Am I funding human rights abuses?
The story behind BEHR News
by Matthew Phillips
I still remember the sense of shame I felt when I learned that there are more people in slavery today than at any other point in history. Shame, because I grew up under the illusion that modern humanity had somehow progressed from that sort of thing, that the long arc of history bent towards justice was thoroughly bent. So how do you explain the estimated 28 million people working in conditions of forced labor today? 1
My journey to find an answer to this question led me through a maze of investigative journalism, handfuls of books, and reporting from dozens of organizations committed to ending slavery. I was surprised by how much information exists publicly online for anyone who is curious enough to go searching for it. But this fact leads to a puzzling question—if the information is available online, why don't more people know about it? For example, most of the chocolate you might buy for halloween has been implicated with human rights abuses for years. And you may have heard about blood diamonds, but what about slavery in the seafood industry or in the metals fueling our tech economy?
The truth is that many of the products we take for granted in our modern economy are implicated in human rights abuses and environmental destruction around the world. Coffee, chocolate, clothes, smartphones.... Sustainable brands do exist in these industries, but the worst offenders are also some of the most well-known. Which led me to the question: "Who is funding the modern slave trade?" Part of the answer lies in the fact that many of these industries would not exist if there wasn't a large consumer demand for them. After all, most people don't walk into the store on the defensive about buying products with horrendous supply chains. I don't think consumers should ultimately be the ones to take responsibilty for the ethical decisions that get made in the global supply chain, but I don't doubt that the average consumer can make a large difference if enough people come together and are vocal about change.
There are many resources online devoted to corporate transparency and organizing boycotts of certain brands for certain reasons, but in most cases there is a lack of comprehensive information about how that company's impact fits into the larger picture of our human rights and environmental woes. For example, our increasing awareness of climate change and environmental degredation has increased our sympathy for environmental protection and sustainability, but a lesser known fact is how much of our modern penchant for environmental destruction goes hand-in-hand with forced labor and human rights abuses. One study estimates that if slavery were a country, it would be "the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, after China and the United States." 2 As is often the case, the problems we care most about don't occur in isolation. Labor rights violations do not happen in a vaccuum. Neither does deforestation or climate change. Neither does war or famine. 3
So what do we do about it? My own answer came to me when I was in the early days of discovering all of this and felt exhausted and overwhelmed by a million open browser tabs and unread books. What I wanted most was to be able to pick up my phone and have access to the best, most comprehensive publications on the intersection of all of these issues. An unexpected car accident led to a series of humbling decisions in my life when, like Jules of Pulp Fiction, who stood facing a volley of gunfire at close range only to look around and discover that every single bullet had missed him, I too miraculously walked away unscathed. Except in my case, instead of renouncing a life of crime, I decided to backpack through Europe. It was on this whirlwind journey that I found a clear head and committed myself to doing something about the problems I had obsessed over for so long. I had been staying with a friend in The Hague, mulling over international crime and desperately thinking that if only people knew about modern slavery then maybe something might happen. Maybe more people would start asking questions about where certain products come from, and maybe more corporations whose products we buy would be held to account for the human rights abuses and environmental destruction they facilitate. Many of the solutions to humanity's greatest challenges have started out as a problem of information and awareness. So after a few craft Belgian beers, I had the epiphany to make an app. Every good idea has an app. But perhaps that's just the software developer in me speaking. In any case, having never built an app, I quickly got sucked down the technical rabbit hole of front-end development and web design on a quest to create something simple, sleek, and with a wealth of information that anyone can navigate on their own.
The result is Business, Environment & Human Rights News, a news aggregator and search engine meant to make it easier to find information about the problems I have been discussing. It currently showcases the publications of a select few organizations with consistently excellent reporting and investigative depth. What you see is the minimum I have been able to accomplish so far, and I hope to add more resources and features in the future to provide the best informative resource on human rights and environmental issues. In the coming week I will write another blog post discussing the technical aspects, limitations, and future direction of the project.
In the grand scheme of things this project may not change anything, but there is a certain feeling of euphoria in trying. For me, this project is the consequence of my inability to sit still with the knowledge that some of the most ubiquitous corporations whose products we buy out of routine and familiarity are implicated in some of the most destructive abuses on our environment and human rights throughout the world. On April 24 this year, International Rights Advocates filed a lawsuit against Starbucks for sourcing its coffee beans from a supplier in Brazil known to use child slave labor. 4 There's a memorable passage in Moby Dick when the character Starbuck (after whom Starbucks Corporation is named) questions Captain Ahab's motive for taking revenge on the white whale, who is, after all, simply a "dumb brute." Ahab replies, "I would strike the sun if it insulted me, for could the sun do that, then could I do the other, since there is ever a sort of fair play." Fair play is exactly what I am after. I refuse to be misled by claims of corporate transparency and ethical sourcing when the evidence says otherwise. In the more memorable words of former President George W. Bush: "fool me, can't get fooled again."
You can't unknow what you know. The upside is that the more you know, the more you can act. My goal is to share the work that great and inspiring groups of people, non-profits, NGOs, and investigative outlets are doing to help protect the dignity of people and the environment. If large corporations cannot be counted on to do their own due diligence, someone else has to. If you want to see change in the world, then these people are worth listening to.
Footnotes
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From forests to factories: how modern slavery deepens the crisis of climate change ↩
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See Kevin Bales' Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World for a great introduction to this topic ↩