Some in Germany are claiming that Haribo is using human slavery to produce gummy bears. It’s certainly an arresting claim, but it’s one that needs to be scrutinized just a little.
Using poor people in a poor part of a poor country to produce one ingredient is not slavery. We’ve got to understand what poverty, real poverty that is, actually means in the real world. It’s not having a little, or even much less than other people — poverty is having near nothing at all.
The slavery claim is being reported widely, but the original comes from Deutsche Welle reporting on a documentary. A certain wax used to stop everything becoming a single gelatinous mass inside a packet is derived from a species of palm trees in northeast Brazil, a poor part of that poor country. Labourers are paid some $12 a day to harvest the leaves it is extracted from. Working conditions are not great, most certainly not anything that any of us would put up with.
That we don’t have to put up with such conditions, that we earn in an hour what they’re getting in a day, is not because of some virtue of ours, nor the absence of slavery here and its existence there. It’s pure blind luck that we were born into a rich country, they into a poor. Because this is what poverty actually means: having to do crappy work in lousy conditions for pitiful amounts of money.
Not actually that this is a pitiful amount of money. There are 700 million people out there who survive on less than $1.90 a day. That’s at American prices, by the way, buying an entire lifestyle for the day at standard Walmart prices for under two bucks. About $12 a day, even at those American prices – Brazilian prices are lower so living standards are higher at the same cash income – puts you into the top 25 percent or so of all incomes on the planet.
Further, average Brazilian wages are around $700 a month or so. Sure, half of average wages doesn’t sound so great, but the U.S. mean is $25 an hour, half that is $12.50. We don’t think that someone earning that is rich, certainly, but $12 an hour isn’t slavery in the U.S.
Brazil is also a very unequal country. The bottom 10 percent earn more like $80 a month, making that average misleading. At which point $12 a day begins to look appealing to a worker looking around for a job.
Would I, would we all, like people to be making more than this? Sure, I would, and we all would. But we do really have to start from where we are. Which is that the historical experience of humanity – yes, after inflation – has been incomes in the $3 and $4 a day range. Substantial and sustained rises above that have only come in those places which have had a successful industrial revolution or by trading with places that have — We’ve never found any other way of doing this. And all too much of the world just hasn’t done that yet.
Haribo might be guilty of using poor people in a poor part of the world to produce what they make gummy bears out of. Hard work for not a lot of money is not the same as slavery.
To the contrary, the very fact that we are buying this carnauba wax from poor Brazilians is the very thing making them richer.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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