MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN BRAZIL: PART 2

BY KEVIN G. HALL

BETHESDA, Md. - This is the second of a two-part series. Part 1 appeared in Sunday's Issues & Ideas section.

Products tainted by Brazilian slave labor are finding their way into U.S. stores and homes more often despite the efforts of concerned activists, trade groups and consumers.

Some U.S. companies turn a blind eye in order to buy Brazilian products at the lower prices that slavery helps make possible. Other companies are like most Americans: ignorant about Brazilian slavery, let alone which of Brazil's exports are tainted by slavery or what to do about it.

Dealing with Brazilian slavery is more difficult than simply replicating the classic Nike boycott of 1997-98, which ended when the athletic-shoe company moved to improve labor conditions at its Asian plants.

Slavery in Brazil raises more subtle questions, and they are harder to act on. For example:

• Most Brazilian slaves clear Amazon jungle for cattle or soybeans for landowners who export the products. Are U.S. companies that buy them tainted?

• Only a fraction of any Brazilian export bears any taint of slavery. Enslaved and ''degraded'' workers in the Amazon produce much of Brazil's charcoal, but not all of it. Companies in northern Brazil use the charcoal to make pig iron, most of which U.S. steel companies import.

What is the U.S. importers' responsibility? And what is a U.S. consumer to do?

As Thomas Donaldson, a business ethics specialist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia, put it: ``If I am buying a car and the strut under the left wheel came from pig iron produced in Brazil, I can care, but it is a caring that doesn't have a way of helping.''

Donaldson thinks U.S. companies can police their supply chains effectively if they choose. Indeed, some U.S. companies, such as Atlanta-based Home Depot, have stopped purchasing most wood products from Brazil unless they can be certified by independent auditors not to harm workers and the environment.

ISSUE OF CONTROL

Other companies contacted by Knight Ridder said their contracts with suppliers barred illegal activities. But they appeared to exert little control over suppliers to ensure that they weren't partners in environmental and labor crimes.

''We ultimately rely on our suppliers to abide by the terms of our contract, and we rely on governments to enforce their laws,'' said Dorothy Brown Smith, a spokeswoman for Armstrong World Industries in Lancaster, Pa., which sells tropical hardwood floors under the brand names Hartco and Bruce.

Dan DiMicco, the president of Nucor Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., said that if his company didn't import Brazilian pig iron, someone else would.

''It's a commodity traded openly on the world market, and no one company is going to be able to influence that situation,'' he said.

Nucor, he added, can't be expected to police its suppliers to see whether they benefit from slave labor.

''That is the responsibility of the people we do business with,'' he said. ''If there are violations of laws at those companies, it's the responsibility of the legal entities involved to straighten it out.'' Nucor imports more than two million tons a year of pig iron, much of it from Brazil.

Tommy Calvert, the chief of campaigns for the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, which fights contemporary slavery, wasn't impressed by Nucor's position. ''This method of trying to put levels or barriers between themselves and subcontractors is becoming a patent tactic of industry,'' he said.

The International Labor Rights Fund, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group backed by organized labor, proposes a measure that isn't likely to get far in Congress: a federal law forcing corporations to reveal their supply chains.

The possible role of slavery in a U.S. import ''is virtually impossible [to know now] because there is no disclosure requirement on the packaging,'' said Terry Collingsworth, the fund's executive director. ``There is a requirement to tell you how much sugar and carbohydrates are in there, but not slave labor.''

HARDWOODS CITED

Individual U.S. consumers can vote with their dollars on only one Brazilian product: Amazon rain forest hardwoods, used for floors, decks and docks.

Exotic hardwood floors are the fastest-growing segment of the $1.87-billion-a-year U.S. flooring market.

Jatoba, a Brazilian hardwood sold under the name of Brazilian cherry, accounts for 3 percent to 5 percent of U.S. hardwood-flooring sales, according to the National Wood Flooring Association in Chesterfield, Mo. Another Amazonian hardwood, ipe, is increasingly used for outdoor decks and docks. It's sometimes called Brazilian walnut.

Almost all of Brazil's $372 million in hardwood exports last year came from the Amazon state of Pará, where slave labor and illegal deforestation are rampant. Slave labor sometimes cuts the trees; more often, it clears land so loggers can get to trees and fell them.

U.S. deck and flooring salesmen are unlikely to say that -- and may not know it -- leaving many concerned consumers at a loss or worse.

Biomedical researcher Robert Kotin, for example, who works at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., said that when he purchased his elegant Brazilian cherry floor, he asked about conditions at the lumber's source. He was told there was no problem.

''We took them at their word,'' said Kotin, 48, who bought from Pennington Hardwoods of Sellersburg, Ind.

Owner Kevin Pennington said he was unaware of the problem of slavery in the Amazon. Anyway, he added, he buys only from companies in the south of Brazil, thousands of miles from the rain forest. But his southern Brazilian supplier, Triangulo, later confirmed that its hardwoods come from the Amazon rain forest.

''We're basically relying on the integrity of the company we are working with,'' Pennington responded. ``Being such a small company, we don't have the resources to police that and know whether they are telling us the truth.''
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Stella Hopkins of The Charlotte Observer contributed to this report from Charlotte, N.C.