Slave Next Door (31 page)

crush any opposition group, such as Tibetans who object to the Chinese

occupation of their country, members of the Falun Gong religion, or

Christian churches that have stood against government controls. And

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while it is illegal under U.S. law to import goods made by slaves or con-

victs, the Chinese government has a way around that as well. Ramin

Pejan again:

Each
Laogai
camp has both a camp name and a public name. For exam-

ple, the Shanghai Municipal Prison is also called the Shanghai Printing

& Stationery Factory. Financial information on 99 forced labor camp

enterprises collected by Dunn and Bradstreet was released on June 30,

1999. According to this data, the 99 camps had total annual sales of

U.S. $842.7 million. These camps represent only 9 percent of the

roughly 1,100 known
Laogai
camps. The extremely cheap cost of labor

in the
Laogai
system creates a very low-priced, competitive product to

export, providing the PRC additional incentive to continue its use of the

Laogai
system.16

That “very low-priced competitive” product range includes the $4

lamp and thousands of other consumer goods. Once we know the origin

of these goods, most of us would rather not buy them, but it is difficult

to trace which of the cheap goods from China come from the hands of

workers enslaved by their own government, since the Chinese govern-

ment works hard to conceal which exports are prison made and which

come from other factories. Slave labor has been known to produce toys,

lamps and other electrical items, tote bags, clothing, and kitchen goods,

but whenever a case is exposed by the press, human rights groups, or

U.S. Customs, the Chinese government closes the prison factory and

then either moves it or reopens it under a new name. Many of the

Chinese exporters, American importers, and “big box” companies

know which goods are made by slaves, but they’re not telling.

The United States is the richest country in the world, and goods flow

from everywhere trying to tap into its lucrative market. Is it any sur-

prise that criminals are making huge profits by using slave labor for the

insatiable American consumer? The goods literally surround us, and

we give them to our children to wear, eat, and play with. It is hard to

imagine that things could be worse, but they are—the slaves that feed

our consumption are also being forced to destroy the environment.

D E S T R O Y I N G L I V E S , D E S T R O Y I N G T H E E A R T H

Slaves grow, mine, and produce what we eat, use, and wear, but the

story doesn’t stop there. In many cases, a major by-product of the slave

labor feeding into the American economy is environmental destruction.

Not surprisingly, criminals who destroy the lives of slaves don’t mind

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wreaking havoc on nature. Forests are illegally cut, strip mines are

carved into protected areas, reefs and coastal environments are

destroyed, and it is slaves who do the work. In the Amazon rain forests,

slaves—not bulldozers—cut the lungs from the planet. The mangrove

swamps destroyed to build shrimp farms are ecological “sponges” pro-

tecting the coastline from being overwhelmed by the rushing wall of

water that is a tsunami. In the devastating tsunami of December 2004,

the areas of Sri Lanka that suffered the greatest loss of life were where

natural coastal ecosystems had been ripped up to install fish and shrimp

farms. This was especially the case when outlying coral reefs were

broken up, thus removing a natural buffer.

The two thousand gold mines of Amazonian Peru and Brazil have

turned 125 miles of rain forest into ravaged mounds of raw earth and

ponds choked with mercury-tainted water and silt. To get at the gold

flecks, tons of topsoil and riverbanks are dug up and hauled into

troughs, where jets of water wash through it. The thick brown and

yellow runoff clogs streams and pollutes whatever lies downriver. With

the topsoil and vegetation removed, nothing grows on the barren moon-

scape that remains. In the camps, mercury is applied to a slurry of min-

erals, dirt, sand, and flecks of gold. Mixed together, gold and mercury

form a bond, called an amalgamation, and the sand or other minerals

float to the surface of the liquid mercury, where they can be skimmed

off. The mercury-gold amalgamation, a waxlike mass, is then heated,

and the mercury evaporates, leaving the gold dust behind. While effi-

ciently separating the gold from all the other sand and dirt, this process

also means that unprotected miners handle mercury and breathe it in

when it is evaporated. All the used mercury is ultimately left in the air,

soil, or water to poison the earth. Another method used to refine gold is

even more dangerous to the workers. This involves leaching gold-bearing

ore with a cyanide solution that is extremely poisonous and polluting.17

The next time you consider buying that stylish South American gold

“Inca” figurine or piece of jewelry, think of the real cost—to the envi-

ronment and to the slaves who mined and processed the ore.

A L I E N AT TA C K !

Outside of Amazonia, a bizarre double-whammy has been inflicted on

Brazilian forests to provide the steel needed for our cars, furniture, toys,

and thousands of other products. It’s like a story out of science fiction.

For thousands of years, a particular corner of planet Earth was dense

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forest. The people who lived in it were just one of the many species that

existed in balance with the thick tangle of trees. A mature ecology of

plants and animals, it was about as stable and long-lasting as any natu-

ral place can be. One day, machines of enormous power appeared. In

hours, they scraped away the ancient forest as if it were no more than

foam on the earth’s surface. Within days the sterilized land was

replanted with a single, alien species. This planting was invincible and

voracious. None of the native insects and animals that survived the

attack could eat or live on the new species. Those that tried learned the

hard way: a noxious poison oozed from its leaves and branches when

cut or broken. Meanwhile, any surviving plants starved as the alien

sucked all the nutrients from the soil in a frenzy that fed tremendous

growth. Soon, where the dense and varied forest once stood was a single

species of uniform color, uniform size, and uniform silence. The birds

were gone, the animals had fled, and only a few lizards and insects sur-

vived as the newly planted trees quietly rustled in the wind.

Today, the alien trees tower over the land. Where the straight edge of

the new monoculture meets the original forest, the lush old growth thins

from the lack of nutrients. You can see it with your own eyes. The place

is the state of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. The alien species is eucalyp-

tus, the oily and fragrant tree from Australia, the leafy home of those

cute koala bears. In the 1970s nearly one million acres in three counties

of Mato Grosso do Sul were stripped of their forests (
mato grosso
means

“thick wood”) and replaced with eucalyptus trees. The native forests

here were not the vast rain forests of the Amazon basin but the shorter,

tangled
cerrado
or scrub forests of the South American central plateau.

The destruction of these forests was the first major human assault on this

part of Brazil. It was, and still is, the edge, the frontier of “civilization.”

And it was all for nothing. The clearance and planting of eucalyptus was

part of a government scheme giving tax breaks and grants to big

landowners in support of a giant paper mill—a mill that was never built.

When the
cerrado
was cleared to make way for the eucalyptus in the

1970s, the wood was just dragged into great piles and burned. Today as

another wave of destruction sweeps across the Mato Grosso, the
cerrado

and the eucalyptus are still being burned, but this time the fire turns

them into money. The wood is made into charcoal, just like the kind you

use in your barbecue. This is a special kind of charcoal, because it is

handmade by slaves. The use of wood charcoal to make iron and steel

goes back to the eighteenth century and contributed to the deforesta-

tion of Europe. In most countries coke, a coal by-product, is used in

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place of charcoal, but where forests are open to criminal exploitation,

or are thought of as having little value, charcoal making is common.

Unemployed workers from eastern Brazil are tricked with promises

of paid work and then trapped in charcoal camps far from their homes

and the rule of law. The work is grueling—cutting and packing wood

into seven-foot-high clay kilns shaped like beehives, then working

through the night to adjust the slow controlled burn of wood into char-

coal.18 The slaves suffer burns and cuts, the heat is ferocious, and their

flesh wastes away. Without running water, they survive on whatever

groundwater they can find; they sleep in open-sided shelters; malaria is

common. After burning, the charcoal is heaped up in piles to wait for

trucks to carry it to the smelters. Mixed with other fuels, it refines iron

ore to pig iron, some of which is exported to the United States. Once

here, the pig iron is made into steel and then into a very large range of

products, including engine blocks and brackets, exhaust components,

and brake drums and rotors for major American car companies. Cars,

trucks, and tractors sold in America can be tainted with Brazilian char-

coal slavery, as well as sinks, bathtubs, and plumbing fixtures in

American homes.19 Unknowingly, the U.S. consumer provides the incen-

tive for this destruction of both human life and the environment.

M O R E I S L E S S

When we add together the flow of slave-tainted commodities and prod-

ucts, we see that all of us are touched by slavery in some way, every day.

It seems as if we are being swamped by the products of bondage; but

strangely, we’re not. The fact is that although slave-made products sur-

round us, these products represent only a small proportion of all

imported and American-made goods. This points up one of the greatest

challenges we face. Unlike the past, when slave-made goods such as

cotton held a majority market share, today only a small and insidious

fraction of slavery taints commodities and products, making them more

difficult to identify and remove. The globalization of the economy has

meant a rapid increase in the kinds and variety of slave-made goods that

flow into our shops and malls, but that doesn’t mean that every shrimp

or bathroom tap or shirt or chocolate bar comes from slavery. Only a

very small fraction of each commodity or product comes from slave

hands. While over $660 million worth of cocoa beans were imported

into the United States in 2007, only part of that came from countries

where slavery and the worst forms of child labor are known to exist on

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cocoa farms, and in those countries only a small fraction of farms have

slaves. The total fraction of imported cocoa tainted with slavery is prob-

ably 2 percent or less.20 The same applies to cotton, sugar, iron, steel,

shrimp, fish, tantalum, timber, and so forth. It is thought that a high

percentage of hand-knotted rugs from South Asia are made by enslaved

children, but the estimates are not clear. Any amount of slavery in the

things we eat, wear, and drive is too much, but in such small propor-

tions, trying to remove slave-made goods from our lives is like looking

for a needle in a haystack.

If we look at all the work done by slaves, not just the slave-touched

goods that flow into the United States, the actual monetary value of

slavery in the world economy is still extremely small. One estimate states

that all the work done by slaves worldwide is worth about $13 billion

per year, the same amount that spam e-mails cost businesses each year.21

A recent study by the United Nations estimated that global profits from

human trafficking are about $31 billion a year.22 This sounds like a lot

of money, and it is, but to put it into perspective, that’s the same amount

Warren Buffett donated to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in

2007.23 In the global economy this is a small drop in a large ocean.

The problem we face as consumers is that it is almost impossible to

know which shirt or chocolate bar or chair carries slavery into your

home. The criminals using slaves sell their products like everyone else,