The sugar industry is facing pressure to clean up its supply chains and improve oversight after revelations that women in India, the world’s second-largest sugar producer, work in debt bondage and are coerced into getting hysterectomies.
In the wake of the report, a group of labor leaders in India went on a three-day hunger strike recently to demand better working conditions. One of the companies that buys sugar in Maharashtra, Coca-Cola, quietly met with Indian government leaders and sugar suppliers last month to discuss responsible harvesting. And Bonsucro, a sugar industry body that sets standards, said that it would create a human rights task force.
The investigation into the sugar industry, by The New York Times and The Fuller Project, revealed a range of labor abuses, including that female sugar cane cutters in the western India state of Maharashtra were pushed into illegal child marriages so that they could work alongside their husbands. Locked into debt to their employers, the women are forced to return to the fields season after season, the report found.
Women also described facing pressure to undergo hysterectomies for routine ailments like painful periods, adding that they usually had to borrow from their employers to pay for the surgery. That often ended the women’s periods and kept them in the fields, but such procedures can also have consequences including early menopause.
Sugar producers and buyers have known about this abusive system for years, the investigation revealed. But multinational companies have done little in response. One mill that profited off abuses even received a seal of approval from Bonsucro. (Major brands like Coke, PepsiCo, Unilever and General Mills have used Bonsucro endorsements to bolster the images of their supply chains.)
Since the investigation was published, labor and environmental groups on Bonsucro’s member council have pushed to create a task force to improve inspections and to determine how inspectors missed the abuses. Bonsucro’s chief executive, Danielle Morley, had been aware that coerced hysterectomies were a problem in Maharashtra, the investigation found, but no one told inspectors to look out for it.
Companies were slow to agree to a task force, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the process, but they ultimately endorsed its creation.
Bonsucro said in an email that the working group had “received widespread support” from members. But Jason Glaser, who sits on the Bonsucro members council and is chief of La Isla Network, a Washington-based research group focusing on workers’ health and safety, said that he would like to see the brands “make more vocal and clear commitments.”
“They shouldn’t outsource the solution completely,” he added, referring to the task force. “They’ve made their money on the way things are, and the way things are is bad.”
Mr. Glaser said that the task force would initially focus on reports of coerced hysterectomies.
At the heart of the abuses is how workers are paid. Instead of wages, migrant workers in Maharashtra receive advances each season. Those function as loans that are repaid through work. With no documentation or rules governing the advances, workers often finish the season in debt and must return.
Workers said that they made the equivalent of $5 a day. Mill owners said that the workers had always been paid that way and that changing the practice would jeopardize their businesses by making it easier for workers to leave.
Maurice van Beers, a representative of the Dutch labor organization CNV Internationaal, said the industry’s focus needed to change. “I’ve been in discussions, sitting in a very luxurious conference room talking about sustainability, but it’s hard to talk about living wages for the poorest workers,” he said.
Coca-Cola and Pepsico have said that they are looking into the problems. Pepsico said that, when compared to Maharashtra’s total production, the company and its partners bought a relatively small amount of the state’s sugar.
After the investigation’s publication, Coca-Cola officials met with farm owners and Indian politicians to start a project called the Coalition for Responsible Sugarcane India.
Coca-Cola did not elaborate on the coalition’s goals, but said that it had expanded programs to work toward “continuous improvement” with suppliers in Maharashtra.
A union of cane harvesters in India said last week that the five labor leaders who had gone on hunger strike had carried out their protest at the sugar commissioner’s office in Pune, a city in Maharashtra.
Mr. Glaser of La Isla Network said that he would like to see a pilot project in which companies invested to improve the supply chain of a single sugar mill. That could cost $2 million to $3.5 million, he said, a tiny fraction of the profits of multinational companies. If successful, that could be a model.
“No one will go bankrupt or lose their competitive edge by making sure women aren’t forced to have hysterectomies,” Mr. Glaser said.
Qadri Inzamam, a reporter with The Fuller Project, contributed reporting.
Read More: Sugar Industry Faces Pressure Over Coerced Hysterectomies and Labor Abuses
