Products of Brazil’s Slavery Find Ways to U.S. Markets

By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers

BETHESDA, Md. - Products tainted by Brazilian slavery are finding their way into U.S. stores and homes more often despite the efforts of concerned trade groups, activists and consumers. Some U.S. companies turn a blind eye in order to buy Brazilian products at the lower prices that slavery helps make possible. Other companies are like most Americans: ignorant about Brazilian slavery, let alone which of its exports are tainted by slavery or what to do about it. Dealing with Brazilian slavery is tougher than the classic Nike boycott in 1997-8, which ended when the athletic shoe company moved to improve labor conditions at its Asian plants. Slavery in Brazil raises more subtle questions, and they're harder to act on. For example: - Most Brazilian slaves clear Amazon jungle for cattle or soybeans for landowners who export them. Are U.S. companies that buy them tainted? - Only a fraction of any Brazilian export bears any taint of slavery. Enslaved and "degraded" workers in the Amazon produce much of Brazil's charcoal, but not all of it. Companies in northern Brazil use the charcoal to make pig iron, most of which U.S. steel companies import. What's their responsibility? And what's a U.S. consumer to do? As Thomas Donaldson, a business ethics specialist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, put it: "If I am buying a car and the strut under the left wheel came from pig iron produced in Brazil, I can care but it is a caring that doesn't have a way of helping."