UK Parliament confronts ‘Italian’ tomato puree made with Uyghur forced labor

The U.K. Parliament is discussing possible steps of action after an investigative report found that “Italian” tomato purees sold in British supermarkets are actually often made with Uyghur forced labour in China.

17 products, mostly store-name brands sold by British and German retailers, likely contain Chinese tomatoes. Some have “Italian” in their name, such as Tesco’s Italian Tomato Purée, while others list “Italian” in their product description.

“Tomato products sold in U.K. supermarkets with labels informing British customers that the purees were Italian-made or produced in Italy were actually linked to slave labour in the Xinjiang autonomous Uyghur region of China,” she said about the links between the U.K.’s supermarket supply chains and Uyghur forced labour.

The news came days after Tadashi Yanai, president and chief executive officer of Japan’s Fast Retailing, parent company of apparel retailer Uniqlo, said his company did not use cotton from Xinjiang.

Companies around the world are being scrutinized to ensure their supply chains don’t include products made with Uyghur forced labour.

China reacted immediately to the report, saying, “This almost equates Xinjiang with ‘forced labour,’ which is a blatant smear campaign against China,” in an editorial in the state-run Global Times.

In 2021, the U.K.’s Lower House of Parliament voted unanimously to designate the Chinese government’s abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including mass detentions, torture and forced labour, as part of a policy of genocide and crimes again humanity.

However, unlike the United States, which has legislation banning exports from Xinjiang under the assumption that they are made with forced labour, U.K. companies are allowed to regulate themselves to ensure such labour is not a part of their supply chains.

British lawmaker Iain Duncan Smith joins activists and community members as they hold a small protest on behalf of repressed Uyghurs in Xinjiang, outside the British Foreign Office in central London, Feb. 13, 2023.

Champion went on to blame the United Kingdom’s “weak and confusing product labelling regulation” for allowing “a linguistic sleight of hand to occur with, one can only assume, the aim of misleading consumers.”

“In the Uyghur region, egregious human rights abuses are taking place every single day, all underpinned by a system of state-imposed forced labour,” an estimated 700,000 people are involved in the production of tomatoes against their will.

Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, who co-chairs the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said the U.K.‘s 2015 Modern Slavery Act, which calls for the prevention and mitigation of instances of modern slavery across supply chains, needs an overhaul.

“Right now, we have polysilicon arrays coming in from Xinjiang in massive quantities, and nothing is being done about it,” he said. “This is not just about Xinjiang; there are a quarter of a million people from Tibet in forced labor.”

The  people who endured or witnessed forced labour in Xinjiang’s tomato fields over the past 16 years, one of whom said that if workers failed to meet their daily production quotas of tomatoes for overseas export, they would be shocked with electric prods.

The news organization researched shipping data to determine that most Xinjiang tomatoes are transported by train through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and into Georgia, and finally to Italy.

In June, rights lawyers acting on behalf of Uyghur advocacy groups filed domestic and international complaints alleging that dozens of containers of tomato paste shipped by rail from Xinjiang to Italy two months earlier were produced using Uyghur forced labour.

Adrian Zenz, senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington and an expert on Xinjiang, said Xinjiang Guannong, a company that produces tomatoes using forced labour, created a shell company to export its produce under a different name to Italy and other locations.

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Zenz cited legislation passed by the European Parliament in April that aims to prevent the import and distribution of goods made with forced labour, but must be passed by the EU’s 27 countries, which will have three years to implement the law.

“The danger is that with the European Union having enacted legislation — a forced labour regulation that will go into effect in three years — the U.K. will become an even greater dumping ground for these kinds of tomatoes,” he said.

Oana Burcu, who specializes in Chinese foreign policy at the University of Nottingham, said it should come as no surprise that tomato paste originating from China, and potentially from Xinjiang, has reached U.K. supermarket shelves.

Italy, which imports large quantities of tomato paste largely from China and the U.S., is one of the world’s largest exporters of tomato paste. It imports tomato paste it, repackages it, relabels it and exports it to other nations in Europe and elsewhere.

The EU has discussed implementing mandatory origin labelling for tomato products in recent years, though the measure has yet to be considered. @rfa.org