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A new documentary from the BBC World Service, Perfume’s Dark Secret, has uncovered rampant child labour abuses in Egyptian jasmine farms that supply global perfume manufacturers for leading brands and groups, including Estée Lauder and L’Oréal. The documentary explores how ineffective auditing systems are failing child labour victims, of which there are an estimated 160 million globally. Experts say incoming due diligence laws could have an impact.
The BBC found children as young as five picking jasmine from 3am in four different locations in Al-Gharbia Governorate, 120km from Cairo, including Shubra Beloula El-Sakhaweya, a small village that is responsible for producing 75 per cent of Egypt’s jasmine. The children featured in Perfume’s Dark Secret suffer from injuries and allergies caused by pollen, impacting their academic performance and causing potentially lasting health impacts. The main culprits, according to the investigation team, are beauty industry conglomerates at the top of the value chain, which are being accused of setting the low prices leading to child labour abuses in their supply chains. Parents feel forced to include their children in harvesting to compensate for the low price of jasmine, in addition to rampant inflation and the weak Egyptian pound.
Jasmine farming has been a vital source of income for Shubra Beloula since the 1960s when it was first introduced as a crop. According to a BBC story from February 2022, it’s common for entire families to pick jasmine flowers during the six-month harvesting season from June to November. “Everyone in this village from the eldest to the youngest picks jasmine flowers,” picker Mohamed Faraj told the BBC at the time. “Kids as young as seven years old wake up by dawn, pick jasmine for a few hours then head to school. I used to do so since I was nine years old.”
While children working with their families to harvest the flower isn’t considered forced labour by the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) definition, it contributes to the cycle of poverty that affects millions of individuals across the Global South, and is regarded as one of the worst forms of child labour.
Who controls the price of jasmine?
The Egyptian jasmine trade is worth $6.5 million and employs an estimated 30,000 people. But with one kilogram of jasmine flowers selling for only EGP 45 (£1.46) on the commodity market, pickers are often living below the poverty line on less than £1 a day. (The price is set at the beginning of the season by the factory owners. It fluctuates depending on demand and the perfume market, but remains consistently low.) Egypt is facing an economic crisis that has seen record-high inflation as well as the falling value of the Egyptian pound, which has dropped 50 per cent against the US dollar since January 2022. Pickers tell the BBC that if the price of jasmine was kept in line with inflation, it would be worth EGP 140 (£3.50 at the time of filming) per kilogram.
“In the village, people have been complaining about the low prices for years, and factories keep telling them that this is the best price we can give you,” says BBC investigative journalist Ahmed Elshamy, who produced the documentary.
Meanwhile, consumer prices for perfume have spiked since 2020 and the global sector is expected to be worth almost $70 billion by 2030, according to market research firm Fortune Business Insights. Suppliers, however, are not benefiting from any of that growth; the prices they receive for the ingredients they supply have remained stagnant, according to the BBC. In fact, the liquid in a perfume bottle that may retail for $250 costs less than $1.50 to produce.
“Consumers witnessed an increase in perfume prices after [the pandemic], so this increase has to be reflected on the natural oil prices and the pickers’ lives,” says Elshamy. There’s little evidence of this in Egypt. “The budgets to make perfume are really tight, so we understand that when the fragrance houses are sourcing raw materials, they aim to keep costs of goods as low as possible,” says Perfume’s Dark Secret director Natasha Cox.
In July 2023, BBC investigators visited Al-Gharbia Governorate and several of its jasmine farms, which stretch 720 acres of land. Through conversations with dozens of families, landlords, workers and jasmine collection point managers, investigators discovered that a significant number of jasmine pickers are children. They recorded children as young as five in the jasmine fields between the hours of 3am and 8am, when the flowers are in bloom and prime for harvest. In the documentary, Mirna El Helbawi, an Egyptian human rights activist and influencer, meets with a local family and reveals the EGP 10,000 (£170) retail price of a perfume containing Egyptian jasmine.
“I want the people using this perfume to see the pain of children in it and to speak up so that the factory owners and their clients can see the pain of the children,” says picker Heba, who harvests jasmine with her children — aged 15, 10 and 5 — to financially survive. “It’s not right that they’re exploiting the children for the price of perfume.”
Three major Egyptian jasmine companies — A Fakhry Co, Machalico and Hashem Brothers — which own farms in Shubra Beloula, are at the centre of the investigation. They supply four main fragrance manufacturers — Givauden, Symrise, Firmenich and International Flavors and Fragrances Inc (IFF) — who produce perfume for the “masters” of the sector, including Estée Lauder and L’Oréal. These conglomerates set the budget for each perfume they launch, putting downward pressure on prices throughout the supply chain, leading to child labour abuses.
Audits are failing to catch child labour abuses
Child labour is rampant in many supply chains, but “70 per cent of child labour is in agriculture — raw commodities and anything in those lower tiers of a supply chain”, says Eleanor Harry, founder and chief executive of HACE, a company using data and AI to monitor child labour risks in supply chains. Of the estimated 160 million child labour victims around the world, Harry says that the majority are family workers in informal employment. “Child labour usually occurs because there is a gap between household income and household expenditure. As that gap widens, usually children work to feed that expenditure gap.”
BBC investigators found that children working in jasmine picking often do so without wearing enclosed shoes, head torches or protective clothing. And as a result, tend to suffer scratches and other injuries as well as skin and eye allergies from overexposure to pollen and pesticides. Around 80 per cent of jasmine processed by A Fakhry Co is grown using fertilisers and pesticides, some of which Fakhry’s 2022 CSR report identified as “dangerous and illegal”.
Many independent studies have demonstrated that children are especially vulnerable to the impacts of chemical exposure because their brain and nervous systems are still developing. Children face chronic health risks from both short and long-term exposure, with evidence linking pesticide exposure to certain forms of cancer, asthma and organ damage as well as harmful impacts on neurodevelopment, among other health concerns.
“Academic performance also suffers when children, exhausted from picking jasmine in the early hours, fall asleep in school. Children are growing physically, mentally and socially, so they’re more vulnerable,” says Harry. “But there’s no data on the long-term occupational safety and health of adults who were child labourers — which shows just how little child labour is covered.”
Egypt’s Child Law, passed in 1996, prohibits children under the age of 14 from working. It makes exceptions for 12 to 14-year-olds to participate in seasonal agricultural work as long as it “is not hazardous to their health and growth, and does not interfere with their studies”. Additionally, it is illegal for children to work between 7pm and 7am.
All companies identified by the BBC’s investigations have made public commitments to the human rights charters, such as the United Nations Global Compact. Some include specific strategies for the prevention of child labour, while others outline child labour in their supplier codes of conduct. However, these commitments are voluntary and often rely on third-party auditing firms.
Sedex and the Union for Ethical Biotrade have been identified as the two main auditors used by fragrance houses and factories in the investigation. The BBC received “glowing” Sedex reports about A Fakhry from May 2023, showing that the auditors had pre-announced their visit, attended during the day, and only reviewed the factory, not the jasmine farms. “Children, like all people, are dynamic indicators,” says Harry. “So when you go to that farm or that supplier, and you don’t see the children, how do you prove that they were there? It’s so difficult because on that day, at the time when the auditor turned up, they weren’t there.”
Accountability through due diligence legislation
Rather than focusing on the inefficiencies and failings of auditing systems, Jason Judd, executive director of the Cornell University Global Labor Institute, believes that legal accountability will be crucial to eradicating child labour in supply chains. “Should we hold auditors accountable for bad data?” he asks. “I sense that this is not a good use of political energy. You want to focus on the root cause, which is that the lead firm doesn’t bear any costs or any legal consequences for a due diligence failure.”
Due diligence laws, including the French Corporate Duty of Vigilance Law introduced in 2017 and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive proposed in 2022, placed onus on conglomerates at the top of the supply chain to identify and eradicate any child labour abuses. “Until we move away from private and voluntary regulations in which the lead firms are writing their own rules, conducting their own investigations through audits or certifications, and reporting their own results, then you won’t see a shift,” says Judd.
In a statement to Vogue Business, Estée Lauder said it believes in protecting the rights of children and has contacted its suppliers to “investigate this very serious matter”, adding that it recognises the socioeconomic complexities of the jasmine supply chain in Egypt and is working towards greater transparency.
L’Oréal told Vogue Business that it regularly audits its suppliers, and discovered child labour in its supply chains after the 2023 jasmine harvest (and before the BBC reached out), stating over email that the group has since worked with the Government of Egypt, the Fair Labor Association and the ILO to “drive systemic change in support of local communities”.
Fragrance house Givauden told the BBC that the concerns raised by the documentary are “deeply alarming” and that “improving the lives of communities in the jasmine supply chain is a responsibility for the entire chain”. Symrise said that child labour “diametrically contrasts the principles and standards that we provide ourselves”; International Flavors Fragrances, Inc. said it has zero tolerance for child labour and has engaged a “trusted third-party human rights expert to conduct an independent review of our supply chain”; and Firmenich said it will “work to support initiatives that seek to collectively address this issue with industry partners and local jasmine farmers and we are willing to help fund such initiatives”.
The Egyptian jasmine companies denied the child labour allegations. A Fakhry and Co. said it’s “entirely prohibited” at both its farm and its factory, and that the suggestion that jasmine farmers’ and pickers’ wages keeps them below the poverty line is wrong — adding that jasmine-picking is pays better than other “comparable agricultural standards in Egypt”. Machalico said it doesn t use any pickers under 18 years old and that the price is discussed between factory owners every year, with the price increasing annually since 2022; and Hashem Brothers told the BBC it refused to comment on the report, “which is based on misleading information”.
Auditing firm Sedex said it stands firmly against all forms of labour rights abuses and exists to help businesses address these. “But no one tool alone can or should be relied on to uncover and remediate all environmental and human rights risks or impacts,” the company said in a statement to the BBC. UEBT said after conducting field assessments in Egypt in 2023, one company “has been issued a responsible sourcing attestation subject to an action plan which we reviewed and approved”, and the attestation will be withdrawn if the action plan is not implemented by mid 2024.
Experts and advocates say the recent evidence suggests that the perfume sector s efforts to date are not enough.
“The first thing [these companies] should be doing is recognise that they’ve got to get behind public regulation that levels the playing field and says the legal liability will be the same for all firms found to be buying in places where their due diligence is inadequate,” says Judd. “Otherwise, I’ll still be writing research about these problems in 20 years.”
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Correction: This article was updated to reflect that factory owners set the price of jasmine at the start of the season. An earlier version of this article read that the conglomerates set the price (3/6/24).
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