2024-03-27 12:09:42
Children exploited in sugar cane fields, young women forced to undergo hysterectomies to no longer have periods and work more, this is the chilling reality revealed by investigation from the New York Times, produced in partnership with the association “The Fuller Project”, and published on March 24. The Coke and Pepsi companies helped transform l’State of Maharashtra in India into a major sugar producer. But they also participate, knowingly, in a particularly brutal system of exploitation and forced labor.
Sugar workers on farms in Maharastra do not get a monthly salary. Their employers pay them an advance, lend them money for pressing needs such as medical expenses, and the workers cut and collect sugarcane to repay their debt. At the end of a season, they are told they still owe money and must come back the following year. Such arrangements, which trap workers in a spiral of endless debt, are defined by the United Nations labor agency as forced labor. Illegal, but it persists nonetheless.
Forced marriages of adolescents and hysterectomies of women.
Because children are a heavy burden on households, 14-year-old girls are forced into illegal marriages and to work “for sugar” with their husbands. Children, sometimes as young as 10 years old, also participate in the exhausting work in the fields, but they must be looked after. Transferring responsibility for young girls to a husband relieves their parents. And then, a couple, called “koyta” in the language of the sugar farms, earns more.
Brokers who supply workers to the sugar industry pressure newly marriageable girls to marry, and sometimes pay for the wedding. Participation in the “cane marriage” as these unions are called, which will of course have to be reimbursed by the families.
Farm worker families begin the cane cutting and gathering season with a debt to repay. Each day of missed work increases the debt and painful periods, as well as medical follow-up, are a problem for workers.
Furthermore, those who exploit them view female menstruation in a negative light, because a woman who has her period, even if she is not prevented from being in the fields, risks having small ailments which harm her. its efficiency.
As for possible pregnancies, they involve medical visits which have a heavy cost and absences from work. And since girls are married very young, in most cases they have children anyway.
And then, on farms, there is no access to toilets or water. Changing expensive sanitary protection is a hassle and there is no question of washing your hands.
The sugar industry of Maharastra has therefore found a radical way to solve all these problems: women are strongly encouraged to have their uterus removed. Women aged 30 or 40 find themselves sterilized, with an increased risk of early menopause and therefore osteoporosis, clots, cardiovascular problems and other diseases. Unscrupulous doctors have found a windfall there, employers pay for the operations, thus increasing the debt of workers who are hard at work all month, in short, everyone benefits from it. It is estimated that one in five women, and some studies speak of one in three, have had a hysterectomy in the region.
Coke and Pepsi concerned, but not enough to act effectively.
The sugar is sold to companies like Coke and Pepsi, both of which have factories in the region. Multinationals are not unaware of the disastrous social situation of sugar convicts, we learn from the New York Times and The Fuller Project. Internal reports attest to this.
Pepsi said in a statement that “The description of the working conditions of sugarcane cutters in Maharashtra is deeply worrying,” explain the American daily and the association.
And Coke consultants have observed that children work in the fields, journalists still denounce. Moreover, they tell us that the multinational has declared its support for a program aimed at “gradually reduce child labor in India” and that Coke and Pepsi have “ issued codes of conduct prohibiting suppliers and business partners from using child labor and forced labor. »
In fact, multinationals are more concerned with controlling the efficiency of their production chains than with respecting their “codes of conduct”.
Group inspectors almost never go into the fields. And the executive of a sugar supplier, franchised by the two companies, told American journalists that, if“Soda company representatives can be scrupulous when asking questions relating to sugar quality, production efficiency and environmental issues,” they almost never address the problems raised by working conditions on farms.
Sanjay Khatal, the chief executive of a major sugar lobby group, says that improving benefits for sugar workers would increase costs so much that “would jeopardize the entire system”.
It should be noted that even if working conditions are often less bad in factories than in the fields, many of them are criticized for not making toilets and water available to workers.
The government has sought to put in place rules to limit medically unnecessary hysterectomies in the state of Maharashtra, but they are largely ineffective and many young women continue to be mutilated.
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