Serious labour rights violations have taken place at Brazilian farms linked to some of the largest international coffee certification systems, including Rainforest Alliance and UTZ, according to an investigation by Repórter Brasil.

The report by the civil society organisation, published this week, found that monitoring systems at so-called sustainable coffee plantations failed to spot irregularities.



These include workers’ pay packets being falsely docked resulting in some receiving less than half Brazil’s minimum wage, and workers being hired informally and without mandatory medical tests.

One farm even promoted its output with a Fairtrade certificate it was not entitled to use.

Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, with about one-third of all coffee consumed planted in the country.

Jorge dos Santos Filho, a regional coordinator for the Union of Rural Workers in the south of Minas Gerais state, the coffee-producing area where the farms investigated are located, said the report exposes weaknesses in certification systems in an area notorious for labour violations.

Underpaid coffee workers

In 2014, workers at the Monte Verde farm in Carmo de Minas in Minas Gerais state, south-east Brazil, complained to their local Union of Rural Workers that deductions were being made to their pay packets for absences that never happened, advances they never received and days off they should have been paid for.

Most of the workers were seasonal. Some got less than half of what they were due, putting them beneath Brazil’s legal minimum wage, then R$724 (£181) a month, dos Santos Filho said.

“If you look at the life of rural workers, they are poor people,” he said. “Even though this is routine it revolts us because it is the rich taking from the poor.”

Dos Santos Filho’s union negotiated an out of court settlement with the farm’s controllers, the Saudi group Fal Holdings, who paid R$37,000 in outstanding wages in a settlement.

Byron Holcomb, a director of Fal who took part in the settlement, said the dispute arose because farm had been changing its tax status at the time. “Some of the old service providers did not provide accurate counsel during our first harvest,” Holcomb said in an email. “We paid all that was due to the workers and the workers suffered no losses.”

The report also cites a 2015 investigation by Brazil’s labour ministry which found 13 seasonal workers had not been registered at a nearby farm, Rancho São Benedito. They had been working without having undertaken medical tests required by law. Five had been in that situation for more than 20 days. The farm owner was served notice and paid a fine.

Rainforest Alliance failings

Both Monte Verde and Rancho São Benedito are members of a group managed by Eisa (Empresa Interagrícola S/A) – a Brazilian subsidiary of global coffee traders Ecom Agroindustrial – that collectively carries the international Rainforest Alliance certificate.

The green frog logo of the certification scheme indicates environmental, social and economic sustainability, and two to three farms from the Eisa group are audited each year, regularly scoring more than 90%.

Luis Pinto, manager of agriculture certification at Imaflora, the company that handles certification for the Rainforest Alliance, said their audits had not found the problems highlighted by Repórter Brasil. They had identified similar labour issues, which had been “improved”, he said, but details of these were confidential.

“In this group we have had non-conformities with labour issues since the beginning. Since the beginning there has been a need for improvement,” Pinto said. However “non-conformities” are not enough to cost a certificate.

“They were not fundamental failures. They don’t represent a critical fail,” he added.

Following Repórter Brasil’s findings, Imaflora audited both farms in October and found the problems had been resolved. “Certifying is about recognising good performance and good practice but it is also about recommending improvement,” Pinto said. Imaflora’s audits have begun including previously-confidential information on non-conformities.

Screenshot from the website for Dona Mariana’s website showing a sack of coffee with the UTZ logo. Photograph: http://cafedonamariana.com.br/galeria

Coffee farms using UTZ logo

Until 2015, Rancho São Benedito also held the UTZ seal – the Netherlands-based sustainable farming certificate found on more than 20,000 products in 135 countries. Repórter Brasil bought the farm’s Dona Mariana coffee in August 2016 with a UTZ logo on it. On January 3 2016, the farm had a sack of coffee with the UTZ logo on its website.

However, Niccolo Sarno, a spokesman for UTZ, said in an email that Rancho São Benedito lost its UTZ certificate in June 2015 because of “non-conformities to our strict code of conduct”. He did not provide details.

He also said that UTZ had discovered Rancho São Benedito was one of a group of farms using the UTZ certification but that had been removed after an audit in 2016.

“UTZ finds it very worrying that a farm that was decertified because of non-conformities to our strict code of conduct was able to use the UTZ seal, on a group license, for one more year and we are now tightening our systems to ensure that this type of situation can’t happen in the future,” he said.

Repórter Brasil also bought a package of Rancho São Benedito’s Dona Mariana brand of coffee in August 2016 with a Fairtrade International seal. “This farm is definitely not a Fairtrade farm,” Susannah Henty, a Fairtrade spokeswoman, told the Guardian in an email.

The farm owners told Repórter Brasil the labour issue had been resolved. “We had a violation in 2015 and we corrected what was wrong before the deadline,” said Marcio Junqueira, son of the farm’s owner Mariana Junqueira. He did not respond to emailed questions from the Guardian.

André Campos, who authored Repórter Brasil’s report, said the certification system lacked transparency. “In general it has had a positive impact on farms,” he said. “But an important point of the investigation is that the certifications failed to spot problems.”

