The U.K. Parliament is discussing possible steps of action after an investigative report found that “Italian” tomato purees sold in British supermarkets are actually often made with Uyghur forced labor in China.

The report published by the BBC on Sunday found that 17 products, mostly store-name brands sold by British and German retailers, likely contain Chinese tomatoes. Some have “Italian” in their name, such as Tesco’s Italian Tomato Purée, while others list “Italian” in their product description.

“Yesterday’s ‘blood-on-the-shelves’ BBC investigation has rightly shocked the British public,” said Sarah Champion, a Labour Party member of parliament who is also a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, during a House of Commons session on Monday.

“Tomato products sold in U.K. supermarkets with labels informing British customers that the purees were Italian-made or produced in Italy were actually linked to slave labor in the Xinjiang autonomous Uyghur region of China,” she said about the links between the U.K.’s supermarket supply chains and Uyghur forced labor.

The news came days after Tadashi Yanai, president and chief executive officer of Japan’s Fast Retailing, parent company of apparel retailer Uniqlo, said his company did not use cotton from Xinjiang.

Companies around the world are being scrutinized to ensure their supply chains don’t include products made with Uyghur forced labor.

China reacted immediately to the report, saying, “This almost equates Xinjiang with ‘forced labor,’ which is a blatant smear campaign against China,” in an editorial in the state-run Global Times.

“The BBC’s latest attempt at ‘fabricating a story’ is rather clumsy,” it said. “In Xinjiang, whether it’s cotton or tomatoes, mechanization has largely replaced manual labor from planting to harvesting.”

‘Genocide’

In 2021, the U.K.’s Lower House of Parliament voted unanimously to designate the Chinese government’s abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including mass detentions, torture and forced labor, as part of a policy of genocide and crimes again humanity.

However, unlike the United States, which has legislation banning exports from Xinjiang under the assumption that they are made with forced labor, U.K. companies are allowed to regulate themselves to ensure such labor is not a part of their supply chains.

British lawmaker Iain Duncan Smith joins activists and community members as they hold a small protest on behalf of repressed Uyghurs in Xinjiang, outside the British Foreign Office in central London, Feb. 13, 2023. (Alastair Grant/AP)

Champion went on to blame the United Kingdom’s “weak and confusing product labeling regulation” for allowing “a linguistic sleight of hand to occur with, one can only assume, the aim of misleading consumers.”

Directing her comments to Douglas Alexander, the UK’s minister for trade policy and economic security, Champion asked, “What more evidence is required to prove that we need stronger labeling standards that give consumers more information on the sourcing countries of pre-packed products?”

“In the Uyghur region, egregious human rights abuses are taking place every single day, all underpinned by a system of state-imposed forced labor,” she said, adding that an estimated 700,000 people are involved in the production of tomatoes against their will.

Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, who co-chairs the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said the U.K.‘s 2015 Modern Slavery Act, which calls for the prevention and mitigation of instances of modern slavery across supply chains, needs an overhaul.

“Right now, we have polysilicon arrays coming in from Xinjiang in massive quantities, and nothing is being done about it,” he said. “This is not just about Xinjiang; there are a quarter of a million people from Tibet in forced labor.”

Firsthand accounts

The BBC said it spoke to 14 people who endured or witnessed forced labor in Xinjiang’s tomato fields over the past 16 years, one of whom said that if workers failed to meet their daily production quotas of tomatoes for overseas export, they would be shocked with electric prods.

The news organization researched shipping data to determine that most Xinjiang tomatoes are transported by train through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and into Georgia, and finally to Italy.

In June, rights lawyers acting on behalf of Uyghur advocacy groups filed domestic and international complaints alleging that dozens of containers of tomato paste shipped by rail from Xinjiang to Italy two months earlier were produced using Uyghur forced labor.

Adrian Zenz, senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington and an expert on Xinjiang, said Xinjiang Guannong, a company that produces tomatoes using forced labor, created a shell company to export its produce under a different name to Italy and other locations.

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Zenz cited legislation passed by the European Parliament in April that aims to prevent the import and distribution of goods made with forced labor, but must be passed by the EU’s 27 countries, which will have three years to implement the law.

“The danger is that with the European Union having enacted legislation — a forced labor regulation that will go into effect in three years — the U.K. will become an even greater dumping ground for these kind of tomatoes,” he said.

Hiding origins?

Oana Burcu, who specializes in Chinese foreign policy at the University of Nottingham, said it should come as no surprise that tomato paste originating from China, and potentially from Xinjiang, has reached U.K. supermarket shelves.

Italy, which imports large quantities of tomato paste largely from China and the U.S., is one of the world’s largest exporters of tomato paste. It imports tomato paste it, repackages it, relabels it and exports it to other nations in Europe and elsewhere.

The EU has discussed implementing mandatory origin labeling for tomato products in recent years, though the measure has yet to be considered.

“A country could use the label made in or packaged in, let’s say, Italy, even if no products from Italy were used as such, and Italy was simply used as a manufacturing or processing base,” Burcu said.

Sophie Richardson, longtime activist and scholar of Chinese politics, human rights and foreign policy, said it wasn’t surprising that tomato puree made from Chinese tomatoes is sold all over the world, including in countries that now have stronger laws against goods made with forced labor.

“And it’s because the enforcement mechanisms are weak, and the companies keep saying, ‘You know, we don’t approve of forced labor,’ but they also don’t actually take the steps that they’re obliged to take in order to prevent having those tainted goods in their own international supply chains.”

Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.