An exclusive investigation by Public Eye in collaboration with Repórter Brasil sheds light on several cases of modern slavery perpetrated by Nestlé coffee suppliers in Brazil. This is in spite of the Swiss company promising zero tolerance of this practice for years. Two workers affected by this scourge recount how they toiled under inhumane conditions, were deprived of their wages, and feared for their lives.
“I can’t find words to describe what I’ve gone through,” says Jurandir dos Santos. “All the memories flood back to me just thinking about coffee.”
All the same, the 50-year-old has decided to tell us what happened to him after he was hired as a seasonal worker for the coffee harvest in April 2023, together with his friend José Ademilson de Jesus Lima. A journalist from Repórter Brasil met both of them in March 2025, on behalf of Public Eye, to interview them in their homes (a compilation of the interviews can be found here).
The Mata Verde farm in the state of Espírito Santo is located 1200 kilometres from Aracaju, the capital of the state of Sergipe.
The Mata Verde farm in the state of Espírito Santo is located 1200 kilometres from Aracaju, the capital of the state of Sergipe.
Jurandir and José both live in Aracaju, the capital of the state of Sergipe, located in the poverty-stricken north-east of Brazil. Every year, tens of thousands of seasonal workers travel from this region to the coffee-growing regions in the economically better-off south-east of the country. There is a huge demand for such workers, because harvesting is largely carried out by hand. Brazil accounts for 40 percent of global coffee production.
“What we say goes here”
Thirty-six-year-old José Lima told us that he worked as a harvest worker for the first time in 2022: “I was unemployed and had separated from my wife, so I went there.” With the money he earned in those three months that the harvest lasted, he was able to continue building his house. The work also appealed to him, so he didn’t hesitate when an agent contacted him, offering him a job for the 2023 coffee harvest. Jurandir Dos Santos said that this woman promised them regular employment and a good wage of at least R$120 (Brazilian reais) per day. This was equivalent at the time (April 2023) to around 22 euros, which is significantly higher than the minimum wage in Brazil, that then was just around 12 euro per day (240 euros per month). They were joined by acquaintances to whom they had mentioned this attractive offer.
After a two-and-a-half-day bus journey, accompanied by their recruiter, they arrived late in the evening on 18th April 2023 at the Mata Verde farm in the state of Espírito Santo, about 1,200 kilometres away. This farm, which produces Robusta coffee on about 50 hectares, is very remote; apart from a small village, there are only coffee plantations, forests and hills.
Brazil: coffee mega-producer
In Brazil, around four million tonnes of coffee beans are harvested every year. This makes it the world’s largest producer by far of this agricultural commodity. While in the mountainous interior, especially in the state of Minas Gerais, Arabica varieties – considered to be of higher quality – are grown, coffee farmers in the coastal state of Espírito Santo have specialized in Robusta coffee, which is mainly used for instant coffee and cheaper roasting blends. They produce around a sixth of the world’s Robusta, known as “Conilon” in Brazil.
At the beginning, everything seemed fine. The workers’ accommodation was “nice”, according to Jurandir. They went into the village and met locals in a bar. “We spent the first two days drinking and celebrating,” said José.
On many occasions, a nephew of the farm owner was also there. One evening, he told them about how a friend of his once put a pistol on the table in the bar. When a policeman came by and asked him to put the weapon away, he refused.
José asked in amazement what the consequences were of this. “None,” replied the man from the farm owner’s family.
“Everything here belongs to us. In this village, what we say goes.”
A sense of unease came over José. For the first time, he wondered whether something was not right here.
No beds, no showers, no drinking water
Then, on the third day, the recruiter told them that they had to move. They would have to carry their belongings to the new place, including mattresses, on foot.
After a long first day at work, they set off, heavily loaded, and had to do the 50-minute walk twice until they reached their new accommodation late at night. “I already didn’t like the look of the front of the house ,” said José. His first impressions were confirmed when he looked inside:
“The wooden floor was rotten and there were water stains on the wall.”
They had to sleep on thin mattresses directly on the floor. He incredulously asked the recruiter if this was really their new home. “Only temporarily,” she reassured them. The farm owner was in the process of preparing another house for them to stay in. She also promised that they would be given beds. José constantly asked her about this in the following days, but: “no beds ever came”. They would never set eyes on the other house either.
Conditions in the accommodation were inhumane. As Jurandir describes:
“We froze at night when it was windy. The drinking water tank, full of silt, was crawling with loads of beetles and other insects.”
There were no doors to provide a bit of privacy, no sinks or showers, just two hoses with cold water coming out of them. There were no tables or chairs either, which meant that workers were forced to eat sitting on the floor or on their mattresses. There were constant power cuts and the toilets were often unusable. There was rubbish under the house, which gave off a strong stench and attracted rats.
All these details were recorded in an inspection report by the Brazilian Ministry of Labour, which would be compiled later and was made available to Public Eye.
José’s simple conclusion was: “It was impossible to live there, completely impossible.”
The food was also “terrible,” said Jurandir. It consisted mainly of sausage, rice and beans. His wife was shocked when he returned home, the worker continued: “I was thin and completely exhausted. I had to tie my trousers, that had fit me before, around my waist so that they didn’t fall down.”
“Everyone got sick,” said José, “including me: colds, rashes, fungal infections, stomach-ache – we had stomach-ache all the time. One colleague was seriously ill for a week. We weren’t given any medication – so we clubbed together to buy some for him.”
Slaving away for starvation wages
The workers got up at 3.30 in the morning. They would prepare lunch, after a “breakfast” consisting of a cup of coffee and a lump of dough made of wheat flour and water, and they would then take a bus to the plantation at 4.30. They would finish work between 4.30 and 5 p.m. and would then often have to walk back, which took them over 45 minutes.
The work consisted in stripping coffee cherries from branches of shrubs by hand. They collected these cherries in a basket-like sieve attached to their hips with a belt, filling 60-kilo bags with them, which they carried out to the road, where they were picked up by truck.
“It’s hard work, really hard,” said Jurandir.
He mentioned that during the day the sun would burn down on them, they would get stung by insects, and thos stings and bites would give them headaches. In addition, the plantations were located in hilly, sometimes steeply sloping and slippery terrain.
The workers were paid according to the amount of coffee beans they harvested. They received R$16 (2.90 euros) for each 60-kilo bag. As they “were not given any tools for removing the coffee beans from the branches more easily,” they managed on average to fill little more than three bags per day, according to the report from the Ministry of Labour inspectors. So, instead of the promised R$120, they would not even receive R$50 (9 euros) per working day of around 12 hours, according to the report. On a monthly basis, this amounts to just 75 percent of the statutory minimum wage.
The farm owner then, according to their information, sells the coffee on to the Robusta wholesale cooperative Cooabriel for R$645 per 60-kilo bag – 40 times the price paid to the workers. This company is not only a direct supplier to the Swiss coffee world market leader Nestlé, but is also involved in its sustainability programme Nescafé Plan (in Brazil “Cultivado com Respeito”, “grown with respect”), which in turn requires certification by the 4C standard.
Sustainability according to Nestlé standards
Nestlé uses the 4C standard to designate the coffee for the world’s largest coffee brand Nescafé as socially and environmentally sustainable as part of the “Nescafé Plan”. According to some media reports, the group, which buys more than 80 percent of 4C coffee worldwide, has “invested” heavily in 4C coffee in Espírito Santo in recent years, and in collaboration with Cooabriel – the largest association of Robusta farms in Brazil, numbering more than 7,600 producers – it has included a cooperative in the Nescafé Plan for the first time. For Nestlé, this has made Cooabriel an “important partner” in their procurement of sustainable coffee. In total, Nestlé buys almost a quarter of its coffee (222 tonnes in 2022) in Brazil – 100 percent “certified and sustainable”, according to its own communication.
Trapped in debt
Even the national minimum wage, equivalent to 12 euro per day, would be far from enough to provide a decent living standard. According to calculations by the Anker Research Institute, southern Brazilian coffee workers would have to earn almost twice as much to make a living.
In the Mata Verde case, however, the farm owner claimed various “inadmissible deductions” in addition to illegally failing to comply with the minimum wage, as highlighted by the labour inspectors in their report.
“Everything was deducted from our wages: boots, protective clothing, work gloves, the harvest basket, even the drinking water bottle that we brought with us to the fields.”
The deductions were just as illegal as the fact that the workers had to pay back the cost of the bus ride (R$350) to the farm in instalments. They were also charged exorbitant prices for the inadequate food. They were always kept in the dark about the amount of the deductions due, as José said:
“We never knew how much we owed. We only knew that we had debts to pay.”
The farm owner was constantly making purchases, saying that they “owed” him for all this, but when the workers asked for amounts and receipts, they only got evasive answers. The same thing happened when they asked for an employment contract.
After the deductions, Lima is left with just 130 reais (22 Swiss francs) of the 220 reais (39 Swiss francs) he earned in his first week of work, he says.
“No one leaves the farm”
José also told us that, at work, they were closely supervised and repeatedly harassed by the farm manager and security guards, who were always standing close to them. When the manager reprimanded a friend of José’s in the first few days and raised his arm, José could see a pistol in his waistband. He then noticed that all the security guards were carrying weapons.
It gradually dawned on him that he had to get away from there. He began to plan his escape and, together with other workers, tried to persuade a bus driver to pick them up. But the farm owner got wind of their plans. He then sent everyone a WhatsApp message saying, as Lima explains:
“No one is leaving the farm until their debts are paid off. If anyone tries, I’ll have the entrance to the village closed off.”
José felt that he was being watched. Whenever he was talking on the phone or exchanging ideas with colleagues, minders would approach him. He started feeling scared:
“They could do something to me at any time,” he thought. “The plantation was large and you were often alone picking coffee.”
“Threats, fraud, deception, coercion”
In their report, the labour inspectors stated that there were no fewer than 24 points relating to the farm, which met the criteria for “slavery-like working conditions” under Brazilian criminal law. According to the report, “degrading working conditions” were also encountered, such as a lack of drinking water and inappropriate accommodation as well as debt bondage, i.e. the restriction of freedom of movement due to debts, exacerbated in this case by “threats, fraud, deception or coercion.”
Debt bondage is a form of forced labour prohibited under Convention 29 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). With the aim of justly responding to its own realities, Brazil goes a step further by also classifying “degrading working conditions” and “exhausting working hours” as “slavery-like”– a legal term that is often paraphrased as “modern slavery”.
Maurício Krepsky, who until June 2023 was in charge of the Brazilian Ministry of Labour’s National Inspection Department for Combating Slave Labour, told Public Eye that the explicit threats of violence in the Mata Verde case were extraordinary. But generally, slavery-like conditions are widespread in Brazilian coffee cultivation. According to the human rights organization Conectas, no other sector has seen so many workers to be rescued from such conditions over the past 10 years. In 2023 alone, it amounted to 316 cases, and experts in the field assume a high number of unreported cases.
There are numerous reasons why coffee production tops this shameful ranking, as Jorge Ferreira relates. As a farm worker, he was a victim of modern slavery himself, and is now a leading activist in the Adere workers’ association. According to Jorge, one of the reasons is that coffee cultivation was “essentially based on slavery”. During the colonial period, Brazil emerged as the most important coffee-growing country.
“To this day, countless coffee producers in our country do not respect human rights and exploit socially vulnerable workers,”
explains the activist. The majority of farm owners are still white, while most workers – and victims of modern slavery – are men of African ancestry. Oxfam Brazil estimates that up to two thirds of them are employed informally during the harvest season, which further promotes exploitative working conditions.
A knife under the mattress
After he discovered that the minders carried weapons and understood that he was closely watched, José Lima realized that he definitely had to get away from there. As he didn’t want the farm owner to go unpunished, he informed the local labour authorities and the federal police beforehand about the conditions on the farm. Despite the danger to which he exposed himself, he secretly filmed and photographed to document the abuses.
A few days later, the police told him that they would intervene. But they couldn’t tell him exactly when. This news only kept José calm for a short period. He felt increasingly threatened: “I just slept with a knife under the mattress.”
On 1st May, 14 days after his arrival, he decided to escape. The next day, after repeatedly insisting, he managed to get a man from the village to agree to drive a group of workers in his van to the next main road, along which the bus to Aracaju ran. To pay for this, they all had to borrow from friends or relatives.
Shortly before midnight, José Lima, Jurandir dos Santos and 12 other workers sneaked out of their accommodation. At the agreed time, they waited at the entrance to the village for the van and set off at half past one in the morning. “It was very cramped in the van,” José told us, “as we sat on top of each other and had a lot of stuff with us. But we had finally managed to get out of the place.”
What the fugitives didn’t know was that just a few hours after their departure, the inspectors arrived at the farm together with the federal police. Maurício Krepsky, then head of department at the Ministry of Labour, recalled that the local inspectors assessed the willingness to resort to violence on the farm as being so high that they called in his team from the capital Brasilia, 1,400 kilometres away, as back-up. But the intervention passed off without problems. And so, shortly after their colleagues had fled, 10 other workers who had remained on the farm were now also free.
A crime that pays
As usually in such cases, the authorities brought administrative proceedings. As part of the outcome, the farm owner undertook to improve the deplorable conditions, take preventive measures and pay the workers a severance payment amounting to three days’ wages, with damages on top. In total, they received the equivalent of around 900 euros per person, plus the cost of the journey home. To their great disappointment, José Lima and Jurandir dos Santos learnt that they were not entitled to these compensation payments, as they were paid out only to those workers who were present on site at the time of the inspection.
They then contacted a lawyer, who filed a lawsuit on their behalf with the industrial tribunal. Both workers finally agreed to a settlement and each received R$7,000 (about 1,275 euros) in compensation – almost 10 times less than the claim they had made.
“That was just enough to pay off my debts,”
said Jurandir. He had taken on these debts so that he could escape, but also prior to the trip for food and clothes, and so that his wife could get through her everyday life during his absence. As their lawyer considered a low chance of winning in court, they agreed to the settlement.
This is a situation familiar to many of such victims, explains Livia Miraglia, associate professor of labour law at the University of Minas Gerais and a specialist in slave labour and human trafficking, in an interview with Public Eye. The compensation paid was also within the usual range. Although Brazil’s comprehensive definition of, and laws on, modern slavery are very progressive, their interpretation is not: “The white and male judiciary systematically denigrates the working class,” says Livia Miraglia. It’s common for people who lose their luggage on a flight to receive higher compensation than those who become victims of slave labour.
In addition, the perpetrators are hardly ever prosecuted:
“No farm owner is afraid that he will have to go to prison for modern slavery,”
says the employment lawyer. She co-authored a study that shows that out of more than 2,679 employers who were reported for this offence between 2008 and 2019, only 112 were convicted – usually receiving short sentences that they didn’t have to serve. Livia Miraglia soberly concludes:
“Modern slavery is a crime that does pay.”
Perhaps the most consequential punishment for employers who are convicted of modern slavery is to see their name end up in a publicly accessible register. Anyone whose name is on this list does not receive loans from state-owned banks, which makes business relationships more difficult. But the entry expires after just two years. The owner of Mata Verde farm also appeared on the list in Spring 2024. When asked about this, however, he vehemently denied that he used slavery or that his staff were armed.
Ineffective controls
Operators further up the supply chain have to fear even less consequences than farm owners: cooperatives, coffee traders and roasting companies such as Nestlé. They would not be touched by the judiciary, explains Livia Miraglia. Another basic problem is the lack of transparency in supply chains. Normally, it’s not possible to trace from which farms traders and ultimately the companies that process and sell the coffee obtain their raw material. Some corporations, like Nestlé, publish supplier lists with the names of intermediates and cooperatives, but not of coffee farms. As a result, the coffee companies’ involvement with modern slavery can only be brought to light in individual cases and through extensive investigations.
Nestlé reaffirmed its “zero tolerance” of such incidents nine years ago, after a case of modern slavery in its Brazilian coffee supply chain was first published. Since then, the multinational has also increased its proportion of certified, i.e. supposedly legally compliant and – in its words – “responsibly sourced” coffee in Brazil to 100 percent.
At the same time, neither Nestlé & Co. nor certifiers such as 4C have yet fulfilled the demand that has been made by workers’ representatives and human rights NGOs for many years: to make their business relationships with coffee farms transparent.
Corporations, like certifiers, usually only become aware of human rights violations through official controls. According to the NGO Conectas, however, such inspections have so far taken place on just one in a thousand Brazilian coffee farms. In the Mata Verde case, Nestlé supplier Cooabriel broke off its business relations with the fallible producer in May 2023, following the intervention by the police. When asked, the certifier 4C stated that “once the non-compliance became known” – through regional media reports immediately afterwards – the farm had been “instantly removed from the 4C System”. Until then, audits conducted by 4C did not bring any irregularities to light.
This hardly comes as a surprise to workers’ representative Jorge Ferreira. He believes that sustainability certifications generally do not protect against modern slavery – an assessment shared by labour inspector Maurício Krepsky. He has learnt from his experience in the field that these often completely disregard the actual situation on the plantations:
“Audits are often carried out several months before the harvest season. And even in so called ‘unannounced’ inspections, the companies are given one to two days’ notification in advance.”
In addition, key problems such as widespread undeclared work are usually simply ignored by the certifiers, according to the inspector.
Not a one-off case in Nestlé’s supply chain
Our investigations show – even with a lack of transparency in supply chains – that Mata Verde is not the only farm in Nestlé’s supply chain where serious abuses have come to light in the last three years. In 2022, for example, labour inspectors identified gross breaches of Brazilian labour law at the Três Irmãs and Primavera farms in the state of Bahia, north of Espírito Santo, which were also suppliers to Nescafé Plan partner Cooabriel, as well as an incident of modern slavery at Três Irmãs.
In a third case, on 4th July 2023, three workers at the Vista Alegre farm in Patrocínio in the state of Minas Gerais had to be released from slavery-like conditions. Invoice receipts showed that the farm had sold its harvest to NKG Stockler, a subsidiary of the world’s largest trader Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, based in Hamburg and with important activities in Zug, Switzerland. The farm received for the delivery a bonus for the harvest, which was certified by Nespresso’s own sustainability label AAA. NKG Stockler apparently didn’t even know about the official inspection, as can be seen in the company’s reaction to our questions. The trader states that it has “paused” its business relationship with the farm in question, which is currently legally challenging the official accusation of slavery, only based on our evidence – and 18 long months after the incident. When asked, Nestlé confirmed that the Nespresso supplier had been “suspended” from the AAA programme “once we were made aware of the issues” (see Nestlé's reaction below).
Profit before human rights
Jorge Ferreira says that it goes nowhere near enough for companies like Nestlé to simply break off their business relationships with specific farms in response to modern slavery. He thinks that they have a direct responsibility to effectively prevent this practice. His organization Adere has therefore repeatedly appealed to Nestlé and discussed this matter with the group’s representatives. Jorge’s sobering conclusion:
“Nestlé pretends to be interested in workers’ rights. But its interest stops as soon as it comes to implementing specific improvements – and paying for them.”
Instead, the company shifts the responsibility for compliance with labour and human rights – and all costs incurred for this – to the coffee producers. (For more about the issue of the generally excessively low prices that Nestlé pays for coffee, see the Public Eye report “High hopes, low prices” from Mexico published in March 2024.)
The case involving José Lima and Jurandir dos Santos highlights that the lack of prevention can have dramatic consequences for people like them. They are both still feeling their impact to this day. José went back to the coffee harvest the following year, to another farm in Espírito Santo. But he did so with a sense of fear: “I thought the Mata Verde farm owner could track me down and send someone to kill me any time.”
For Jurandir dos Santos, his first time was also his last. He was traumatized and has a clear message:
“I’d like to say just one thing to the people in the big multinational corporations: take a close look at what you are doing. Buying coffee is easy. The hard part of the job is harvesting it. It’s us, the workers, who make sure you get your coffee in the first place. And you don’t appreciate that.”
Nestlés reaction
When asked, Nestlé explains that the company currently sources coffee from "4C certified farm unit" of 500 farms within the Cooabriel cooperative, which represents a subset of the total farms associated with this cooperative. The company states that it currently does not purchase coffee from the farms Mata Verde, Três Irmãs and Primavera mentioned here and that they are not part of the Nescafé Plan. However, Nestlé does not comment on past trade relations, including to the Mata Verde farm, which supplied 4C-certified coffee to Cooabriel until its exclusion from the 4C system in June 2023.
Nestlé continues: "We also maintain direct communication with Cooabriel to emphasize the importance of safe and fair working conditions across all farms where we source our coffee". Regarding the Vista Alegre farm, Nestlé says: "Once we were made aware of the issues you referenced, we took decisive action and suspended this farm from our AAA Sustainable Quality Program pending evidence that the farm complies with our strict standards". Nestlé's supplier NKG Stockler confirmed that it only took notice of the incident in March 2025 through Repórter Brasil and Public Eye.
Several other questions, such as whether and how Nestlé intends to guarantee living wages for harvest workers, remained unanswered.
The full statement is available here.
Video interview with José Lima and Jurandir dos Santos
The two workers talk in detail about the conditions on the farm and their escape. They explain who they believe is responsible and they have a clear message for multinationals and coffee consumers.
Swiss NGO Public Eye offers a critical analysis of the impact that Switzerland, and its companies, has on economically disadvantaged countries. Through research, advocacy and campaigning, Public Eye also demands the respect of human rights and of the environment throughout the world. With a strong support of some 29,000 members, Public Eye focuses on global justice.
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Imprint
Text: Carla Hoinkes and Florian Blumer
English translation and editing: Alphadoc / Oliver Classen
Research: Public Eye in collaboration with Repórter Brasil
Video: Repórter Brasil, subtitles Public Eye
Illustrations: opak.cc
The illustrations were freely designed on the basis of photos and detailed accounts provided by José Lima and Jurandir dos Santos.
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