It’s almost 2024, and the world’s largest coffeehouse chain is still linked to slavery.

Starbucks-certified coffee farms in Brazil were caught again violating human rights, a report published in October reveals.

Every time this happens, Starbucks brushes the scandal under the carpet, and says its Coffee Farmer and Equity (C.A.F.E.) verification program is fine. But it’s obviously not fine – it’s a sham.

Starbucks has a new CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, and it has a brand that’s worth billions of dollars. If we raise our voices now, we can put the new CEO on the spot while that report from Brazil is still ringing in his ears. Let’s get him to use Starbucks’ enormous purchasing power for good. When 100,000 of us have signed, we’ll deliver the petition to him where he can’t ignore it: 

Tell Starbucks to stop coffee slavery, and adopt international fair trade standards NOW.

Three years ago, The Guardian reported that children as young as eight picked coffee beans on farms in Guatemala supplying Starbucks. Now Repórter Brazil’s report “Behind Starbucks Coffee” shows that the company’s supply-chain is still stained with rights abuses.

Brazilian officials, for example, rescued 17 workers from modern slavery at a coffee farm in Campos Altos, in August 2022. They included a 15-year-old girl and two boys aged 16 and 17, who were forced to do backbreaking work in the blistering sun.

Starbucks’ suppliers have brushed off child labour exposés that they couldn’t deny as simply human resources “mistakes”, while the US coffeehouse chain claims to have “zero tolerance” for such abuse anywhere in its supplychain. And still the human rights violations continue…

While no certification system is perfect, experts have said for years that Starbucks’ verification program–C.A.F.E. Practices–could be improved by adopting international fair trade standards, and by including truly surprise inspections to stop abuses.

Sign the petition to Starbucks CEO, Laxman Narasimhan.

We’ve delivered impactful petitions to Starbucks before, and we know that the company can be moved with public pressure exposing its dirty secrets. Our community helped make Starbucks improve its palm oil sourcing policy in 2016, and in 2018 we exposed the company’s unmet promise to deal with the mountain of its throw-away cups.

Let’s sign and spread this campaign to get to 100,000 before the new year!

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