Modern slavery risk assessment

Labour exploitation in the agrifood sector must be addressed for sustainability. Data-driven methodologies can identify risk hotspots and facilitate development of mitigation strategies.


Modern slavery risk assessment
Labour exploitation in the agrifood sector must be addressed for sustainability. Data-driven methodologies can identify risk hotspots and facilitate development of mitigation strategies.

Stefan Gold, Gabriela Gutierrez-Huerter O and Alexander Trautrims
A grifood supply chains have high risk of labour exploitation. Around two million people work under conditions of modern slavery and forced labour -at the most extreme end of the labour exploitation continuum -in this sector worldwide 1 . So far, the concept of a sustainable food system has focused on issues of food security, nutrition for society and consumer health within planetary boundaries. However, it has neglected parts of the social dimension of sustainability, in particular agricultural workers' rights and working conditions. Considering supply-chain opacity and the illegality surrounding labour exploitation, the development and implementation of sound methodologies for the collection and analysis of relevant data remain strong challenges; nonetheless, such methodologies are urgently needed to increase supply-chain transparency and for transformation into sustainable food systems.
In this issue of Nature Food, Blackstone and colleagues 2 report on the development of a data-driven methodological approach to evaluate forced labour risk, and the application of the approach to assess related risks embedded in the retail supply of fruits and vegetables within the US. The authors draw on principles of social life-cycle assessment (S-LCA) for aggregate-level analysis of forced labour risk. Departing from a qualitative analysis of data on known occurrences and government response for each country-commodity combination, qualitative risk levels are converted into medium-risk-hours equivalent (mrh eq) per serving. The advantage of this quantitative indicator is the ability for users to compare risks on a commodity-by-commodity basis, but also to aggregate to a food supply or product portfolio level and thus identify areas where targeted investigation may be required. Out of the sample of 307 commodity-country combinations, 85% were coded as high risk, and 8% as very high risk. Converted to per-serving risks, five fruit commodities account for 39% of the total forced labour risk in the US retail fruit supply, and five vegetable commodities account for 55% of the total forced labour risk in the US retail vegetable supply.
While some of these findings are empirically supported by media coverage of labour issues -for example, in Mexican avocado production -more generally, the analysis by Blackstone and colleagues exposes that a substantial part of forced labour risk is linked to US domestic supply chains. This underlines that forced labour is not exclusively a problem of low-and middle-income countries in global supply chains, but also affects the countries that create the demand for the produce made by forced labour. The study identifies hotspots where businesses, policymakers, buyers, farmers, workers advocacy groups, consumers and communities are urged to take concerted action. In the framework of the Fair Food Program of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida, for example, workers, growers and buyers such as supermarkets and restaurant chains collaborate on a code of conduct with explicit market sanctions and a monitoring system with rapid investigation and responses that protect and improve the working conditions of tomato pickers 3 .
Blackstone and colleagues provide a methodology for measuring forced labour risk in agrifood supply chains through a triangulation of risk indicators. The data-based analysis at an aggregated level can direct business, government and society resources to those commoditycountry combinations where interventions can yield the most impact and avoid risk shifting. One example of how fine-grained methodologies can support the allocation of limited resources towards tackling forced labour is the case of strawberry production in Southern Greece 4 . A combination of satellite remote-sensing and ground-truthing through field visits is the input for a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) that evaluates and ranks worker settlements based on labour exploitation risks.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 stipulates to end all forms of labour exploitation by 2030 and relies on the development and integration of evidence-based risk assessment and prioritization methodologies, such as that proposed by Blackstone and colleagues for agricultural food production. The use of multi-source data for triangulation and to continuously update data is critical. Blackstone and colleagues have set the foundations of a dynamic risk anticipation methodology, which should be designed to continuously account for future developments such as upcoming changes in labour laws, political and military conflicts, or impacts due to global crises.
Appropriate responses to modern slavery are determined by stakeholder conceptualization of forced labour and its causes in high-risk sectors 5 , including agriculture. Modern slavery, forced labour and labour exploitation need to be understood more widely as a problem systematically embedded in contemporary capitalism, rather than an abnormality in the system 6