Personally, I really don’t like avocados and my wife is actually allergic to the strange green fruit. But they have become de rigeur for the Millennial generation, with crushed avocado on toast apparently the equivalent of my generation’s cheese and pickle sandwich.
But these days there appears to be a dark side to pretty much anything we buy, and an investigation by the Sunday Times takes us into avocado-related procurement with purpose territory.
Actually, this case is an example of my two personal interests overlapping in terms of procurement practice and behaviour. As well as the purpose and sustainable procurement agenda, I have been focusing on things that go wrong in the procurement world, with my book Bad Buying — How Organisations Waste Billions Through Failures, Frauds, and F*ck-ups published last week by Penguin Business. And this avocado case study shows how procurement with purpose issues can flip into “bad buying” in a very real sense.
The report alleges that there have been human rights abuses at Kakuzi, an avocado farm in Kenya that supplies UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Lidl — and until recently Marks & Spencer. The owner of the farm, a British company, is now being sued with accusations that guards working for Kakuzi have been guilty of extreme violence against the local community in 79 quoted cases. Those include battering a 28-year-old man to death for allegedly stealing avocados, rapes of 10 women, and attacks on villagers walking on paths through Kakuzi land. Former employees of Kakuzi are among the claimants.
We’re not talking here about a few avocado fields – this farm is the size of Manchester, as the Sunday Times put it. It has expanded to meet the growing demand for avocados in recent years and now employs 470 security guards, working in shifts, which gives you an idea of just how big an operation it is. Villagers say they fear the guards who are armed with “rungus”, long wooden clubs that were a traditional Masai weapon and remain legal in Kenya. Some also have knives. But Kakuzi says it has to protect its crops; after all, a hectare of avocados is worth more than £27,000.
The lawsuit is directed at the farm’s British parent company, Camellia, which has farming interests in several other British Commonwealth countries, including India, Bangladesh and Malawi. And human rights specialist Amal Clooney is amongst the barristers working on the case is, just to make it even more interesting for the media!
Camellia argues that Kakuzi, which is listed on the Nairobi and London stock exchanges, is run by its own board on behalf of largely Kenyan shareholders. The parent company said in a statement: “Camellia bought a 50.7% stake in the 1990s but doesn’t have operational or managerial control of Kakuzi, nor does it control the board.” That seems very odd. Surely if you own over 50% of a company, you control it? Apparently the two firms share some executives too.
It seems unlikely that the “control” claim will allow Camellia to avoid responsibility here. This whole affair also has uncomfortable reminders of Britain’s colonial past, which is an embarrassment for firms responding to the Black Lives Matter initiative and under pressure to improve their human rights record. The supermarkets involved have all said they are working with the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) to investigate and address these reports.
It’s important to remember that exports of fruit and vegetables to European supermarkets and consumers are now an important and positive element of the economy for many African countries, but this supply chain brings some tricky questions in terms of purposeful business. As well as human rights issues, there are questions around the carbon emissions related to transportation of produce, as well as potential for destruction of native habitats. On the other hand, it can be better for overall global emissions to grow produce where the natural conditions are ideal, rather than in more “artificial” heated, irrigated or fertilised environments in northern Europe.
So we shouldn’t just say “ban avocados”, although my wife would certainly support that cause. But firms need to do everything they can to ensure that human rights are not being abused at any point and in any location within the end to end supply chain for avocados, and indeed the same applies for everything they buy. It is not always easy to eliminate problems, but businesses need to show they are taking all reasonable steps, or they risk a backlash from their customers.