Campaigner puts slavery in focus

By Lucy Battersby, The Age, Melbourne, 9 April 2008

Millions of people are still trapped in slavery around the world because businesses are unaware of forced labour in their own supply chains, according to a visiting anti-slavery campaigner.

Nor can Australianconsumers be confident the products or food they buy are not made with slave labour.

"If you were to look at forced labour, in all of the things we use day-in, day-out, we don't think about how we use slavery," said David Batstone, who is traveling Australia with World Vision chief executive Tim Costello to raise awareness of slave labour in business supply chains.

Professor Batstone is the author of several anti-slavery books and co-founder of an international campaign to fight the global slave trade.

World Vision recently launched Don't Trade Lives, a campaign to build support networks in Australia for victims of slavery.

The campaign also encourages consumers to ask chocolate makers about their cocoa suppliers, because it says child labour is regularly used on cocoa farms in Africa.

Australia imports about $15 million of cocoa products annually from western Africa, primarily Ghana and Ivory Coast.

But chocolate makers say they have programs to improve labour practice on cocoa farms.

Cadbury corporate affairs director Trish Fields said Cadbury recently launched theCadbury Cocoa Partnership, which will invest $100 millionover 10 years to improve cocoagrowing communities in Ghana, India, Indonesia and the Caribbean.

We take the allegations of forced child labour within cocoa farming communities very seriously and are absolutely aligned with World Vision on this," she said.

Director of the anti-slavery project at the University of Technology in Sydney, Jennifer Burn, said there were about 100 trafficked people in Australia at any one time.

But the use of slave labour to make products sold in Australia was widespread.

"If we are going to eradicate slavery in the world, then we have got to look at the economics of slavery as well as the human rights issues," she said.

Professor Batstone has spoken to senior staff from Jetstar, the Body Shop, National Australia Bank, Freehills, Macquarie Bank, Unilever, Manpower and BHP Billiton.

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