The Civilian November 2017

Page 1

THE

CIVILIAN CIVILIAN

A STUDENT PUBLICATION FOR THE LSU LAW CENTER COMMUNITY NOVEMBER 2017 | VOLUME 14 | ISSUE 3

YOUR FAVORITE HARIBO GUMMY BEARS ARE MADE BY SLAVES

As fall semester winds down, and the reality of finals rears its ugly head, many students at the Law Center have begun cramming their brains with as much legal information as humanly possible. While some can stay focused for hours on end, the relentless monotony of the law library eventually takes its toll - leading to the inevitable scourge of procrastination. Carlos Coro Fellow procrastinators hopelessly scrolling Staff Writer through their endless social media news feeds may have come across a truly disheartening headline; Haribo, the German confectionary juggernaut, has been accused of turning a blind eye to slave labor and animal abuse in their supply chain of ingredients. The allegations arose from a German media outlet, Deutsche Welle, in their program Markencheck, an investigative journalism production in the style of CBS’s 60 Minutes. The program travels down Haribo’s supply chain for carnauba wax, the essential ingredient that prevents Haribo gummy products from congealing into a single mass. Venturing into Brazil’s carnauba palm plantations, they find laborers sleeping

in the beds of trucks and working in unsafe conditions for a meager income equivalent to $12 a day; but that is not all, as the program also unveils how the bovine bred to produce the gelatin in Haribo gummies are subject to horrifyingly unsanitary conditions. Public scorn for Haribo has been palpable in the wake of Markencheck’s scathing report, thanks in large part to the incendiary power of social media. Media groups along the likes of Business Insider, A.V. Club, Vice’s Munchies, Consumerist, and even Huffington Post have flooded social networks with the inciting allegations through their own articles. However, a closer look at these articles reveals that they lack any true substance, with many citing each other on the same unsubstantiated allegations. In fact, not a single article taken from these sources identified the “Brazilian Labor Minister,” who categorized the conditions of carnauba palm plantations as “slave labor conditions.” Furthermore, the folks of Markencheck never actually step foot on any bovine farm, but rather, relied on the films of a German animal rights group which refused to provide the location of the alleged animal abuse. These inconsistencies beg to question if Haribo is really responsible for employing slave labor in their supply chain.

continued on page 5...


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.
The Civilian November 2017 by The Civilian LSU - Issuu