food supply chain

Major European supermarkets have upped their dividend payouts to shareholders by an average of 123 percent during the first eight months of the pandemic. Shockingly, hardly any of these supermarkets paid any substantial COVID-19-related support to the workers and farmers who throughout the crisis kept supply chains going.

While inequality was already deeply unfair before the pandemic, it has now reached shocking proportions. COVID-19 has cost global workers $3.7 trillion in lost income, and women and young workers have been hardest hit. Few places reveal this trend more clearly than supermarket supply chains.

From 2013 to 2016, Oxfam's Behind the Brands campaign called on the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage companies to adopt stronger social and environmental sourcing policies. Now we assess whether the companies have taken meaningful steps to implement the commitments they made in response to the campaign. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Thai government’s immediate responses have significantly affected workers and small-scale producers in the seafood sector. This briefing note identifies these impacts, offers reflections on the remaining challenges and further measures to support small-scale producers and workers during the ongoing pandemic.

Food workers throughout global supply chains are on the frontline of the coronavirus. The epidemic adds another crisis onto the almost permanent state of economic crisis in their lives. Now more than ever supermarkets and their suppliers must protect the rights of all the workers and producers who are risking their lives to keep food on our tables.

Human-rights abuses are commonplace in farms linked to major European supermarkets such as Aldi, Lidl and Tesco, new Oxfam research reveals. The organisation calls on the EU to introduce new legislation that requires companies to respect the human rights of people working in their global supply chains.

Workers on tea plantations in the Assam region of India are systematically denied their rights to decent working and living conditions. Oxfam’s research shows that the solutions lie in a fairer sharing of the end consumer price of tea, stronger gender policies and a review of plantation labour laws.

This briefing paper, part of Oxfam’s campaign to end human suffering in food supply chains, looks at in-work poverty and labour rights abuses faced by seasonal workers in Brazil’s tropical fruit sector, which supplies many major international supermarket chains.

This Oxfam briefing note presents compelling new evidence that our food supply chains are rife with violations of human, labour and women’s rights. it summarises new research commissioned for Oxfam, which shows the depth and scale of human suffering in food production in India and Brazil linked to international supermarket supply chains.

All around the world, millions of small-scale farmers, fishers and workers endure inhumane conditions to produce the food we all eat. We can change this. Join us and help us reveal what is behind the price of the food we buy. Together, we can tackle this injustice and help stop the human suffering behind our food.