The people behind the prices - Summary
Oxfam's Behind the Barcodes campaign calls on supermarkets, who play such a critical role in shaping today's food supply chains, to do more to ensure that the human and labour rights of those producing the food they sell are respected...
This focused Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) of SOK Corporation's Italian processed tomato supply chains is a pilot for the company's new approach to assessing human rights impacts in high risk supply chains that goes ‘beyond audits’...
In recent years there have been a range of reports in Italian and international media outlets, by civil society organizations and multi-stakeholder initiatives of exploitative labour practices on farms, especially in the South of Italy, supplying the processed tomato industry. These reports have documented the practice of recruitment of workers, the vast majority of whom migrants, through illegal labour brokers called caporale, whose control extends to many aspects of workers' lives.
Reported conditions include low wages paid as piece rates rather than according to collective wage agreements, excessive working hours, unsafe transport to and from work and informal accommodation housing thousands of workers without basic amenities including running water and electricity. The risk of human rights impacts such as these in SOK's Italian processed tomato value chain are explored in the assessment.