The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the UK Guardian, and a non-profit group called the Investigative Reporting Project Italy published a joint investigation on Friday that found several large grocery store chains have been selling tomato products allegedly made with forced labor from the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province.
CBC reported major brands including Nestle, Del Monte, and Unilever have bought tomatoes from Chinese companies in Xinjiang linked to forced Uyghur labor. The tomatoes are allegedly processed in “intermediary countries like Pakistan, the Philippines, and India” before arriving at grocery stores, leaving customers with no way of knowing their purchases are supporting Chinese Communist firms accused of participating in slavery and genocide.
Chinese policemen push Uighur women who are protesting at a street on July 7, 2009 in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, China. (Photo by Guang Niu/Getty Images)
Ethnic Uighurs take part in a protest march asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese Xinjiang region and asking for the closure of ‘re-education center’ where some Uighurs are detained, during a demonstration around the EU institutions in Brussels on April 27, 2018. (Photo credit should read EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)
CBC criticized some grocers as “evasive” for concealing the origin of their tomato products:
Even the Italian suppliers of store-brand products for Canada’s most recognized grocers — Loblaws, Sobeys and Whole Foods — were found to be purchasing tomatoes from the Xinjiang region, although the grocers say no Chinese tomatoes are in their products.
One grocery chain, Whole Foods, has removed its store brand 365 Double Concentrated Tomato Paste from store shelves “out of an abundance of caution” after Marketplace provided information about their supplier.
CBC expressed skepticism at claims from some grocery stores and food providers that they might be making documented purchases of tomatoes from Xinjiang, but they are taking steps to ensure those products are never sold in Canada.
Some Italian suppliers claimed the tomatoes linked to forced labor were used in products sold to the United Kingdom, Africa, and Australia instead, which may not come as a comforting revelation to consumers in those countries.
Researcher Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation blasted these corporate responses, saying the companies “found a way to still make a profit off this oppression.”
“They are using a product that carries a high risk of forced labor and then they say, ‘We don’t sell this to the West because Western countries might have a problem with that, but it’s fine to sell it to Africans,’” Zenz said.
Police patrol as Muslims leave the Id Kah Mosque in the old town of Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. AFP/File JOHANNES EISELE.
Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project executive director Mehmet Tohti called the use of tomatoes harvested with forced labor “insane and unacceptable,” no matter where the food is processed and sold.”
“Regardless of whether there are Xinjiang tomatoes in their products, [they] are part of this forced labor supply chain and they are benefiting from it,” Tohti told CBC.
According to CBC’s investigation, thousands of Uyghurs have been coerced into planting, picking, and processing tomatoes for Chinese suppliers, often by threatening to confiscate their property or send them to Xinjiang’s infamous concentration camps because it would be “unpatriotic” of them to refuse their work assignments.
The Trump administration banned all cotton and tomato imports from the Xinjiang region in January 2021. The Chinese embassy in Washington denounced the ban as a “political lie” and a scheme to “suppress Xinjiang enterprises and undercut Xinjiang’s stability, development, and prosperity.”