> “Regulatory oversight and validation of good practices are very difficult to document for compliance over the border,” he noted, “They are of course done much better here. And there are validated and official fair market agreements between wholesalers and retailers that require documentation and compliance.”
This is such a bullshit excuse (on the industry's part, to be clear, not the person speaking). If we cared to validate supply chains, it would be done, for this and everything else. We don't because the people in power do not want to know. They don't want to know how greenwashed avocados are, they don't want to know how many diamonds come from conflict zones, they don't want to know how much of their lithium was mined by kids, and all the rest.
We know how to solve these problems and we're choosing not to, and not only are we maintaining harms done overseas in the process, we're also destroying the ability for domestic producers of... everything, really, to compete in the market too.
You seem to have a very cynical view, but I think the reason nobody is verifying these things is that they're hard to actually check, and nobody wants to pay for the cost of verification. My only experience with this sort of tracking is compliance with "Conflict Minerals" reporting, and from that I can tell you that tracking and verifying the origin of any commodity or bulk good is nearly impossible to accomplish reliably. There is no real way to know where a refined metal came from, other than accepting a supplier's assurance, and maybe looking through some documents, looking for obvious mistakes. I have to imagine that avocados are similar.
Here, watch this: I'm the US government with the most powerful military and surveillance network on the planet with multiple deployed floating cities. You give me a list of every supplier you use and I will recursively go down that list and every employee they have and if you use slaves to harvest materials at any point, I shut down your entire business and burn every shippng crate of stock until you get a supplier that doesn't use slaves. If you lie, I ship the executives to one of numerous black sites under my control. If we're going to do it to innocent people, shipping them to God knows what death camp without due process, I'm not going to sit here and listen anymore about this "we can't do that" nonsense about our supply chain.
Woah, crazy, slavery solved.
At least have the balls to tell me you want cheap avocados and don't care if child slaves pick them. I'm so God damn tired of all the excuses and smoke and mirrors.
Let’s say you buy electrolytic capacitors, and you’re worried that they might have conflict tantalum in them. You call up the manufacturer (likely Samsung), and they tell you that they are unable to verify the origin of the metal. Even if they did tell you who sold them the metal, that’s just a refiner, and there is no way to verify whatever they tell you about the origin. Many conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and I am not sure how you’d detect that.
I understand your frustration, but how do you actually verify the origins of these commodities? The professional auditors just blindly trust documentation as far as I can tell.
Then why the fuck are you buying them from there? Get a different supplier. If they can't answer that question, it's because they do use slave labor or just don't care. Neither is acceptable.
I'm sorry, are you okay if you asked your boss "hey, we don't have actual slaves in the basement, right?" And they answer "I don't know?" I hope to God you would call the police. But suddenly it's acceptable because a CEO says "maybe, but it saves us 5¢ per unit and they're just brown people in another country"?
I'm not going to boohoo for poor little victim companies because they just need slave labor because they're too stupid or greedy to not buy from a company who can't say "no slavery is used in making my product".
"Oh no, I want to make shirts, but all the cotton I'm willing to pay for comes from slave plantations." Then don't make shirts. And if you do, that makes you a slaver too.
I love how this is where the conversation is these days. This is how far the Overton window has shifted. Slavery is totally acceptable as long as you pretend you don't know. Fix it? Stop slavery? That's just too hard and we may lose profits. "Oh no, poor little us, it's impossible for us to actually care about human rights."
So your solution is that purchasers just need to buy from someone who tells them that the commodity is clean? That is definitely what many do, and what the conflict minerals regulations have encouraged companies to do, but I don’t trust any unverifiable information.
My point is that these companies know that slavery is being used. Nestlé quite literally admitted to it!
If we're going to be a fascist dumpster, why does everyone pretend it's some inherent right that the corporate wigs get all this insulation and that there's simply nothing that can be done against quite literally the worst crimes against humanity that we could possible participate in?
The literal bare minimum someone can do is get a written affidavit from their supplier that the chain is clean. I'm a stupid individual man and somehow I can take the extra hours required for damn near every purchase to look up who I'm buying from and where it comes from. Sometimes I even go without! But companies worth quite literally tens of billions can't?
If all you have to do is get written affidavits, you’ll just create an industry of co-minglers and liars abroad, without changing anything. I don’t think this is a readily solveable problem.
Then you make it illegal to do business with countries that don't have an extradition treaty for slavery!
I cannot fathom this mindset. This is human slavery! This is worse than murder and rape and child endangerment, because it inherently includes all of them! It is the worst crime you can commit onto another human being for decades and decades as you drive them into the grave. I've seen a picture of a man looking at the severed hands of his daughter for bananas! But you're willing to handwaved it away like it's a minor inconvenience?
As if a country that is currently demanding OpenAI give them every chat they've ever had, including deleted, a country that has every phone call and text ever made, that has privileged access to emails and photo clouds and search engines for monitoring, that runs countless poisoned exit nodes and honey potted websites, which infiltrates domestic and foreign cults and rings and governments with spies regularly, that publishes papers on how to spy on citizens walking through their homes via wireless signals and hear audio through hard surfaces by using vibrations in leaves, that operates military cities and steers security standards and has quite literally unlimited money for their war machine, which can track individual human activity from space can't find out if millions to billions of pounds of materials going through their ports being inspected by their customs with manifest signed by domestic companies with paperwork uses slavery!?
Oh, come on. When it's about SpaceX taking humans to Mars we're all "we do these things because they are hard" but when it comes to ending the most abhorrent crimes against humanity of our times you throw up your hands and declare "the billionaires told me it was hard"!?
> If we're going to be a fascist dumpster, why does everyone pretend it's some inherent right that the corporate wigs get all this insulation and that there's simply nothing that can be done against quite literally the worst crimes against humanity that we could possible participate in?
I mean, historically, Fascists and Capitalists have been pretty hand-in-hand so that's far from even strange to me. Despite the Nazi party having Socialist in it's name, they literally coined the term "privatization" to describe their process of selling public-good utilities and services to private owners so they could profit off of them.
The only thing I would say is don't burn the shipping crates. That's just wasteful. Sell the products at 50% off retail to everyone in the US below the poverty line first, then everyone else, and use the funds to pay to improve the working conditions overseas. Our atmosphere doesn't need more waste in it.
> My only experience with this sort of tracking is compliance with "Conflict Minerals" reporting, and from that I can tell you that tracking and verifying the origin of any commodity or bulk good is nearly impossible to accomplish reliably.
This is a better written and more eloquent version of the same excuse I was ranting about in my comment. And I'm afraid my response is not as eloquent:
Bull. Shit.
This is an eminently solvable issue. Make the executives of whatever corporation personally, criminally responsible for the slavery found in their supply chain, and then: Watch the problem be solved. No, I don't know the specifics of how you do it. That's not my job. But we put men on the moon, for Christ's sake. We, creatures not gifted by nature with wings, have the ability to fly at (mostly) reasonable cost, to such a degree where the inconveniences involved in it make it boring to discuss. Everyone in the west moves around in metal boxes with smaller metal boxes within them in which we blow up fuel and air in precise mixes to travel upwards of 80 mph, largely safely. You're telling me the collected knowledge of our species cannot be leveraged to make sure that little kids aren't doing resource extraction!?
> and nobody wants to pay for the cost of verification.
THAT is the real problem, and that's also solvable by the above. I bet the executives at these companies will open the business's purse REAL FAST when it's their, actual physical ass on the line, and not just a paltry fine and firm finger-wagging from the Government.
In reply to the comment below:
> But how do you actually verify the source? Let’s assume that some amount of conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and commingled with ‘clean’ material (which is usually how it happens); how do you figure out whether your supplier is using this material? Do you just trust any documentation they provide? If not, what is it that you’d do?
I mean this is actually one application of crypto that I didn't think was brain-dead stupid. I read a paper about the potential of using blockchains to verify the integrity of materials in supply chains.
More to the point though: I said, I don't know how it's done. But I guaran-damn-tee you that if the corpos will be charged, legally, personally, for the finding of slavery in supply chains, that they will figure it out and fucking quick.
And, even moreso, once you raise the consequences of those "lapses" in ethics to such a degree, it's highly probable that the dubious sources will either improve or shut down entirely, because there will be no corporation in the West ready to do business with them anymore. The risk is simply too high for those in charge of said corporations. They will pay whatever it costs to have materials that are from properly vetted sources.
And of course, I'm not a child, there will still be issues, none of this is a silver bullet for any of it, and there will always be bad actors acting badly. However we still have murders, and we don't just... fine murderers $500 and tell them they better not do it again, despite the fact that we can't catch them all. We catch them and we punish them.
> No, I don't know the specifics of how you do it.
HN had four stories of the US government violating the 4th and 5th amendments for surveillance for CBP and ICE yesterday alone. The President jokes about revoking citizenship, of both natural born and otherwise. We have had dozens of citizens sent to black sites without due process. We are monitoring social media for immigrants while deporting people to illegal death camp prisons in countries they have never been.
The sitting US president is a convicted rapist who attempted to violently overthrow the government 5 years ago. Who is now covering for the leader of the largest, highest-profile child rape program in history - led by one of his best friends! They, this week, published fabricated videos from official government sources. And the SCOTUS has declared him effectively immune from prosecution.
We are so far from pretending to be a country of rules and laws anymore. So, fuck it, just decree it and call them terrorists at this point. Ship the execs to Guantanamo.
But how do you actually verify the source? Let’s assume that some amount of conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and commingled with ‘clean’ material (which is usually how it happens); how do you figure out whether your supplier is using this material? Do you just trust any documentation they provide? If not, what is it that you’d do?
The coffee supply chain is one exception imho. There's a market for value-add in the supply chain, I've been amazed to watch the price of specialty coffee keep rising at my favorite roaster.
Many consumers don't have the time or luxury to know. We're in the "give them bread" phase. We already heavily subsidize many parts of the food chain to keep people happy. Nobody wants to do anything politically that might cause food prices to go up.
Yet it's still a better one. It's much more plausible consumers haven't had the exposure and time to form a decision on this than it is to conclude that they don't care.
That's not a solution, it's defeatist horseshit. I want avocados. I don't want avocado growers to be able to hide their environmental impact. I want lithium batteries. I don't want kids mining lithium. I want animal products. I don't want animals needlessly tortured in factory farms.
I don't feel like I'm asking for the fucking moon here.
It's a classic case of revealed vs declared preferences. People overwhelmingly say they want everything ethically sourced, but they reveal that they don't want to pay more for it, which makes ethically sourced anything a luxury good in the cases where it succeeds at all. People want kids out of
At some point IMO people need to grow up and recognize that there's a GULF between the world people say they want, and the one they insist on creating. Assuming that your money follows your stated intentions, you're part of a small minority that truly cares about this to the extent that they're willing to pay for it.
According to the complaint, people, generally, are putting their money where their mouth is, and that the market prices such higher, as one would expect.
The problem is the information asymmetry: a consumer can't know if the word "sustainable" indicates sustainable practices, or is just ink. That's where regulation ought to step in, but of course, waves at current political turmoil…
I think this is just an argument for why we should decide what production practices are acceptable for society, impose it, and dole out harsh penalties for cheaters.
If you're going to line your coffers by selling things to us, then we get to decide things like whether you get to use slave labor, whether you get to adulterate it with pollutants, whether you get to lie about its contents, etc.
That way people can pick the cheapest product and receive something that isn't completely horrific. We already kinda have this, but your comment just supports the need for it.
It's there for the sub-set of people who truly care, or want to socially signal that they care. It's like... Tony's Chocolonely or any of the fair trade centric chocolates. They exist, they make sales, and you know who blows them out of the water every year? Nestle. Mondelez.
For every person who goes to Whole Foods and checks the labels, there are thousands of people who go to Wal-Mart or Costco and the only thing they check is the price.
Tony's Chocoloney had to stop marketing their chocolate as the only chocolate that doesn't use slave labor because they couldn't guarantee it.
Unless you're literally flying over to vet suppliers yourself, there's practically nothing you can do as a consumer to guarantee you're not being lied to.
Frankly, maybe this is an opportunity for an OSINT org. Just as soon as they stop having all these wars of aggression with professional misinformation campaigns to focus on, of course.
Amen. Sadly, it seems next to impossible to bring this sort of change and accountability to industry. In the meantime, our only option is pay premiums (both financially and in effort), which the masses are unable or unwilling to do, in order to opt out of the current system (if it's even possible).
At least you're thinking about the issues, and seem to care, so thanks for that.
I'm not OP, but no, I want to pay a fair price for things. I don't mind paying a lot more for avocados if it means no one has to die or be abused to produce them.
You can find ethical concerns with anything if you look hard enough. Supermarket foods are not on my list of things I get too wound up about. Yes, the farming practices of developing economies are not congruent with what we in our place of economic dominance and comfort expect, but that's part of "developing." Look at our own, or any first-world country's history.
Feel free to go to the Farmers Market on Saturday and pick up an $8 head of lettuce and some $4/ea heirloom tomatoes if it bothers you.
I mean we used to have a strong Avocado industry here in the states before NAFTA. Which reminds me I have to go cut one of the dead Avocado trees in my back from those days.
The US avocado industry is still pretty strong compared to pre-NAFTA. See Figure 4. It looks like domestic production (in lbs. of avocados) actually peaked in 2005/2006, and nearly reached that level again in 2010/2011.
This is such a bullshit excuse (on the industry's part, to be clear, not the person speaking). If we cared to validate supply chains, it would be done, for this and everything else. We don't because the people in power do not want to know. They don't want to know how greenwashed avocados are, they don't want to know how many diamonds come from conflict zones, they don't want to know how much of their lithium was mined by kids, and all the rest.
We know how to solve these problems and we're choosing not to, and not only are we maintaining harms done overseas in the process, we're also destroying the ability for domestic producers of... everything, really, to compete in the market too.
But the lines gotta go up, so on we go.