The Sugar Beat

“Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. will ‘take the necessary measures’ if sugar producer Cosan SA Industria & Comercio returns to the Brazilian government’s slavery blacklist,” that article read.

“On Jan. 8, Walmart suspended a supply contract with Cosan SA Industria & Comercio after the world’s biggest sugar-cane processor was added to a government slavery blacklist,” Bloomberg continued.  “The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer reinstated contracts after Cosan won an injunction from a labor court ordering it removed from the Labor Ministry list.”

Cosan claims the incident that landed it on the slavery blacklist was the fault of a third-party cane cutter.  But, according to Bloomberg, the Brazilian Attorney General’s Office plans to appeal the injunction.

Regardless of the outcome of the Cosan case, it is just the latest example of “slavery” and “Brazilian sugar” being used in the same breath.

A September 2009 report by the U.S. Dept. of Labor listed “forced labor” as a problem in Brazilian cane production.

Additional press reports seem to verify that claim.  For example, a June 2008 Los Angeles Times article noted:

“But even as Brazil's booming economy is powered by fuel processed from the cane, labor officials are confronting what some call the country's dirty little ethanol secret: the mostly primitive conditions endured by the multitudes of workers who cut the cane.

“Biofuels may help reduce humanity's carbon footprint, but the social footprint is substantial.

"’These workers should have a break, a place to eat and access to a proper restroom,’ Marcus Vinicius Goncalves, a government labor cop in suit and tie, declared in the midst of a snarl of felled stalks and bedraggled cane cutters here. ‘This is degrading treatment.’

“More than 300,000 farmworkers are seasonal cane cutters in Brazil, the government says. By most accounts, their work and living conditions range from basic to deplorable to outright servitude.”

A May 2008 Reuters article about an Amnesty International report on Brazil’s cane industry explained:

“Amnesty said that in March 2007, 288 workers were rescued from forced labor at six cane plantations in Sao Paulo state, and 409 workers from an ethanol distillery in Mato Grosso do Sul state.

“In November 2007, inspection teams found 831 indigenous cane cutters working in poor conditions, also in Mato Grosso do Sul, while over 1,000 people ‘in conditions analogous to slavery’ were released in June from a sugar plantation in Para state.

“’We've been receiving accusations of rights violations against workers in the industry that range from precarious working conditions to threats against union leaders,’ Tim Cahill, Amnesty's Brazil researcher, told Reuters by phone.”

Sounds pretty bad…especially when you consider that we haven’t even touched on Brazil’s well-documented environmental issues.

Makes you proud to be an American.