Thursday, August 20, 2015

20/08/2015: Costco and CP Foods face lawsuit over alleged slavery in prawn supply chain

Three California law firms are seeking an injunction to stop the US retail chain Costco selling prawns unless they are labelled as the produce of slavery, the Guardian reports.

The firms have filed a class action lawsuit against Costco and its Thai seafood supplier, alleging that Costco knowingly sold prawns from a supply chain tainted by slavery.

The claim, lodged in the federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday, alleges that Costco has for several years bought and resold farmed prawns from the leading Thai food group CP Foods, and other companies, that have sourced the raw material for their feed from ships manned by slaves.
     
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/aug/19/costco-cp-foods-lawsuit-alleged-slavery-prawn-supply-chain
Image: Urban
The plaintiff in the class action is a California resident, Monica Sud, who has bought prawns from the membership-based wholesale grocer, but the class action potentially affects millions of customers in California, America’s most populous state.

The action follows a Guardian investigation in 2014 that tracked the complex prawn supply chain and reports by the UN and non-governmental organisations, including the Environmental Justice Foundation, that human trafficking for forced labour and slavery have become endemic in the Thai fishing sector.

Read the full article HERE.

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1 comment:

  1. I saw how Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt have asked Costco to switch to cage-free eggs. And I saw this video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeabWClSZfI) about how Costco lets its egg suppliers lock chickens in cages. Its pretty disgusting! The video even shows, at a Costco supplier, birds forced to share cages with the mummified corpses of their dead cage mates. And then Costco defended the practice, saying that supplier was “behaving appropriately.” I’ll never shop at Costco again.

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