You can participate in the European Commission’s consultation on forced labor regulation until tomorrow, November 30 at 24:00 (Brussels Time). Read our position paper and make your voice heard!

We want to cite just a few figures, showing how large the scale of the forced labor problem is in the animal production sector.

• KnowTheChain published a report on how the world’s largest food and beverage companies are addressing forced labor in their supply chains in 2020. The meat industry fared particularly badly for the four companies included in the benchmark. In early 2020. WH Group, Tyson, JBS and Hormel announced record dividend payments of $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, in the United States alone, more than 200 meat plant workers have died from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. None of the Big Four meat companies could identify a procedure for evaluating new suppliers for forced labor risks or responding to allegations of forced labor;
• According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, meat-processing giant JBS bought cattle from two ranches that were later included on Brazil’s „dirty list” of companies that employed slaves (https://reporterbrasil.org.br/wp- content/uploads/2021/01/Monitor-8-Slave-labor-in-Brazils-meat-industry.pdf);
• Wage, hour, employment discrimination irregularities against people in the agricultural sector have been pointed out for years in reports by the Gangmasters & Labor Abuse Authority, indicating that a great many of them involve the UK’s animal production sector (https://www.gla.gov.uk/media/5069/industry-profile-agriculture.pdf).

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