General
Can Wall Street Pressure Ease Brutality in India’s Sugar Fields?
Pension funds and big investors are pressuring Coca-Cola, Pepsico and others over brutal working conditions in India’s cane fields. Some of the sugar buyers are tiptoeing toward change.
The New York City comptroller, who oversees hundreds of billions of dollars in pension investments, is pressuring some of the world’s major sugar buyers to stop profiting off child labor, debt bondage and coerced hysterectomies in western India.
The city’s pension funds own nearly $1 billion in stock in Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Mondelez and others. Those companies, or their franchisees, are among those that buy sugar from the Indian state of Maharashtra. An investigation by The New York Times and The Fuller Project this year revealed a brutal, endemic labor system there — one that is at times enforced by threat of kidnapping and assault.
“We will bring pressure to bear on the companies we invest in who participate in that system by sourcing their supply from it and by funding it,” the New York comptroller, Brad Lander, said in a recent interview.
Mr. Lander is urging companies to work with labor groups in Maharashtra and to demand supply-chain improvements. He has rallied institutional investors including BNP Paribas Asset Management, based in Paris; Sands Capital of Virginia; and the London-based Schroders to do the same. Those firms hold hundreds of millions of dollars in stock in the sugar-buying companies.
The Biden administration is also applying pressure. The State Department has encouraged American companies to use their buying power as leverage to push sugar mills to make changes, according to a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Diplomats have also encouraged companies to work with labor unions.
