Monthly Archives: February 2020

Responding to child labour in Nespresso’s supply chain

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Originally published by Thomson Reuters Foundation News

No one who has ever dealt with the challenges of agricultural livelihoods in the global South should ever be surprised that child labour remains an issue. However a report that Channel 4’s Despatches programme has filmed children picking coffee beans and hauling sacks on six Guatemalan farms believed to supply Nespressogives a shocking glimpse of the cynicism with which some businesses seem to treat this issue.

In responding to the reports Guillaume Le Cunff, Nespresso’s CEO, stated that “Nespresso
has a zero tolerance of child labour”, and the company noted over the past four years only 15 child labour cases had been identified by third-party auditors in Nespresso’s supply chains. All had been “effectively resolved” according to the business.

However, Mr Le Cunff also mentioned that coffee suppliers are given “a day or two days”
advanced notice before spot checks take place. With practices like that, one can only
imagine  Mr Le Cunff’s shock – SHOCK! – to discover there is child labour in his supply chain.

To be fair, audits are used by many big companies to give a façade of transparency rather than actually putting in the hard work that is necessary to more effectively tackle the issue. However, even with the best will in the world, audits are a poor instrument for resolution of child labour.

Unlike child slavery, which is the trafficking of children to a third party for the purposes of exploitation, child labour tends to occur within the family context. In other words, those who practice child labour are often the child’s own parents who are often trying to do their best for their kids in horrendously difficult circumstances.

That their best intentions for their child result in child labour is a consequence of poverty. It is a consequence of the poverty of families who put their children into the fields because they may not have enough money to eat let alone send their kids to school. It is a consequence of the poverty of communities which may not even have schools or, where there are buildings, may not have qualified teachers to staff them.

Audits by their very nature do not address these underlying causes of child labour. As
Nespresso appears to practice them they just make sure that labouring children are not
there to be seen when the inspectors show up with their note pads for fear it puts
consumers off their coffee.

Even where businesses pay premiums to suppliers for the commodities that they purchase, as Nespresso appears to do, this is often insufficient to end child labour in communities: landless labourers will never benefit from premiums; and families with only small parcels of land still may not earn enough from such payments to obtain a living income.

Hence, it would, paradoxically, be a pity if these reports of Nespresso’s failings put people
off buying their coffee. If businesses stop trading with poor communities they will be
impoverished further. Instead of boycotting Nespresso consumers should demand better of it and, as George Clooney, Nespresso’s public face for many years, said “hold everyone’s promise to account.”

So what does “doing better” look like? First it requires that businesses recognise that, like
any human rights or poverty challenge, child labour is a political issue. That is, it relates to the allocations of power and resources within communities and within wider societies. So if businesses want to address child labour in a meaningful way then they must engage with those issues.

Specifically, they need to act to advance gender equity, economic diversification, and child rights within the communities from which they source ensuring that the distinctive
challenges of the landless and, in particular, girls are directly addressed. Current models of trade and audits simply do not tackle these aspects of poverty. Instead there must be
specific focus on women’s political and economic empowerment in communities, establishing effective cultures of child protection, and ensuring that the landless have a
proper stake in the local economy.

Businesses must also work to ensure good governance, both nationally and locally in the
countries with which they do business. For example, businesses pay significant amounts in tax to the countries from which they source their commodities. It is reasonable for them to ask if national governments are using that revenue to effectively reduce poverty in the communities from which they source: Are they providing student grants for needy children? Or do all the schools have enough books and desks?

In spite of the complexities progress is being made. The number of children in child labour fell by 16 million from 168 million to 152 million between 2012 and 2016. Further progress depends on businesses like Nespresso properly engaging with the issue and its underlying causes.

As such Dispatches provides a moment of truth for the business. We all await to see if they rise to the challenge or merely tinker with their public relations.

The Volunteer: the true story of the resistance hero who infiltrated Auschwitz, by Jack Fairweather

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Witold Pilecki

In the vastness of the Second World War, one fact contends for the title of most startling of all, and it is this: Polish officer Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz.

It is true that, when he first agreed to the assignment in 1940, he probably could not have conceived of the scale of the risk and abject horror that he would encounter there. After all he took this intelligence mission specifically to find out what was going on in this secretive German facility. But having seen what was happening he still stayed for three years, risking his life every day in a effort to build a resistance movement there and to alert the outside world to what was happening.

A veteran of both the 1920 Poland-Russia war and the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany Witold was a brave man with no illusions about war. But he had never seen anything like Auschwitz. No one had.

The reports that Witold sent to the resistance in Warsaw and to the Allies in London detailed something unprecedented in human history: the construction of an industrialised programme of mass murder. In the shadow of this Witold’s organisation gathered intelligence and, where they could, assassinated Nazis. But Witold also realised that kindness was resistance in that every time someone shared meagre food or helped a fellow prisoner it was a refusal to accept the dehumanisation that the Nazis intended for them.

Even seeing the Nazi atrocities against Jews, political prisoners and Russian prisoners of war with his own eyes Witold could barely comprehend it so vast and irrational was that killing. But the Allied High Commands who refused to respond to Witold’s pleas for direct action against this genocide have no such excuse. The cumulative evidence provided to them at enormous cost by the Polish Home Army and the Jewish Agency can have left little doubt as to what was happening. But thousands of miles away from the death cries of Jewish women and children and the stink of incinerated human flesh Churchill and Roosevelt found plenty of excuses for inaction.

Witold eventually escaped to make a direct appeal to the Home Army for military support to an uprising in Auschwitz. But by this stage they too were preoccupied with other things, most particularly their plans for an uprising in Warsaw to reassert Polish independence at war’s end. So the courageous resistance network that Witold had built up in Auschwitz was left hanging, eventually to be liquidated by the SS.

Witold died knowing that his mission to Auschwitz had been a failure. Furthermore as someone who was regarded as a traitor by the Stalinist authorities who replaced the Nazis the full details of what he did were also covered up until the fall of the Soviet Union. But, as Witold said before his death,”I tried to live my life in such a fashion so that in my last hour, I would be happy rather than fearful. I find happiness in knowing that the fight was worth it.”

Jack Fairweather’s book is a superb, and superbly gripping, tribute to this man of conscience and action who the butchers of history tried to erase. In spite of his failures Witold’s life stands as an enormous indictment of all those who fail to use the power that they have to diminish human suffering.

The Anarchy: the relentless rise of the East India Company, by William Dalrymple

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Summary: a gripping account of the most hostile corporate takeover in history – the East India Company’s bloody seizure of the Mughal Empire

The East India Company was established in 1600 to facilitate trade between England and South Asia. New markets were desperately needed, then as now, following England’s hubristic decision to politically separate itself from its natural economic hinterland in mainland Europe.

The East India Company eventually established trading posts in the Mughal empire, at the time probably the wealthiest state in the world. By the mid-18th Century however cracks began to show in that empire as it lost territory to the south and came under attack from other powerful states in the north: Persia even sacked Delhi in the late 1730s.

By this stage the East India Company was already in possession of an army from earlier conflicts with the French in the region so it soon became drawn into these wars, first as a king-maker allying itself to different south Asian factions, then seizing the opportunity to take the whole state for itself. In other words the British subjugation of India began, literally, as the most hostile of corporate takeovers.

The cataclysm that British rule represented for ordinary south Asians, something still substantially under appreciated in Britain itself, was the subject of Shashi Tharoor’s excoriating Inglorious Empire. Dalrymple traces the origins of this to the general lack of concern by the English for their newly acquired subjects. Rather they viewed their new conquests as “a pirate views a galleon”, and plundered with murderous abandon.

Even the onset of famine in Bengal as a consequence of East India Company depredations did nothing to blunt their extraordinary rapaciousness. The state continued to be looted to provide riches for the Company officers and dividends to English shareholders with no thought of humanitarian relief for their victims. In the end it is estimated that up to 10 million people were starved to death.

In The Anarchy Dalrymple provides a fine narrative account of the establishment of the East India Company and its conquest of India. He draws not only on European sources for this but also Asian ones. Hence he provides a fine and nuanced portrait of an Indian society before, during and after its destruction by the mercenaries of the East India Company, notably Clive.

Dalrymple seems to have something of a soft spot for Warren Hastings, a successor to Clive, who in spite of his complicity with this larcenous enterprise, was something of an Indiaphile. He also brings to new audiences the careers of major India figures such as Tipu Sultan, and casts new light on the careers of figures whose infamy is now largely forgotten, such as Richard Wellesley, brother of the more famous Arthur, Duke of Wellington.

It is said that the curse of the Irish is we remember everything, while the curse of the English is they remember nothing. As England prepares to cut itself loose again from Europe, this is a portion of their history which they should learn urgently. It will help them understand better why India will likely seek to eat them raw in future trade negations.