Supply Chain Risks and Vulnerabilities – From Slavery to Genocide

Fonte: Unsplash.com

It took the emergence of Covid-19 to show the world the risks and vulnerabilities of large supply chains that, in the name of efficiency and low costs for consumers, concealed the great evils and risks behind their activities, which are now evident from modern slavery to genocide.

Therefore, the discourse of efficiency and low cost, after about 40 years, is transformed into a catastrophe with the Covid-19, given the suffering and deaths of workers. The national and international press showed the risks and vulnerabilities of companies, such as JBS and Cargill in both Brazil and Canada, in the case of Covid-19. The lack of transparency in supply chains is starting to be recognized around the world.

In previous governments, Brazil was one of the countries that supported large supply chains with funding from public funds, through BNDES, benefiting large slaughterhouses and the company JBS, today the largest meat distributor in the world, although criticized for its deforestation activities, with other companies in the agribusiness sector. Focused on efficiency and big profits, large supply chains seemed to believe that the risks and social problems hidden for years would never be exposed.

In Brazil, it was easy to transfer our slavery heritage to the sector, today with the refinements of the so-called modern slavery, such as the practices of forced labor, debt slavery, domestic servitude, forced prostitution, forced marriage, and human trafficking. These types of slavery do not only happen in Third World countries but are global practices, mainly in civil construction activities, agriculture, beauty salons, farms, car-washing, and drug sales.

Scholars studying the relationship between globalization and slavery have demonstrated the alarming growth of modern slavery, today much greater in numbers than the historical slavery of past times. The field of study of slavery in supply chains is new, but it has drawn the attention of scholars in the fields of environmental studies, sociology, law, geography, political science, literature, cultural studies, international development, and history, with the purpose not only of to remove slave labor from supply chains, but to show how much this slavery is contributing to environmental degradation.

Unfortunately, our persistent impulse to always buy the cheapest doesn't lead us to think that every day thousands of people are subjected to slave labor. Cell phones, clothing, shoes, wine, food, flowers, and many of the products we buy and use every day are produced by people trapped in modern slavery, linked to the supply chains of international businesses offering goods and services.

A few days ago, the Canadian press reported that the country's main supermarket chains stock tomato products linked to Chinese forced labor. In this case, Canadian consumers who buy tomato paste, sauce, and ketchups may be buying products manufactured by Uyghurs or other ethnicities living under oppressive working conditions in Xinjiang, a remote area of ​​western China, where they are subject to mass detention and torture by the Chinese government, called genocide in some countries, as reported.

To reach this result and to map the dizzying global supply network, months of the investigation were necessary in undercover work with Chinese companies, analyzing the international shipping records, which managed to connect Xinjiang tomatoes to international brands, some of which are found in the main supermarkets. from Canada.

China has adequate digital platforms that could easily track its supply chains. An adequate digital infrastructure, including the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (Iots), must replace the control and physical structure of the past. In addition, of the five largest infrastructures of 5G technology – Huawei, Samsung, Nokia, Ericsson, and ZTE, two are Chinese.

Even so, it is observed that without strategies and policies for resilient, sustainable, and social well-being supply chains, sophisticated technological infrastructure is useless. Supply chains will not disappear, but structural changes are underway, in the sense of current structures. Europe, in ​​ privileging regional and local chains, considering the failures and risks of agriculture, follows this direction, emphasizing local food production. Certainly, a decoupling process (regional decoupling) will take place in the supply chains, seeking the path of resilience and environmental sustainability.

It is unbelievable, as has been described, the exploitation of forced labor and the destruction of lives of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, China, with the presence of companies such as Nike, Samsung, Adidas, Amazon, among dozens of others. The greed, profits, and capital increase of many companies' supply chains are the great incentive to reduce the value of human lives. In such a world, the death of innocent people is capitalized as much as possible, as in the case of the death kit in Brazil. As already mentioned, Chinese communism is driving wild capitalism to disregard international laws, rules, and customs, making it increasingly vulnerable to immoral behavior by adopting destructive measures.