We've got to stamp out modern slavery

[CHIMO]

The re-emergence of slavery on ships off West Africa is profoundly shocking but it is not a surprise. Last week slavery its modern form came to light in cases of forced labour uncovered on trawlers fishing for the European market. In a haunting echo of the 18th century triangular trade, west African workers were found off the coast of Sierra Leone on board boats where they lived and worked in ships' holds with less than a metre of head height, sometimes for 18 hours a day for no pay, packed like sardines to sleep in spaces too small to stand up, with their documents taken from them and no means of escape.

It is no accident that globalisation has seen the reemergence of slavery. The human degradation off West Africa is replicated elsewhere. I first came across modern slavery when investigating the UK chicken supply chain in Thailand in 2002. UK retailers and manufacturers now source much of their cheap commodity chicken from Asian factories. On the subcontracted farms around Bangkok that supply the international poultry processing factories I found illegal Burmese migrants trapped in debt bondage and forced labour. Fifteen Burmese refugees, interviewed for me by the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity, described sleeping in one room on the floor working whatever hours their Thai boss required of them, without pay and without a day off for two months. They had been kept in order by violence and by the threat of deportation if they complained.

In Brazil, investigating the explosion in soya production in the Amazon region for my book Eat Your Heart Out, I heard of the slaves found on farms being cleared in the rainforest. A Dominican priest, Xavier Plassat, who campaigns to free them told me how he had just returned with government swat squads from a farm 60km off the road where 200 workers were being kept in slavery, labouring without pay, deprived of freedom of movement and controlled by debt bondage. They had no clean water and little food and were living 30 to a room. Plassat believed slavery and agribusiness were inextricably linked. Monoculture for export, the large-scale intensive farming dominated by transnational corporations (TNC), and favoured by trade rules and international financial institutions, had created the conditions for slavery by eliminating the traditional small scale farming that provided food for 60% of the Brazilian population. He is not alone. Kevin Bales, the great expert on modern slavery, has shown how driving peasant farmers off the land has created a new supply of dispossessed workers who can be pressed into this condition.

Expansionist agriculture and empires have always depended on slave labour, as Latin authors of the Roman empire complained centuries ago. Today, we live in an era when the dominant powers don't officially "do" empire, so economic control takes a new privatised form in the TNC. Modern slavery has evolved to match. The straightforward ownership of chattel slavery is gone, replaced instead by an outsourced, subcontracted kind of control over people, which can be terminated when they have served their purpose. The transnationals universally abhor any idea of slavery or forced labour and yet it is found in their supply chains. Slaves and exploited migrants, often driven into migration by the squeeze on family agriculture, are what make the economics of today's agribusiness work.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/modern-slavery-globalisation-multinationals

[truedelphi]

1. Very good topic. May I add one more category -

Manning the marijuana groves of Northern California forests.

This happens to be one of the reasons I will be voting for legalizing marijuana - to help end slavery!

Drug cartels send one of their people out to a bar or diner where Latinos congregate. This cartel person puts out the word that he has work. An eager and unemployed person goes off with him in the cartel person's pickup. They arrive at a site inside the northern California forest where land has been cleared and marijuana has been cultivated.

Often the person is selected because they are someone who has not been in the area very long. They have no idea where they are. They are threatened that if they do not stay with the crop, fertilize, weed, and water it faithfully, harm might come to not only them, but to any family member or friends that the cartel person knows of.

There is speculation that some of these "slaves" are shot at the end of the season. And of course, should the DEA or local police show up, this poor worker has no idea of the real identity of the owner of the marijuana grove. He has no way to offer up information on whose crop this really is, and so this person might end up in jail, charged with the crime of "growing."

[bemildred]

2. Slavery and drugs have always been close partners.

The British empire was built on tea and sugar and opium (and slaves). The US' on sugar and rum and slaves and tobacco.