US commodities giant Cargill has been convicted of buying cocoa from farms in Brazil where child labor or forced work was identified.
It’s also been ordered to start a “due diligence” process to verify whether there is child labor in its supply chain and to launch an awareness campaign to combat the practice.
In the lawsuit, Cargill said it buys cocoa from hundreds of producers, co-ops and merchants in Brazil and had no way of knowing whether child labor was used in any of that chain.
Commenting on the conviction, Mighty Earth CEO Glenn Hurowitz said:
“Prosecutors made the right decision in convicting Cargill for ‘pretending not to see’ slave and child labor in its cocoa supply chains. The reason that judicial authorities and independent investigators alike keep discovering deforestation and slave labor connected to Cargill is because the company simply lacks accountability.”
“If Cargill wants to show it is taking these issues seriously, we don’t see how its Brazilian CEO Paulo Sousa can continue in his job. Sousa is running an operation that’s elbow-deep in persistent slavery and nature destruction, and his performance is simply not compatible with a modern company. We normally don’t call for executives to be sacked; we’d rather they do better, but Sousa has compiled such a consistently horrendous record that we don’t see any other pathway for Cargill to clean up its act.”
