Forced Labor Taints Brazilian Coffee, Say Complaints to U.S. Authorities

Tariffs are not the only threat to business for big companies selling coffee in the United States. On Thursday, a watchdog group petitioned the Trump administration to block coffee imports that it says are produced with forced labor akin to modern-day slavery in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee grower.

The petition to Customs and Border Protection, filed by the nonprofit Coffee Watch, names Starbucks, by far the largest coffee retailer in the country, as well as Nestle, Dunkin’, Illy, McDonald’s and Jacobs Douwe Egberts, the owner of Peet’s, as companies that rely on potentially dubious sources. It asks the Trump administration not to allow distribution of any imports from Brazil that “wholly or in part” rely on human trafficking and forced labor.

“This isn’t about a few bad actors,” Etelle Higonnet, the founder and director of Coffee Watch, said in a statement. “We’re exposing an entrenched system that traps millions in extreme poverty and thousands in outright slavery.”

The request for U.S. action was filed a day after another group, International Rights Advocates, sued Starbucks in federal court on behalf of eight Brazilians who were trafficked and forced to toil in “slavery-like conditions,” said Terry Collingsworth, a human rights lawyer and the founder of the group.

The suit seeks certification as a class action representing thousands of workers who it says have faced the same plight while harvesting coffee for a major Starbucks supplier and regional growers’ cooperative in Brazil called Cooxupé.

“Starbucks needs to be accountable,” Mr. Collingsworth said in an interview, adding that “there is a massive trafficking and forced labor system in Brazil” that the company benefits from.

Amber Stafford, a spokeswoman for Starbucks, denied the allegations and said the company was committed to ethical sourcing, including helping to protect the rights of people who work on the farms its coffee comes from. “The cornerstone of our work is our Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices verification program, which was developed with outside experts and includes robust third-party verification and audits,” she said in an email.

Mr. Collingsworth contends that despite the verification program, the company has not made its practices transparent. The lawsuit, he said, will help his group get more information about the company’s supply chains.

Several of the companies named in the petition to block imports take part, along with the Rainforest Alliance, in the Sustainable Coffee Challenge, whose stated aims include improving the lot of agricultural workers. Apart from Starbucks, the companies either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to do so.

The advocacy groups issued a joint statement on Thursday, saying their efforts expose “the hidden human cost behind one of the nation’s most beloved commodities: coffee.”

The groups’ goal is to disrupt a segment of the Brazilian coffee industry that they say supplies companies abroad in part by trafficking vulnerable workers. The coffee sector in Brazil was founded on slavery and continued to depend upon it, they say, even though Brazil abolished slavery in 1888.

The groups say that illegal labor brokers — known as “gatos” or “cats” — seek out workers from poor, rural communities, some of whose inhabitants descend from enslaved people, making false representations about jobs and advancing funds for food and travel. The laborers end up in “debt bondage,” working off what they owe by harvesting coffee under conditions not so different from those of their enslaved forebears.

Other human rights groups, as well as news organizations and the U.S. government have reported similar findings.

In April, four coffee producers that are part of the Cooxupé collective were added to a slave labor blacklist by the Brazilian authorities after inspectors found dozens of workers, including a teenager, who were being subjected to conditions akin to slavery, according to Repórter Brasil, a Brazilian nonprofit.

In some cases, the workers do not have running water, beds or toilets, according to advocacy groups. They work long hours without protective equipment and often do not receive their full wages or any pay.

The Brazilian government has repeatedly taken action, but because coffee harvesting is a seasonal activity, it is not subject to as much monitoring as other fields of employment.

The eight workers in the Starbucks complaint withheld their names out of fear of retribution at home. “These traffickers are dangerous guys,” Mr. Collingworth said. Workers who try to leave or report abuses face death threats and are often prevented from leaving the farms, he said.

The legal actions were based on records from the Brazilian authorities, nonprofits and journalists “showing a persistent pattern of labor abuses throughout Brazil’s coffee sector,” the advocacy groups said. The system, rights advocates contend, is bolstered by corporations abroad who rely on Brazilian suppliers — and by unwitting American consumers.

“No coffee produced by slaves should enter American homes,” said Ms. Higonnet of Coffee Watch.