A new Danwatch investigation of Guatemala’s coffee industry reveals serious problems with illegal child labour and signs of forced labour such as armed guards, debt spirals, and confiscation of ID papers. Pricey, high-quality coffee is apparently no guarantee against violations.
This investigation is the first of two parts of a journalistic investigation carried out in Kenya from March 2-11 2016, where ngo’s, politicians, experts in land rights and indigenous peoples’ rights and community members have been interviewed by an international collaborative team of journalists. Desk research, including data collection through Freedom of Information Act, research in this field as well as interviews with experts on human and land rights was conducted from December 2015 - May 2016. Partners in Lake Turkana Wind Power project have had the opportunity to be interviewed and furthermore comment on the findings of this investigation prior to the publishing date.
Danwatch travelled to Brazil’s largest coffee-producing state, Minas Gerais, where half of Brazil’s coffee is grown. We visited coffee plantations, interviewed coffee workers, trade unions, experts and local authorities.
Danwatch accompanied the police and the Brazilian Ministry of Labour and Employment on an inspection of a Brazilian coffee plantation where seventeen men, women and children were found to be victims of human trafficking and were freed from conditions analogous to slavery. Two children, ages 14 and 15, had also worked picking coffee on the plantation.
This investigation, ‘Broken Promises’, looks into both the short-term effects of extractive industry in Mozambique, and its long-term effects in Zambia, where mining has been going on for almost a century.
Higher education institutions in Western Europe have spent 4.27 billion euros so far in 2015 on ICT hardware, software and services to secure quality education for millions of young Europeans. At the other end of the supply chain tens of thousands of Chinese students work as interns in the assembly lines of IT factories every summer producing for the world’s biggest brands. Many of them are forced into internships and cannot quit or they will not graduate.
