such legislation needs to include meaningful requirements for corporate accountability and address the full scope of human rights. That means recognizing living incomes and fair livelihoods as a human right. That also means centering the voices of those most impacted both in crafting the rules and in creating mechanisms for enforcement. Meaningful corporate accountability also means including corporate liability and access to remedy for those who are harmed. The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Nestle and Cargill makes clear just how urgent such conditions are.

Read through the Supreme Court’s decision and there is one perspective that is noticeably absent. Nowhere in the decision is there any acknowledgement of the horrendous abuses that the six survivors of trafficking and child labor endured. Their case has been making its way through courts since 2005. In that time, another generation of young people have spent their youth doing hazardous work and risking their health and lives. Future solutions need to include these voices, and their right to live and work with dignity.

Photo Credit: Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/Vq__yk6faOI?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink  

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In December, Nestle announced plans to build a massive $154-million-dollar coffee processing plant in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The plant would process Robusta coffee, a variety of coffee that commonly goes into instant coffee and cheaper blends (think Nescafe, for example). Much of the world’s supply of Robusta is grown in Brazil and Vietnam at lower elevations than the high mountain Arabica coffee that dominates Mexico’s coffee industry.  To support this plant, Nestle is asking the government to subsidize the planting of 80,000 hectares of Robusta, a volume that would make Mexico rival Brazil in coffee production.

Such an investment would dramatically change the face of Mexico’s coffee industry. For many years, Mexico was one of the top producers of organic and fair trade coffee and still the coffee industry there is dominated by small-scale coffee farmers whose families tend small diverse plots of land in the mountains. Robusta variety coffee, by contrast, is generally farmed on in large plantations where full sun and monoculture plantings mean heavy chemical fertilizer use.

Low Coffee Prices, Climate Change Threaten Livelihoods

This proposal comes at a particularly bad time for coffee farmers around the globe. While Nestle reported $7.3 billion dollars in profit last year, coffee farmers are seeing prices hit historic lows, hovering around $1/pound on the commodity market for much of 2018. These low prices come as many farmers are already struggling with the impacts of climate change. Irregular weather patterns mean increased drought and unseasonable rain washing away hillsides or damaging blossoms, and making plants more susceptible to fungal diseases like la roya. All these pressures drive down yields and quality—and these pressures have been building over the past half-decade or more.

Big Food vs. Small-scale Farmers

In Mexico, coffee farmers are facing all these challenges, and some additional ones too. While their new president, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador (often shortened to AMLO) was elected in part on a platform of standing up for small-scale farmers and rural people and speaking out against neoliberalism, so far his administration has not followed through. Instead, the latest budget slashes funding for the coffee sector, support that is vital for a sector that’s largely made up of small-scale, often indigenous farmers.

Pulling support from small-scale farmers and funneling it to corporate interests is a pattern that is, unfortunately, far too familiar. And the complaints that coffee producers raised as they took to the streets in Veracruz sound familiar as well.

While government officials promote the coffee processing plant as a potential source of jobs and growth for the region, farmer groups are skeptical. Nestle’s press release promises 250 new jobs and the potential to create up to 1200 jobs in the region. Yet this sort of investment only serves to further concentrate wealth and vertical integration in an industry that continues to consolidate.  According to the 2018 Coffee Barometer study, “Only 10% of the aggregate wealth of coffee stays in the producing countries,” and this extraction of wealth is noted as an obstacle to a sustainable coffee sector as well as economic development for coffee producers.

Invest in Agroforestry Not Industrial Farming

The Coordinadora Nacional de Organizaciones Cafetaleras (CNOC), the National Coalition of Coffee Organizations, has expressed concern that this will drive prices down for coffee farmers and push the market further towards low-quality instant coffee. Instead, they argue, the government should be supporting the growth of domestic coffee markets, allowing Mexican farmers to keep more of the value of their crop in the country.

Channeling this investment to Nestle is supporting the wrong kind of farming. An expansion of Robusta coffee planting has the potential to drive land grabs to build the massive plantations needed, fueling deforestation and squeezing out small-scale diverse farmers. There’s plenty of evidence that coffee farms, when planted with a diversity of trees and well-managed, can help sequester carbon and combat climate change. But that’s likely not what Nestle has in mind as such diverse agroforestry systems tend to require more investment of time and labor and yield diverse crops not the industrial stream of a single ingredient that they require.

No to Nestle, No to More Corporate Coffee

In a letter to the President and the Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development, members of CNOC make a series of demands to make this proposal a better deal for small-scale coffee producers—and everyone aside from the very few who stand to benefit from making Nestles more money:

• Not to provide financial support for Nestle’s proposed plantations.
• Not to fund robusta plantations through reforestation programs.
• To assess the environmental impact of developing Robusta plantations in Veracruz and surrounding states.
• To engage in dialogue with President Lopez-Obrador and the Secretary of Agriculture and Rural Development on their specific policy proposals for a stronger coffee sector that benefits the people of Mexico, not just massive multinational corporations.

Let President AMLO know that the international community of coffee drinkers is concerned about small-scale farmers—sign the petition today.

Who Profits from Your Coffee?

Deals like this offer a concrete reminder of why we highlight the importance of knowing who owns the company you’re buying coffee from. While the marketing materials of some of Nestle’s more premium brands like Blue Bottle Coffee or Chameleon Cold Brew may highlight their farmer partners and sustainability initiatives, their parent company is investing far more resources in projects that are bad for coffee producers and the planet. (And this project is just one of many—Nestle routinely comes in near the top of lists of corporate abusers for human and labor rights, water rights, and environmental issues).

If you’re looking to support small-scale coffee farmers, our list of mission-driven brands collects companies who are committed to working ethically throughout all their supply chains. Companies like Equal Exchange have been committed to working with small-scale farmers for more than three decades and others like Higher Grounds Coffee, Just Coffee, and Peace Coffee grew out of solidarity projects with Mexican coffee farmers.

Small-scale farmers around the world struggle to earn a livelihood. Meanwhile, multinational corporations like Nestle rake in the profits (in their case, $7.3 billion dollars per year). Show your support for small-scale farmers and against yet another project to make the second biggest food company a little bigger

The post Small-scale Farmers Stand Up to Nestle Coffee Processing Plant appeared first on Fair World Project.