TITLE: Lawmakers: Big Pharma Might Be Cashing In On Experiments On Chinese Slaves
https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/26/lawmakers-big-pharma-might-be-cashing-in-on-experiments-on-chinese-slaves/
EXCERPT: A group of House lawmakers has urgently called upon the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate American biopharmaceutical companies that conducted clinical trials in Xinjiang, China, where millions of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have faced persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The group of bipartisan representatives, led by House Select Committee on the CCP Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., and the committee’s ranking member, Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf last Monday. The letter pointed out that based on publicly available data, major U.S. biopharmaceutical companies have conducted hundreds of clinical trials in China for at least 10 years, a practice that raises three primary concerns: national security, data integrity, and human rights violations.
First, most of these clinical trials involved at least one entity associated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). For example, the lawmakers wrote that one American biopharmaceutical company conducted a cancer therapeutic clinical trial at the 307 Hospital, controlled and operated by the PLA’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS). Notably, the U.S. government has blacklisted AMMS on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List due to national security concerns.
The lawmakers are deeply concerned that the involvement of PLA entities in clinical trials poses a significant risk of either “critical Intellectual Property (IP) being transferred to the PLA or being co-opted under the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC).” Essentially, these U.S. companies have undermined their own competitiveness and endangered national security by partnering with the PLA-affiliated entities.
Second, clinical trial data from China is notoriously unreliable. An investigation in China revealed that fraudulent practices in clinic trials were widespread, with a staggering 80 percent of data being fabricated. This poses a significant risk to American patients, as biopharmaceutical companies that rely on such data may inadvertently develop or fine-tune health-care products and services that could harm rather than help.
The FDA’s previous decisions to decline treatments based solely on Chinese clinical trial data underscore the gravity of this issue. Therefore, these U.S. lawmakers suggest that the FDA should impose similar scrutiny on clinical trial work done in cooperation with the PLA, a measure that could provide much-needed reassurance to the public.
Third, it is disturbing that some of the clinical trials were set in hospitals located in Xinjiang (XUAR), where the Uyghur Muslim population and other ethnic minorities in the region have been subjected to the CCP’s brutal, government-led, systematic ethnic cleansing for at least a decade.
TITLE: Sugar Industry Faces Pressure Over Coerced Hysterectomies and Labor Abuses
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/world/asia/india-sugar-industry-abuse.html
EXCERPTS: The sugar industry is facing pressure to clean up its supply chains and improve oversight after revelations that women in India, the world’s second-largest sugar producer, work in debt bondage and are coerced into getting hysterectomies.
In the wake of the report, a group of labor leaders in India went on a three-day hunger strike recently to demand better working conditions. One of the companies that buy sugar in Maharashtra, Coca-Cola, quietly met with Indian government leaders and sugar suppliers last month to discuss responsible harvesting. And Bonsucro, a sugar industry body that sets standards, said that it would create a human rights task force.
The investigation into the sugar industry, by The New York Times and The Fuller Project, revealed a range of labor abuses, including that female sugar cane cutters in the western India state of Maharashtra were pushed into illegal child marriages so that they could work alongside their husbands. Locked into debt to their employers, the women are forced to return to the fields season after season, the report found.
Women also described facing pressure to undergo hysterectomies for routine ailments like painful periods, adding that they usually had to borrow from their employers to pay for the surgery. That often ended the women’s periods and kept them in the fields, but such procedures can also have consequences including early menopause.
Sugar producers and buyers have known about this abusive system for years, the investigation revealed. But multinational companies have done little in response. One mill that profited off abuses even received a seal of approval from Bonsucro. (Major brands like Coke, PepsiCo, Unilever and General Mills have used Bonsucro endorsements to bolster the images of their supply chains.)
After the investigation’s publication, Coca-Cola officials met with farm owners and Indian politicians to start a project called the Coalition for Responsible Sugarcane India.
Coca-Cola did not elaborate on the coalition’s goals, but said that it had expanded programs to work toward “continuous improvement” with suppliers in Maharashtra.
TITLE: Shein Reports Child Labor in Supply Chain as Global Scrutiny Increases
https://www.thefashionlaw.com/shein-reports-child-labor-in-supply-chain-as-global-scrutiny-increases/
EXCERPTS: In its most recent sustainability report, Shein revealed that its audits discovered two instances involving child labor in its supply chain in 2023. In its report, the China-founded, Singapore-based ultra-fast fashion behemoth said it “swiftly resolved” both cases by temporarily suspending orders from the suppliers at issue and launching an investigation that led to “remediation steps” like terminating contracts with underage employees, ensuring the payment of outstanding wages, and arranging medical checkups as needed.
The two cases, which the company said in its report were uncovered by Shein Responsible Sourcing (“SRS”) audits that took place during the first three quarters of 2023, also led to Shein ensuring that suppliers “strengthened their processes for screening new hires” by maintaining appropriate records. “Following appropriate remediation, the contract manufacturers were permitted to resume business,” the company stated in its report, noting that in the fourth quarter it did not find any cases of child labor. (Shein defines child labor as “any person under the age of 15, under the age of completion of compulsory education or under the minimum age for employment in the country/region, whichever is the highest.”)
Shein also stated that starting in October 2023, it vowed to apply “a firmer stance against severe violations” that future audits might identify. Before October, which is when the two child labor cases in question were discovered, the company’s approach was to immediately suspend orders from the supplier(s) and give them 30 days for remediation. After October, when the company strengthened its policy, it said that it would terminate the business relationships at issue altogether.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., lawmakers have conducted their own inquiries into Shein and other fast fashion companies’ practices. In December, for instance, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce requested that the company answer questions about forced labor concerns. That inquiry was followed four months later by a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report that echoed many of the same allegations.
And on the consumer-activist side, as recently as this summer, worker rights activists in the United Kingdom campaigned for the government to block Shein’s push for listing on the London Stock Exchange over ethical concerns connected to its supply chain. Those efforts followed an investigation by Switzerland-based nonprofit group Public Eye in May, which found that workers producing garments for Shein regularly work more than 70-hour weeks, among other labor-related findings.