Food for Thought: On Food, Power and Human Rights

Food for Thought: On Food, Power and Human Rights by Gunnar Brulin and Malin Klingzell-Brulin (Stockholm, Sweden: BILDA Forlag, 2010)

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it should be that the integrity of our food supply is bound up with the well-being and working conditions of the essential workers who harvest our food and bring it to our stores and tables. Food for Thought: On Food, Power and Human Rights gives a trade union perspective on everyday decisions we make about what to buy in the grocery store.  Food for Thought authors Gunnar Brulin and Malin Klingzell-Brulin (husband-and-wife Swedish writers employed by the Swedish Food Workers’ Union) take us inside factories, local and regional food markets, and food workers’ unions on four continents.  The book asks troubling questions about the food chain that I’d never thought to ask – bearing down, in a dozen illuminating case studies, on whether workers in far-flung parts of the globe are getting a fair shake – and, if not, what we can do about it.

Fair trade coffee is a case in point.  Nestle, the villain of the book (Nestle and its competitor Kraft Foods, control 10% of the world food processing market), markets its own brand of fair trade coffee in Europe.  The authors checked to see if there was a way to verify if Nestle’s “fair trade coffee” was legitimately fair trade.  Import records did indeed verify which plantations produced the coffee. And an international organization, FLO-Cert, ensures that the coffee in the package really is fair trade coffee.  However . . . the Brulins discovered that Nestle’s coffee roasting subcontractor had no collective bargaining agreement.
Many readers may be loath to give Nestle the benefit of the doubt — remembering how aggressively Nestle marketed dried (“just-add-water”) baby formula in Asian, African, and Latin American countries in the 1970s — despite urgent public health warnings that Nestle was poisoning babies in those countries where there wasn’t reliably safe drinking water.  The authors of Food for Thought found Nestle is still doing harm.  In a chapter called, “The Silent Massacre,” the authors interviewed workers crippled with repetitive strain injuries working in a Brazilian factory that made Nestle’s instant coffee Nescafe.  Did Nestle do time-and-motion studies to eliminate the cause of those repetitive strain injuries?  No.  Did Nestle find less stressful jobs elsewhere in the Nescafe factory for the injured workers?  No.  Were those who complained of repetitive strain injuries fired? Yes.  Book authors Brulin and Brulin suggest international solidarity may be the only way to make Nestle do the right thing.  For example, Nestle’s efforts to break a union in Chiclayo, Peru, were stymied when unionized Nestle workers in Australia threatened a work stoppage.

Food for Thought reports dramatic harm done to African economies by multinational corporations dumping food at prices that undercut local economies.  The damage to a country like Ghana when U.S. multinationals export rice was dire, but predictable.  (Ghana’s rice farmers couldn’t compete on price with U.S. agribusiness-grown domestically-subsidized rice.)  But  Food for Thought asks readers to open their eyes to some of the unexpected consequences of dumping food in countries struggling to feed their population.
Take, for example, massive exports by transnational corporations of a commodity like frozen chicken parts — to a country like Cameroon. The “globalized” chickens were raised on colossal poultry farms (owned by giant corporations) in Thailand and Brazil.  Just the frozen legs and wings were going to Africa. (European consumers prefer chicken breasts.)  Like the aggrieved rice farmers in Ghana, Cameroon’s domestic chicken farmers couldn’t compete on price with frozen chicken produced by transnationals (which received export subsidies).

There was a lurking health peril, as well.  In Cameroon’s traditional African live chicken markets, customers pick out healthy chickens and buy them at a fair price.  But frozen chicken wings & legs were flooding in and Cameroon didn’t have the infrastructure to insure constant freezing.  As a result, a 2007 study found 25% of the frozen chicken contained salmonella and other bacteria.  The chicken actually stank by the time it was sold, but the poor and unemployed bought it, because it was all they could afford, then tried to disguise the taste.
Fortunately, a grassroots campaign in Cameroon (and a sympathetic European Parliament initiative to preserve Africa’s domestic production) remedied the situation. Cameroon slapped a tariff on imported chicken.  The European Union didn’t take retaliatory tariff action.  In neighboring Ghana, however, chicken farmers weren’t as lucky.  Transnational exporters reduced Ghanaians’ market share by 70%!

Food for Thought makes heroic efforts to pursue food ethics to their logical conclusions. The authors were intrigued to hear from a restauranteur that the Thai fast-food meal they had just eaten in Stockholm — had been cooked and frozen, all ready-to-eat, in Thailand.  So the authors flew to Thailand to check on the working conditions of the workers who prepared those ready-to-eat meals.  Inspecting a factory, they were relieved to find it applied “the same scrupulous food safety restrictions as Sweden.” But the rest of their fact-finding tour of Thailand revealed one gloomy reality of the global food chain after another.
It turned out that the factory in Thailand that processed the chicken portion of their ready-to-eat meal had locked out 400 of its workers for two-and-a-half months because the workers demanded a pay raise.  Turning next to investigating the shrimp industry, the authors learned that an estimated 70,000 – 80,000 children under the age of 15 are working in Thailand’s shrimp industry. Thailand’s biggest shrimp companies claim they don’t use child labor.  But they admit that their suppliers do – employing workers as young as eight years old.  Child labor is common among Thailand’s migrant workers.  Thai trade union activists fear a threatened U.S. boycott of Thai shrimp might hurt these migrant laborers most.

Investigating a shrimp peeling factory in Thailand, the authors found 12-hour work days were not unusual.  Pay is by piecework, and the authors sadly noted that most of the pieceworkers didn’t take time to break for lunch.  Worse still, Brulin and Brulin could see children of migrant workers peeling shrimp in the same factory as their parents.  The parents feared sending their children to school for fear if there was a raid they’d be separated and never see their children again.  The authors conclude that pressuring the Thai government to reign in child labor might be the best solution to a seemingly irresolvable problem.

Food for Thought ranges the world.  On assignment for their Swedish food workers union, authors Brulin and Brulin gained access to factories and victimized food workers — to bring to life their sobering perspective on how Third World countries are faring under economic assault from transnational corporations.  The authors report some successes, as well, the result of ingenious organizing (rolling international solidarity strikes; outreach organizations of informally-employed water purifiers in India – and agricultural workers in Ghana; and unions only women can join in gender-segregated Kerala, India).

All in all, however, the authors paint a grim picture of the globalized food chain.  In the year of publication, 900 million people worldwide were starving.  They continue to be harmed by the control exerted by a tiny number of transnational food corporations: biotechnology and seed companies (Monsanto, Syngenta, BASF, etc.); giant supermarket chains (Tesco, Walmart, etc.); food processors (Unilever, Nestle, Kraft, etc.); and hedge funds.   The most frequent complaint in Third World countries is that transnational corporations increase casualization of workers who would fare much better in permanent jobs.  Companies like Coca Cola pay subcontractors for drivers in the Philippines, instead of paying union wages.  In so doing, they depress wages — 30% of Filipinos live below the poverty line!

Lavishly illustrated with photographs, Food for Thought: On Food, Power and Human Rights persuasively argues the need for boycotts, focused publicity campaigns, and targeted actions by international labor organizations when transnational titans harm workers in Third World countries. After our year-and-a-half experience of pandemic we need to appreciate our local grocery’s connection to the global food chain – and, on occasion, choose which brand names not to buy.

Reviewed by Joe Doyle, a retired New York City school teacher who has published articles and edited newsletters on maritime workers and their unions, Americans who fought in the International Brigades, Irish Americans, and Asian Americans.