Priest exposes slave labour

SCOTTISH priest Fr Jock Thorlby gave a harrowing account of the real cost of sugar to thousands of people in Brazil when he visited the European Parliament yesterday.

The sugar reforms announced by Commissioner Mariann Fisher Boel will do nothing to help these victims of the sugar industry, he said. Instead, it will serve the purposes of the sugar barons that dominate the industry in Brazil and rule the lives of thousands of desperate people.

"We are talking about slave labour conditions and damage to the environment such that Europeans would not tolerate here," said the Scottish priest who works in the Pernambuco region in north-east Brazil. Campaigning for the workers, he has received three death threats in the past 18 months and has been shot at a number of times.