Belgian Company Linked to Rural Slavery in Brazil (Media)

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday October 16, 2002 17:06 by Folha De Sao Paulo (Brazilian newspaper)

The Federal Police and the Ministry for Employment have found around 180 people who have been working for four months in conditions analogous to slavery on a farm in the state of Pará, Brazil. The farm is linked to the Belgian capital investments company SIPEF.

The Federal Police and the Ministry for Employment have found around 180 people who have been working for four months in conditions analogous to slavery on a farm belonging to Dom Eliseu in the state of Pará, on the border with Maranhão (Brazil).

The people were not being paid their wages, were living in precarious conditions, and among them there were children between 4 and 10 years old, who were also working in the harvest of the black pepper crop.

The farm , called Senor, is linked to the company SIPEF, which has its headquarters in Belgium. Police and deterctives have been in the area since last week, and it was only yesterday that the adult workers received the necessary work documents.

A local NGO, Centro de Defesa da Vida e dos Direitos Humanos de Açailandia (Centre for the protection of Life and Human rights), which informed the police, will also send a complaint to the EU, accusing the company (SIPEF) of breaking the law in Brazil, and exploiting child labour. A part of the pepper crop is exported to Europe.

The children - about 30 of them, according to the NGO., were living with their families, who had been recruited in nearby cities for the harvest of the crop, and had been promised that they would receive 12 Brazilian centavos (about 0.03 US cents) per kilo of pepper collected. According to the workers, the promised rate was reduced to 10 centavos when they arrived at the farm.

Besides this, they were not permitted to be present while the pepper was weighed and were forced to accept the figures given by the managers. The payment which was supposed to be monthly was never made acording to the workers.

" We don't know if the company was directly responsible for the exploitation. It could have been the managers, which doesn't excuse the company from being responsible", said Carmen Bascaran, from the Centro de Defesa, which took in workers on the the 18th Oct, who said they had escaped from the farm, where they had been acused of stealing pepper and were being threatened by foremen.

Also from another related article in the same newspaper:

".... The brazilian director of SIPEF, a Belgian capital investments company, which is involved in the farm, Joost Smit, arrived yesterday to talk to police and investigators from the Ministry for Employment ..... However it was not possible for journalists to question him and they were told he had left and could not be contacted as he did not have a mobile phone....."

Note from the same newspaper:
During this year alone, 1149 people have been freed from slavery in Brazil.

Between 1995 and 2002, more than 4500 rural workers were freed from slavery in Brazil.