Assessing the forced labor risk of US fruit and vegetable commodities

Tichenor Blackstone, Nicole; Benoit Norris, Catherine; Robbins, Tali; Jackson, Bethany; Sparks, Jessica L. Decker

Abstract

Studies on sustainable food consumption to date have largely focused on promoting human health within ecological limits. Much less attention has been paid to social sustainability, in part because of limited data and models. The aim of this research is to assess the forced labor risk of fruits and vegetables consumed in the US by compiling new datasets and developing a new forced labor risk scoring method. Several steps were needed to compute forced labor risk per serving, including compilation of trade, labor intensity, and price data; qualitative coding of risk associated with food production for each commodity-country combination, and quantitative risk characterization (i.e., SLCA impact assessment). Because commodities had multiple origin countries, weighted means and ranges of risk were calculated. Our analysis of 292 country-commodity combination enabled us to identify the varying level of forced labor risk associated with each using the metric of medium risk hours equivalent. Our method and results represent the first attempt, to our knowledge, to estimate the risk of forced labor across a diverse set of foods. Our findings point to the importance of using and further developing granular data for social risk assessment of foods.

Citation

Tichenor Blackstone, N., Benoit Norris, C., Robbins, T., Jackson, B., & Sparks, J. L. D. (2020). Assessing the forced labor risk of US fruit and vegetable commodities. In U. Eberle, S. Smetana, & U. Bos (Eds.), Proceedings 12th International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food LCAFood2020: 13-16 October 2020, Berlin Virtually, German (315-320)

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (Published)
• Conference Name: 12th International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food 2020 (LCA Food 2020)
• Start Date: Oct 13, 2020
• End Date: Oct 16, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Oct 13, 2020
• Publication Date: Oct 13, 2020
• Deposit Date: Nov 23, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 29, 2023
• Pages: 315-320
• Book Title: Proceedings 12th International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food LCAFood2020: 13-16 October 2020, Berlin Virtually, German
• ISBN: 9783000676048
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/27596420
• Related Public URLs: https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AP0nfW%5F0%5F6RRXRE&id=E04FA834AFB66516%2167672&cid=E04FA834AFB66516&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&parCid=UnAuth&o=OneUp
• Additional Information: Presented in the session: “Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems”; Topic 9: LCA Challenges in Americas