Supermarkets must help end 'brutal conditions' for farmers: Oxfam
AFP/File / STRIndian tea farmers, many of them women, are scraping a living, Oxfam says
Supermarkets in the West are using their purchasing power to force suppliers to cut their prices, contributing to exploitation and even forced labour of millions of farmers worldwide, a global charity said Thursday.
"Millions of women and men who produce our food are trapped in poverty and face brutal working conditions, despite billion-dollar profits in the food industry," Oxfam International said as it released a report titled "Ripe for Change".
"From forced labour aboard fishing vessels in southeast Asia, to poverty wages on Indian tea plantations and hunger faced by workers on South African grape farms, human and labour rights abuses are all too common in food supply chains," the report said.
In surveys conducted in five countries last year, Oxfam said it documented what it called "unfair trading practices" by supermarket giants such as setting prices below the cost of sustainable production.
They were also unwilling to raise prices in order to take into account increases in the minimum wage, it said.
Such practices left the workers at the bottom of the supply chain to pay the heaviest price.
In Thailand, more than 90 percent of workers at seafood processing plants said they had gone without enough food the previous month, Oxfam said.
Around 80 percent of those workers were women, it added.
In Italy, where many farm workers are migrants, 75 percent of women working on fruit and vegetable farms said they or a family member had to miss meals because they could not afford to buy enough food.
- 'Cruel paradox' -
"It is one of the cruellest paradoxes of our time that the people producing our food and their families are often going without enough to eat themselves," Oxfam said.
The charity criticised major European and US supermarkets for failing to ensure that food producers were treated with dignity.
Part of the reason inequalities were increasing, Oxfam said, was because of supermarket chains' drive to deliver year-round choice at a low cost.
The main beneficiaries from this drive, according to the report, are supermarkets themselves -- with little thought given to the working conditions of people who produce the food.
"The eight largest publicly owned supermarkets in the world generated some $1 trillion from sales in 2016 and nearly $22 billion in profit," Oxfam said.
It plans to launch a campaign to urge supermarkets to "crack down on inhumane working conditions".
"Supermarkets can afford to pay producers a fair price without burdening shoppers," said Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam's executive director.
"In many cases, giving back just one or two percent of the retail price -— a few cents -- would be life-changing for the women and men who produce the food on their shelves," she said.
Yekaterinburg: World Cup host city where gangs once ruled
AFP / Jorge GUERREROThe tombstones of leaders of the Uralmash gang in Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg has escaped its dark past of contract killings and organised crime to become a World Cup host city with a more hopeful future.
The industrial city of 1.5 million people is the most eastern of all the 11 involved in the tournament, staging four group games including France v Peru on Thursday.
A stroll among the graves of cemeteries reveals how far Yekaterinburg has come in the past 20 years to stage the biggest sports event on the planet.
Prominent among the fading tombstones of Soviet apparatchiks, professors and Red Army heroes is the well-maintained grave of Mikhail Kuchin.
His life-size and intricately engraved tombstone shows him in a suit, the keys for a Mercedes dangling ostentatiously in his left hand.
AFP / Jorge GUERREROThe tombstone of Russian mafia gangster Flarit Valuev in Shirokorechenskoye cemetery in Yekaterinburg
It is a nod to the criminally financed and lavish lifestyle this member of the so-called "Russian mafia" led in the turbulent aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.
He was assassinated in 1994, aged 34.
- Violence erupts -
A few steps farther down in the Shirokorechenskoye cemetery, close to the city centre, are buried other leading members of the Tsentrovye (Centrals) gang.
They were killed in a tit-for-tat street war that erupted in the 1990s between the Tsentrovye and Uralmash gang, named after a huge Soviet-era plant that sustained the city.
With the Russian economy imploding, the gangs battled over everything from casinos and heavy industry to "protection" -- in reality extortion -- of small businesses.
AFP/File / Anne-Christine POUJOULATYekaterinburg is the most eastern of all the host cities at the World Cup
It is a dark period in Russia's early post-Soviet history that the people of Yekaterinburg would rather forget -- if only the gravestones would let them.
"It is a notorious part of our history that we couldn't make that transition period (to capitalism) in a peaceful and a beautiful way," said Maria Tretyak, a Yekaterinburg native and expert in the city's history.
"But at that time it seems that there was no other way to make money and so many young people would really want to be members of these gangs."
Organised crime was endemic in Russian cities of all shapes and sizes, with the gangs of Yekaterinburg and surrounding Urals towns based mostly around local manufacturing plants.
- Dying young -
In the northern neighbourhood of Uralmash lies another cemetery where the gang's slain bosses -- the criminal elite -- take pride of place in the best lots and boast the most expensive tombstones, costing upwards of 2.5 million rubles ($40,000).
Like their Central rivals immortalised across town, almost all were killed in the 1990s before reaching middle age.
Freshly laid flowers nestle among the busts and a CCTV camera is trained on some of the tombs to ward off vandals, thieves or gawping tourists.
The two gangs came up with increasingly inventive ways to bump one another off, said Tretyak, a guide with the Yekaterinburg For You tourist agency.
According to one local legend, when one assassination attempt failed, the victim's killers wielded enough influence to turn off electricity in the neighbourhood around the hospital, causing the life-support machine to fail.
- Changing fast -
"You can say that Uralmash eventually took control all over the city and were very influential, very powerful here," said Tretyak, adding that after seeing off their rivals, Uralmash's leaders either died, went into politics or started more legitimate businesses.
The last Uralmash gang boss, Alexander Khabarov, died in prison in 2005 in suspicious circumstances, effectively signalling the end of a violent period in Yekaterinburg's history, said Tretyak.
"Yekaterinburg has changed a lot, it is becoming more and more European and globalised," she said.
"Now it is the city administration that controls the city -- not the gangs."
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