Blood and earth: modern slavery
Rebecca Fricker reviews a new book by Kevin Bales
Kevin Bales is co-founder of Free the Slaves, consultant to the UN Global Program against Trafficking of Human Beings and author of a widely praised book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy.
Don’t talk about how the big people eat at the big table
These words, spoken by an official to a human rights activist in the Congo, could equally apply to most companies and their customers. Fortunately, Kevin Bales is prepared to talk about how consumption of technology, jewellery and food at our ‘big table’ contributes to slavery and ecocide elsewhere in the world.
In his new book, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide and the Secret to Saving the World, the links between slavery, the illegal destruction of the natural environment and climate change itself are laid bare.
Chicken feed
While never a comfortable read, the lyrical descriptions of forests and the deep humanity of the book, combined with practical solutions, leave the reader energised and ready to make the necessary ‘small choices, made at the right moment’ to ‘bring very big changes’. As the author explains: ‘There’s always been a moral case for stopping slavery; now there’s an environmental reason, too.’
Slavery, and the resulting ecocide, is explored with fieldwork in the mineral mines of the eastern Congo, shrimp farms and mangroves of Bangladesh, Ghana’s gold ‘fields’ and Brazil’s forests, backed up with independent climate change science. While Kevin Bales is not shy of providing pages of calculations to support his theories, stark statements make their point clearly: ‘If slavery were an American state it would have the population of California and the economic output of the district of Columbia, but it would be the world’s third-largest producer of CO2 after China and the United States.’
Yet, he is also hopeful: ‘We know that slavery can be brought to an end. The thirty-five million slaves in the world today make up the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery, and the $150 billion in slave production each year is the tiniest proportion of the global economy ever represented by slavery… We know how much it would cost to bring slavery to an end – about $11 billion over a period of twenty to thirty years. And it is chicken feed. In fact, it is less than the amount that Great Britain alone will spend on chicken feed over the same period.’
Types of slavery
So, what forms does this slavery take? Six types of slavery are identified and discussed:
- Forced labour by armed groups
- Debt bondage slavery
- Peonage slavery
- Sexual slavery
- Forced marriages
- Enslavement of child soldiers
All of these types of slavery appear in the illegal mineral mines of the Congo. This is used as a case study to illustrate the steps in the mobile phone supply chain that starts with the slave miners of tin ore and finishes with us, the consumer.
The lack of responsibility taken by companies all along the chain is shocking: ‘That’s the thing about criminals that commit slavery and ecocide, they hide what they do and make things hard to trace. But if you’re making your living dealing in metals, whether in the form of jewellery or cellphones, you have a responsibility to not hurt other people while you make profits. The supply chain may be complicated; the morals are not.’
An issue for businesses is that if they investigate their supply chains and find slavery then their awareness of this knowledge can carry a reputational risk: so, sometimes, they find it expedient not to look at all.
Government complicity
Government complicity in this cycle cannot be underestimated. As the author shares a café with some Congolese army officers he tries ‘not to stare at the sharp contrast between the sophistication of the weapons and the complete lack of basic amenities like running water or electricity’.
The role of slaves in the destruction of forests and the horrific impact this has on the world’s atmosphere is backed up with exhaustive research, but again it is the simple statements that make you pause: ‘Deforestation accounts for somewhere between seventeen per cent and twenty-five per cent of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. In other words, on the day you are reading this, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the air as if eight million people were flying from New York to London.’
The failure to protect the mangroves (ripped out as part of the slave-using system around shrimp production in Bangladesh) is highlighted as being of the greatest concern.
One country has recently tried to protect its forests and eradicate slavery, despite being one of the last countries in the western hemisphere to abolish legal slavery. The election of president Lula in 2003 in Brazil led to the setting up of a National Commission for the Eradication of Slave Labour. This Commission tightened the law against slavery, increasing penalties; introduced expropriation without compensation of land belonging to slaveholders; created a national ‘dirty list’ of people and companies who used slave labour – ensuring they were no longer eligible to receive government funds, grants or credits; and expanded the mobile courts, enabling the immediate dispensation of justice.
Making different choices
These reforms had immediate results but provoked a violent response from vested interests. As Lula himself stated in 2006: ‘This [slavery] system channelled wealth to a powerful elite and dug a social abyss that still marks the life of the nation.’ The powerful elite fought back and the persecution faced by those working for human and environmental rights in Brazil is laid out in unflinching detail, including the death of José Cláudio Ribeiro Da Silva, whose worldwide fame as a sustainability pioneer was not enough to protect him.
So, what are governments, organisations and companies waiting for? Forget chicken feed, the UK spent more than $11 billion bailing out the Royal Bank of Scotland after the global financial crisis. They are waiting for us to make different choices and demand necessary changes.
Kevin Bales cites Wendell Berry, who said: ‘…every time we make a decision about the food we eat, we are “farming by proxy.”’ He goes on: ‘The same goes for our relationship with all the goods that come from the intersection of slavery and environmental destruction.’
We are mining by proxy every time we buy a cellphone or a piece of gold jewellery. When we choose to load up the barbeque with shrimp we are fishing by proxy. When we buy furniture or cars or kitchen sinks, we are cutting down forests by proxy, burning them into charcoal by proxy and smelting iron by proxy. What we eat, or choose to wear, the things we buy for our homes, or choose not to buy, all link us in one relationship after another to people in slavery, national economies and protected forests.
Millions of little choices
The future is down to us. It depends on the choices we make on a daily basis. The author writes: ‘These millions of little choices turn into a great river of economic pressure, a powerful river that can either erode or sustain people’s lives and the natural world.’ At the bare minimum, he feels, each of us should:
- Contact companies whose products and services you use and tell them it is important to you that they are slavery free.
- Research who has effective policies and use rankings provided by organisations such as ‘Enough Project’ and Ethical Consumer.
- Let lawmakers know you support legislation such as the US Conflict Minerals Trade Act and the UK Modern Slavery Act.
If we truly believe that each one of us is unique, precious and a child of God, then we need to ask ourselves ‘what decisions have I made today that contribute to slavery?’ in order to protect people like Ibrahim, a Ghanaian gold mine slave.
Kevin Bales writes: ‘Then Ibrahim, tears running down his cheeks, said that he wanted to ask something of me. “I want to be remembered,” he said.’
‘“When my story is written and your book is ready, will you send me a copy? I want to show it to others, to show them that I am not completely useless. I just want to show that something good can come out of my life.”’
Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World by Kevin Bales. Spiegal & Grau. ISBN 9780812995763. £20.
