Chicken |
The South African
Poultry Association (SAPA) said it had asked its government to seek
"urgent comment" after a report said thousands of workers in Brazil's
meat and poultry sectors were victims of forced labour and inhumane work
conditions.
The report by the
Washington-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP),
released last month to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said slave labour
in Brazil's poultry sector is "endemic".
SAPA said this needed to be investigated immediately.
"Thousands of South
African workers have lost their jobs because of dumped chicken imports
from countries including Brazil, which has now been exposed as a country
where workers are subject to degrading working conditions and forced
labour," SAPA said in a statement.
IATP said other
poultry farming associations in countries that are major importers of
Brazilian poultry may follow suit after seeing jobs lost to cheaper
imported produce.
"We definitely hope
to see at least some public attention (on this issue), especially in
the European Union, which is one of Brazil's largest markets," Josh
Wise, an IATP spokesman, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone on
Monday.
The poultry
business in South Africa has been fighting against competition from
producers in Brazil, the European Union and the United States for
several years.
Domestic producers
have long complained about cheap imports from overseas companies of
chicken portions still on the bone, popular locally but generally less
favoured by consumers in the United States and Europe.
Earlier this year,
many countries, including South Africa, suspended imports of meat from
some Brazilian producers following revelations of unsafe meat exports.
"We have quite a
strong labour movement to certify ... the labour conditions of countries
we do business with," SAPA's chief executive Charlotte Nkuna told the
Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone on Monday.
Brazil's BRF, one
of the world's largest poultry exporters, said in a recent statement
that it "does not tolerate and strongly condemns all forms of work in
degrading conditions and incompatible with human dignity, such as
exhausting working days, forced labour and debt bondage".
The South African government had yet to respond to the request, Nkuna said.
Neither the South
African government nor Brazil's labour ministry responded to the Thomson
Reuters Foundation's requests for comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment