A new documentary by Democracy Now highlights the impoverished conditions of sugar workers on plantations in the Dominican Republic.
It is important to note that last November, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from the one of the major Dominican sugar companies, Central Romana, which sells its products in the United States under the Domino brand.
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At the time, the U.S. government said it had uncovered, quote, “indicators of forced labor.” One US official decried the company’s practices as, quote, “inhumane.”
A September 2022 report between the ILO, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration, found that the latest Global Estimates indicate that 50 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021. Of these people, 28 million were in forced labour and 22 million were trapped in forced marriage. Unfortunately, the number of people in modern slavery has risen significantly in the last five years. In 2021, 10 million more people were in modern slavery compared to 2016 global estimates.
See the video below with interviews of Haitian workers who give an account of their daily work life. Correspondent Juan Carlos Dávila documents where many Haitian migrants and their descendants work on sugar plantations under conditions amounting to forced labor and live in heavily under-resourced communities known as bateyes.
