Rotten Avocados
The reason why avocados should be making headline news.
The millennial super-food; a vegan’s safe haven; the once fatty indulgence turned into an Insta-worthy aesthetic. We usually see her presented centre stage on a marble plate, either mashed or sliced on a multi-seeded sourdough loaf, covered in chilli flakes or maybe even a poached egg, as a way to evoke an even larger sense of food envy. Yes, you guessed it — the beloved avocado. With a whopping 11.7M posts coming under the avocado hashtag on Instagram, there’s no doubting that the avocado holds some form of superiority amongst other fruit, not even comparable to that of the basic banana, apple or, god-forbid, — a pear.
If you take to your search engines, the first thing that comes up when Googling ‘Avocado’ is a selection of health websites or publications; a series of titles centring around information about the fruit itself and the varying benefits it offers. For example, ‘12 Best Healthy benefits of the Avocado,’ taken from Medical News Today. On top of this, each year more than 11 billion pounds of avocados are consumed around the world and in 2018, the global avocado market recorded 3.2 million tons of avocados being harvested worldwide. So, there’s no doubt that the avocado places pretty high in the rankings in terms of economic benefits for producers, as well as crowning itself faultless in the eyes of the consumer.
However, alongside all of the avocados fame and glory, it appears that there’s a very heavy price being paid. It’s only when you get further and further down the search engines algorithm that you will access information about the human rights crisis that recently came to some form of light earlier this year — a crisis centring around the largest avocado farm in Kenya, estimated to be around the same size as Manchester. A farm which is not only the largest exporter of Kenyan avocados, but also one whereby over 50% of shares are owned by the UK shareholder Camelia PLC; exporting its green gold to the UK supermarket giants Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Lidl.
In October this year, The Times released an article drawing brief media attention to the accusations of extreme violence being employed by the Kakuzi farm owners. The farm is guarded by over 500-armed security guards who have allegedly bestowed slave labour onto its workforce, as well as practised extreme acts of violence on the local community. The accusations in question include that of rape, killings and false imprisonment. More shockingly, is that these accusations date back to 2009, over a decade ago.
To summarise the article, The Times reported that the lawsuit that was made against the Camelia group, holds the UK shareholder as negligent. The British company is stated to have close management of the Kakuzi farm, meaning that executives would have been aware of the human rights abuses that have been happening for over 10 years, and since done nothing about it. On top of this, since the articles release in October, it appears that still no immediate action has taken effect.
With the UK being held accountable for these alleged barbaric crimes and exploitation, it feels to me that this is only one example of our shameful colonial history continuing to exist. We are still seeing slave labour in 2020. So, I’d like to raise the question, why hasn’t this story been at the forefront of the mainstream media?
When looking into this crisis in an attempt to configure a larger picture, it was interesting to me that there were only two articles readily available from large UK media outlets. The first, being The Times article just mentioned, and another taken from the Financial Times. The second article taking a larger focus on Tesco, discussing their halt in avocado supply from the Kakuzi farm after the allegations were announced. Not exactly what you’d call plentiful.
Taken from Ethical Journalism and Human Rights, it’s the media’s responsibility to expose such violations, whether this be on a local or global scale. On from this, it’s the journalist’s role to report on such crimes, helping lead the way towards front-page news. It is clear that greater media reportage and more widespread discussion of the issue is what will ultimately lead to more urgent government action. The Times article covers the lawsuit, but no journalist has since made an attempt to cover the crime itself.
It’s a common anxiety that COVID-19 has received such an excessive amount of media attention, that there’s been a decline in other global news, such as this one. It appears to me that this horrific abuse of human rights that’s taking place on Kenyan avocado farms, has been somewhat ignored by both journalists, as well as the government. Is a nice slice of avocado on toast really a justifiable choice of breakfast if it ignores all forms of human rights?
