Rees-Mogg promises cheap food after Brexit but workers will pay the price

As we mark both Anti-Slavery Day and World Food Day this week, I will be leading a debate in parliament highlighting how some of the worst instances of modern slavery and exploitation are to be found in our food supply chains.

Theresa May, when she became prime minister, singled out modern slavery as “the great human rights issue of our time” – and it is true that the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which May brought in as home secretary, was world-leading. We also have the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, created after 23 illegal migrant labourers drowned picking cockles in Morecambe Bay in 2004.

But human rights abuses in the food processing, fishing and agriculture sectors are still rife. The seafood sector is particularly notorious. The Environmental Justice Foundation has documented in vivid detail how enslaved workers in Thailand, including Rohingya refugees, have been kept at sea for years, transferred from ship to ship, tortured and abused, force-fed methamphetamines and witnessed fellow workers being murdered and their bodies tossed overboard. The UK continues to import millions of pounds-worth of seafood products from Thailand every year.

In Ireland, as the Guardian reported in May, migrants from Asia and Africa brought to work on fishing trawlers under an official permit scheme stand “a significant chance” of becoming victims of trafficking, with workers paid a fraction of the minimum wage and forced to work dangerously long hours.

The tomato industry is also rife with exploitation: 60% of the UK’s tinned tomatoes come from southern Italy, where the supply of agricultural labour is dominated by illegal gangmasters with links to organised crime. By contrast, conditions for tomato growers in Florida were transformed when workers began to organise into the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

The opacity of global supply chains and the lack of due diligence by major food companies means that, apart from Fairtrade-certified products, we have no way of knowing whether the food on our supermarket shelves was produced ethically or not.

Too often, cheap food comes at a cost: the exploitation and abuse of workers at the hidden end of the supply chain. And there is a risk that this will increase as competition in the sector leads to even more downward pressure on prices. Sainsbury’s, for example, has promised that prices on key lines will fall by 10% as a result of its merger with Asda.

Oxfam’s recent Behind the Barcodes campaign found a direct correlation between drops in the prices paid by the supermarkets to suppliers and the risk of human rights violations in supply chains increasing. It also found that supermarkets were increasingly keeping more – as much as 50% – of the money their customers spent; the amount reaching workers and food producers was sometimes less than 5%.

And we now have the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg hailing the prospect of cheaper food imports after Brexit. This is cheaper food that would come at a terrible price – there would be a race to the bottom on food standards, food safety, animal welfare and environmental protections, along with the exploitation of workers around the globe.

So I am calling on the government and supermarkets to act. We need the government to bring forward measures to tighten up the Slavery Act, require due diligence throughout the supply chain and impose tougher penalties on companies that fail to comply. We also need the government to support – at the next G20 meeting – proposals for a UN binding treaty on business and human rights that holds companies legally accountable for human-rights violations along their supply chain.

Supermarkets and the big brands are starting to lag behind other sectors, such as clothing and information and communication technology, in addressing these issues in their supply chains. It is time they acted and the government must ensure they do.

• Kerry McCarthy is the Labour MP for Bristol East