Banksy mural in Islington. Jordi Martorell/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Selling food is big business, with retail profits rising quickly among a handful of increasingly powerful players. Market concentration in the food retail sector has been paralleled by the proliferation of cases of forced labour in the industry. The two trends are not unrelated. On the contrary, monopolisation in the industry is driving exploitative labour conditions within food supply chains.
Slavery in the Thai fishing industry, forced labour in American and British agriculture, child labour and human trafficking in the chocolate industry, and forced labour in palm oil plantations in Malaysia are just a few examples of the ever-growing number of food commodities produced—in part or in whole—for supermarkets through forced labour.
