Forced labor may be common in US food system: study

Some of the food on U.S. tables has a high probability of having been picked, prepared or processed by Americans who were forced to do it, a new study has found.

And because the U.S. attempts to keep forced labor out of the food supply chain and focus on other countries, coercion in this country may go unpunished. 

That’s the unpleasant conclusion of a multi-university study into forced labor in the U.S. food system published Monday in the journal Nature Food.

About 62 percent of the commodities likely to have been made by workers laboring under duress come from within the U.S., the authors found.

The study comes out as the unremitting heat wave baking key U.S. agricultural regions has underscored the deadly dangers farmworkers face in picking the nation’s crops.

Farmworker Efrain López García died this month after experiencing heat-related illness on a Florida farm growing tropical fruits.

And a young Mexican immigrant died on a Parkland, Fla., farm in the unseasonal heat that marked New Year’s Day, according to the Department of Labor.

In February, the Department of Labor revealed that more than 100 migrant children — many as young as 13 — were illegally working dangerous jobs at a Wisconsin meatpacker.

No one is alleging that these specific workers were there under duress. 

But they represent the areas of the economy where forced labor is most likely and where workers are most vulnerable, according to the study’s authors.

Forced labor was most likely in commodities that are either hand-picked — like avocados, apples or citrus — or highly processed, in particular meatpacking.

The risk of domestic forced labor is one that has largely flown under the radar, study coauthor Jessica Decker Sparks of Tufts University said.

Decker Sparks said that when Americans imagine their odds of buying food prepared with forced labor, they imagine that it’s only a problem for imports.

Forced labor is a big problem globally: According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), nearly 28 million people are coerced into work worldwide. 

Most of these are in Asia and the Pacific, with the highest per-capita rate to be found in the Arab States, the ILO found.

But the ILO found that about 3.6 million are in the Americas, that the coerced are most likely to be migrants, and that “forced labor touches virtually all parts of the private economy.”

U.S. government data suggests that the problem in the U.S. is of a different scale — but also that the data itself may not be reliable, according to a State Department report. That report found that the Department of Homeland Security had opened 1,111 investigations into possible human trafficking in 2020.

But it also suggested this might just be the tip of the iceberg.

“One NGO noted law enforcement disproportionately dismissed requests for help from survivors who were Black, Indigenous, or people of color, or arrested them when they came forward,” the agency authors noted.

The assumption that coercive labor is a foreign problem blinds consumers — and policymakers — to the “risk that comes from our domestic food production as well,” Decker Sparks said.

 “And that’s important because some of the more effective tools we use to try to eliminate or mitigate the risk of forced labor in the U.S. are trade bans or trade sanctions,” she added.

These measures, in other words, do little to help those suffering from forced labor in the U.S.

Risks are particularly serious for seasonal agricultural workers whose employers hold control of their visas, tying them to single employers who control their food, housing and transportation — and who may hold their passports. This can leave workers with little defense against physical and sexual abuse, the authors noted.

The Nature Food researchers didn’t assess the actual incidence of people being forced to work in U.S. agriculture — a hidden problem beyond the scope of the study.

They focused instead on identifying areas in the U.S. food industry where the risk to workers was highest — which are also where regulators would want to look first.

To do this, they looked at the supply chains for all U.S. food commodities except seafood, collating both established legal protections for workers and reports from journalists and nonprofits of forced labor.

“We’re talking about a systemic issue,” coauthor Nicole Tichenor Blackstone of Tufts said. 

That means it’s up to “policymakers to inform how we can change regulation, monitoring, and enforcement of forced labor prevention.”

Blackstone also singled out a responsibility for businesses and other supply chain actors who have the power to change conditions to mitigate risk and collaborate with workers to do so.”