Priest exposes slave labour
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.
He said companies like Coca Cola that use huge quantities of sugar and never ask how it was produced should be boycotted.
The reality for workers in the industry was illustrated by a phrase used by one man to him some time ago when he said: "This sugar has the taste of blood."
In Brazil where the sugar barons have links to the narcotics trade, people are being pushed off their land into shanty towns while the barons extend their huge plantations for sugar cane.
Those between the ages of 18 and 35 years start their working day at around 4am. They are driven to the plantations where they spend 14 hours working. They must cut 3 tons a day to earn US$100 a month.
"It takes about 10,000 strokes of a machete a day that kind of work does awful things to the body. They burn the cane before harvesting to drive out what they call vermin and people have to work beside this heat when the temperatures are around 30 degrees."
His visit to the Parliament was hosted by MEP Mairead McGuinness who said the EU reforms add to the profits of large-scale global food industry and serve to weaken the position of the poor and landless in Brazil.
