The nonprofit watchdog Coffee Watch recently filed a petition to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to stop the import of coffee produced with slave labor in Brazil. Coffee Watch relied in part on several Mongabay reports to file the petition.
“Mongabay is kind of how I learned about the problem, way back in the day,” Etelle Higonnet, founder and director of Coffee Watch, told Mongabay by email. “I was so shocked that I started researching and googling the issue. Then I developed a kind of treasure trove of all the evidence ever collected about slavery in Brazilian coffee.”
In the petition, Coffee Watch cites three Mongabay reports detailing human rights abuses from coffee production in Brazil.
The first, a 2018 report, details how Brazil labor ministry investigators rescued 33 coffee workers from two farms in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Workers said they had substandard housing infested with mice and bats.
Workers also said they were not paid fairly. “We’d harvest and they’d leave it [the beans] there to be weighed the next day. When we arrived there, the coffee was gone,” one of the rescued workers said.
At least one of the farms held a C.A.F.E. certification meant to ensure ethically sourced coffee. The certification was owned in part by U.S.-based coffee company Starbucks.
In 2019, Mongabay reported that another Minas Gerais coffee farm, which also received a quality certification from Starbucks and Nestlé-controlled brand Nespresso, was similarly found to employ forced labor. That farm was added to Brazil’s “dirty list” of employers caught exploiting labor. The coffee companies stopped purchasing from those farms when they were dirty listed.
However, Higonnet said forced labor in Brazil is “widespread” and “a business model for many companies.”
In another 2021 report, Mongabay found that Cooxupé, a cooperative that supplies coffee beans to Starbucks and Nespresso, illegally charged coffee laborers for the use of equipment they needed to harvest coffee.
Cooxupé is at the center of the recent Coffee Watch petition, which asserts that the cooperative bought coffee from several farms accused of producing coffee “wholly or in part” with forced labor and then sold that coffee to both Starbucks and Nestlé.
“These companies have knowingly benefited from the use of forced labor,” the petition states.
In an emailed response to Mongabay, Starbucks communications representative Amber Stafford said the company believes the claims are without merit. She said Cooxupé sources coffee from more than 19,000 coffee farms and “Starbucks purchases coffee from a small fraction of those farms, and only those who have been verified through our C.A.F.E. practices.”
Mongabay did not receive a response from Nestlé or Nespresso at the time of publishing.
Higonnet said she believes CBP “will find what we reported is just the tip of the iceberg” and will move to end coffee imports from Brazil associated with forced labor.
Banner photo of farmers sorting coffee cherries courtesy of Jo-Anne McArthur.
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