Tag Archives: Equal Exchange

Final Thoughts (For Now) on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

2015-12-21 Comments Off on Final Thoughts (For Now) on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

For more than a week we have been writing here about Brazil’s extraordinary effort to eradicate modern slavery, and how that effort relates to the country’s coffee sector. Today is the eighth, final, and perhaps most important post in the series. The one that answers the question, “So, what?” So, now we know this terrible […]

The National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labor

2015-12-18 Comments Off on The National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labor

On Tuesday, we explained here that Brazil gets high marks for enlisting businesses in the country’s campaign to eradicate modern slavery.  Yesterday we profiled in some detail one of the two instruments that leaders in the country’s private sector use in their efforts to eradicate modern slavery from their supply chains: the Dirty List.  Today, […]

Brazil’s “Transparency List”

2015-12-17 Comments Off on Brazil’s “Transparency List”

Earlier this year we visited with Rosa Maria Campos in Brasilia. She leads the union of labor inspectors who visit factories and farms all over Brazil as part of the country’s fight against slavery—inspectors who face budget shortfalls in the capital and hostility from the employers they inspect in the field. Rosa Maria is inspiring—courageous, […]

Brazil’s Fight Against Modern Slavery

2015-12-16 Comments Off on Brazil’s Fight Against Modern Slavery

Brazil’s fight against modern slavery has been held up as an example by labor rights advocates from Free the Slaves to the U.S. Department of Labor to the UN’s International Labor Organization. Its effort has been ambitious (the goal is total eradication of modern slavery), courageous (websites have been hacked, activists threatened, inspectors killed), creative […]

A Little Perspective on the Scope of the Problem

2015-12-15 Comments Off on A Little Perspective on the Scope of the Problem

When we learned more than two years ago that Brazil’s government had cited 15 coffee farms for profiting from modern slavery, we asked our partner Repórter Brasil to help us understand whether those farms contained the full universe of cases of modern slavery in the country’s coffee sector, or whether they were representative of a […]

This is What Modern Slavery Looks Like

2015-12-14 Comments Off on This is What Modern Slavery Looks Like

The current issue of Vanity Fair features this inspiring profile of one our partners in the fight against modern slavery in Brazil.  The author ably summarizes modern slavery like this: “[It] differs from classic chattel slavery, in which people are held as private property, but to the extent that it treats people as tools to […]

Brazil and the “S-Word”

2015-12-11 Comments Off on Brazil and the “S-Word”

The Atlantic slave trade left a ruinous legacy everywhere, but in the Americas, perhaps no country was more affected than Brazil.  During a ghastly period of more than 300 years, estimates suggest that somewhere between four and five million slaves were delivered to its shores by slave traders—more than one-third of all Africans dragged to […]

Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

2015-12-10 Comments Off on Modern Slavery in the Coffeelands

During the summer of 2013, we learned quite by accident that 15 coffee estates in Brazil were included in the government’s “Dirty List,” an official registry of farms and firms found to be profiting from what the country’s laws define as modern-day slavery. We turned for insight to a long-time CRS partner in São Paulo […]

Apples and Oranges

2015-11-24 Comments Off on Apples and Oranges

When the Fair World Project published this comparison of select brands in the U.S. coffee market last year, I was sorely tempted to respond here. To explain publicly what was happening privately: that I was being asked by Fair Trade roasters in the upper tiers to arrange meetings with Direct Trade roasters in lower tiers […]

We all drink downstream

2015-04-17 Comments Off on We all drink downstream

Last week, SCAA gave me the opportunity to talk about water and coffee at its annual Symposium in Seattle. For my first contribution to the Coffeelands blog, I want to give a brief synthesis of last week’s presentation, which serves as a great intro to water and the coffeelands. . . WATER CRISIS In 2015, […]