Brazilian government frees sugarcane debt 'slaves'

Despite attempts by the Brazilian government to 'humanise' the sugarcane industry, the exploitation of workers continues. The Mobile Verification Task Force, a body created to screen working conditions in agriculture, has discovered a sugarcane plantation near Ulianopolis where more than 1,000 labourers were forced to work in inhumane conditions. This reopens the debate about the social sustainability of biofuels (earlier post, here and here).

Human rights and labour organisations believe that of the 700,000 sugarcane workers, between 25,000 to 40,000 people could be working in conditions akin to debt slavery.

The plantation where the abuse was discovered was located about 250 km (155 miles) from the mouth of the Amazon river near the town of Ulianopolis. The company which runs the plantation denies the charges against it and said that the workers were paid good wages by Brazilian standards.

Labour ministry officials and prosecutors who found the more than 1,100 workers, said they were working 13 hours a day and living in conditions described as 'appalling'. Officials said that the labourers lived in overcrowded conditions with no proper sanitation facilities. There were no provisions for them to store food either.

Many workers in Brazil are thought to fall into debt slavery by paying for transportation to work far from where they live and by buying overpriced tools and food. Farmers in the Amazon region who incur debts are forced to work virtually for free in order to repay the money they owe:
biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: biomass :: sugarcane :: ethanol :: social sustainability :: poverty :: social justice :: Brazil ::

The government's anti-slavery team, the Mobile Verification Task Force, which conducted the raid on the plantation, was founded in 1995 by the Labour Ministry and claims to have freed more than 21,000 workers from debt slave conditions at more than 1,600 farms across Brazil. The latest is the largest such raid in Brazil, a country beset by the problem of slave labour.

Recently, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pledged to bring industry leaders and workers together to "to discuss the humanisation of the sugar cane sector in this country".

He was acting after being criticised for calling Brazil's ethanol producers "national and world heroes", despite critics accusing producers of exploiting workers in the sugar cane and ethanol industry. The Roman Catholic Church estimates there are some 25,000 workers living in slave-like conditions throughout Brazil, most of them in the Amazon.

Ethanol sells in Brazil at half the price for conventional petrol. The vast bulk of the sugarcane from which the fuel is made, is grown in the south-central state of São Paulo.

But even if all forms of 'slavery' were to be rooted out in the sector, the tragedy is far from over. The growing trend towards the mechanisation of the sugarcane harvesting process threatens to push the seasonal labourers who enjoy better working conditions into poverty for good. This situation of workers being caught between backbreaking work and unemployment, can only be solved when profits from the sugarcane industry are distributed more fairly.

In 2004, the Brazilian government launched the ProBiodiesel program, with the explicit aim of producing the biofuel in conditions that benefit small farmers. For biodiesel, a special policy called 'Social Fuel' was created, which guarantees ownership by small farmers (earlier post). But for the sugarcane and ethanol industry there is no such framework.

References:
BBC: 'Slave' labourers freed in Brazil - July 3.