July 28, 2015 — When the U.S. State Department released its annual human trafficking report on Monday, it told distressingly familiar tales of forced sex work and housekeepers kept against their will. But this year, one area got special attention: Slavery in the global supply chains of agriculture, fishing and aquaculture.
The report has ranked the anti-trafficking efforts of most nations around the world since 2001, sorting them into three tiers of compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. To obtain the top ranking of tier one, countries must “demonstrate appreciable progress in combating trafficking,” while third-tier countries are deemed to be ignoring the problem, and thus subject to non-trade related sanctions.
In the report’s early years, domestic and sex work dominated, and trafficking was attributed to “greed and moral turpitude.” But in the 2015 report, the more mundane — but endemic — problem of labor rights within global supply chains takes center stage, with food industries highlighted for both abuse and for some promising efforts to fight the problem.
“Awareness about forced labor and its significance in the global economy has been mounting in recent years,” Mai Shiozaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, tells The Salt in an email. A mix of government officials, advocates, businesses and media had driven that shift, she says.