Brutality of Sugar Cane Fields
BEED, India — Archana Ashok Chaure has given her life to sugar.
She was married off to a sugar cane laborer in western India at about 14 — “too young,” she said, “to have any idea what marriage was.”
Debt to her employer keeps her in the fields.
Last winter, she did what thousands of women here are pressured to do when faced with painful periods or routine ailments: She got a hysterectomy and got back to work.
This keeps sugar flowing to companies like Coke and Pepsi.
The two soft drink makers have helped turn the state of Maharashtra into a sugar-producing powerhouse. But an investigation by The New York Times and Fuller Project, a global nonprofit newsroom, has found that these brands have also profited from a brutal system of labor that exploits children and leads to the unnecessary sterilization of working-age women.
People at every stage of the supply chain were interviewed, including dozens of laborers, contractors, mill owners and former executives at multinational companies. The Times also examined medical records and interviewed doctors, lawmakers, government officials, researchers and aid workers who have spent careers examining the livelihoods of Maharashtra’s sugar workers.
Young girls are pushed into illegal child marriages so they can work alongside their husbands cutting and gathering sugar cane. Instead of receiving wages, they work to pay off advances from their employers — an arrangement that requires them to pay a fee for the privilege of missing work, even to see a doctor.
An extreme yet common consequence of this financial entrapment is hysterectomies. Labor brokers loan money for the surgeries, even to resolve ailments as routine as heavy, painful periods. And the women — most of them uneducated — say they have little choice.
Hysterectomies keep them working, undistracted by doctor visits or the hardship of menstruating in a field with no access to running water, toilets or shelter.
Removing a woman’s uterus has lasting consequences, particularly if she is younger than 40. In addition to the short-term risks of abdominal
pain, it often brings about early menopause, raising the chance of heart disease and osteoporosis.
But for many sugar laborers, the operation has a particularly grim outcome: Borrowing against future wages plunges them further into debt, ensuring that they return to the fields next season and beyond. Workers’ rights groups and the United Nations labor agency have defined such arrangements as forced labor.
Sugar producers and buyers have known about this abusive system for years. Coca-Cola’s consultants visited the fields and sugar mills of western India and, in 2019, reported that children were cutting sugar cane and laborers were working to repay their employers. They documented this in a report for the company, complete with an interview with a 10-year-old girl.
In an unrelated corporate report that year, the company said that it was supporting a program to “gradually reduce child labor” in India.
Labor abuse is endemic in Maharashtra, according to a local government report and interviews with workers. Maharashtra sugar has been sweetening cans of Coke and Pepsi for more than a decade, according to an executive at NSL Sugars, which operates mills in the state.
PepsiCo confirmed that one of its largest international franchisees buys sugar from Maharashtra. The franchisee just opened its third manufacturing and bottling plant there. A new Coke factory is under construction in Maharashtra, and Coca-Cola confirmed that it, too, buys sugar in the state.
These companies use the sugar primarily for products sold in India, industry officials say. PepsiCo said the company and its partners purchase a small amount of sugar from Maharashtra, relative to the total production in the state.
Both companies have codes of conduct prohibiting suppliers and business partners from using child and forced labor.
“The description of the working conditions of sugar-cane cutters in Maharashtra is deeply concerning,” PepsiCo said in a statement, adding that it would take any actions that “may need to be taken.”
Coca-Cola declined to comment on a detailed list of questions.
Rural and Impoverished
The heartland of this exploitation is the district of Beed, an impoverished, rural region of Maharashtra that is home to much of the migrant sugar-cutting population. One local government report surveyed approximately 82,000 female sugar cane workers from Beed and found that about 1 in 5 had had hysterectomies. A separate government survey estimated the figure at 1 in 3.
The abuses continue, despite local government investigations, news reports and warnings from company consultants, because everyone says somebody else is responsible.
Big Western companies have policies pledging to root out human rights abuses in their supply chains. In practice, they seldom, if ever, visit the fields and largely rely on their suppliers, the sugar mill owners, to oversee labor issues.
The mill owners, though, say that they do not actually employ the workers. They hire contractors to recruit migrants from far-off villages, transport them to the fields and pay their wages. How those workers are treated, the owners say, is between them and the contractors.
Those contractors are often young men whose only qualification is that they own a vehicle. They are merely doling out the mill owners’ money, they say. They could not possibly dictate working conditions or terms of employment.
Nobody pushes women to get hysterectomies as a form of population control; having children is commonplace. Girls typically marry young, and many have children in their teens.
They seek hysterectomies to stop their periods, as a drastic form of uterine cancer prevention or to end the need for routine gynecological care.
India is the world’s second-largest sugar producer, and Maharashtra accounts for about one-third of it.
The abuses are born from the Maharashtra sugar industry’s peculiar setup. In other sugar regions, farm owners recruit local workers and pay them wages.
In Maharashtra, about one million workers, typically from Beed, migrate for days to fields in the south and west. Throughout the harvest, from about October to March, they move from field to field.
Instead of wages from farm owners, they receive an advance — often around $1,800 per couple, or about $5 a day per person for a six-month season — from a mill contractor. This century-old system reduces labor costs for sugar mills.
In the fields, where she has spent her life cutting sugar for a mill owned by NSL Sugars, Ms. Chaure, like the others, sleeps on the ground, spends hours a day hunched over and carries loads on her head.
Tampons and pads are expensive and hard to find, and there is nowhere to dispose of them. Without access to running water, women address their periods in the fields, with reused cloth that they try to wash discreetly by hand.
The women often have familiar ailments: pain that radiates in their lower backs and prolonged or irregular periods that make work more difficult.
Dr. Ashok Belkhode, whose Maharashtra practice includes gynecology, said: “All the problems are intermingled with their personal hygiene and their economic condition. They have to work so hard.”
Hysterectomy is a routine surgery performed around the world, although infrequently for women in their 20s and 30s. In India, it is more common, including as a form of birth control, and other parts of the country also have high hysterectomy rates. But in Maharashtra’s sugar industry, everyone — contractors, other workers, even doctors — pushes women toward the surgery.
Married to and for Field Work
In her wedding photographs, Ms. Chaure stares straightfaced into the camera. She had never met the groom; that was normal. The same had happened to many of her friends.
Like many rural women in Maharashtra, Ms. Chaure does not know her exact age but is in her 30s. She figures she was about 14 on her wedding day. It was two years after she dropped out of her village school so her parents could take her to the sugar fields. “I was scared to get married,” she recalled, “really scared.”
Ms. Chaure ended up on the operating table because a sonogram showed she had ovarian cysts, her records show.
Instead of removing the cysts, her surgeon told her she should have a hysterectomy. She did not question the advice. She knew so many women who had done the same. She was terrified of getting cancer. And maybe this would end her pain, and the doctor visits.
The surgeon removed Ms. Chaure’s uterus, a cyst, an ovary and a fallopian tube. In an interview, her surgeon said it was necessary because the cyst was unusually large.
The Times shared details from Ms. Chaure’s file with Dr. Farinaz Seifi, the director of gynecology at Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut. “There was absolutely no indication for hysterectomy,” she said.
Economic Incentives
In this part of Maharashtra, two economic incentives push girls into marriage.
First, sugar cutting is a two-person job. Husbandand-wife teams make twice as much as a man working alone. The two-person system is known as koyta, after the sickle that cuts the sugar cane.
Second, the longer that children accompany their parents in the field, the longer parents must support them. So families often seek to marry off daughters young, even in early adolescence.
“If we are married, their stress reduces, and the responsibility is shifted to our husband’s shoulders,” Ms. Chaure said. “So they marry us off.”
Workers said there were rarely official contracts or records tallying how much sugar cane they cut. At the end of the season, contractors usually declare that a balance remains.
In 2019, a state lawmaker’s investigation on the high number of hysterectomies in Maharashtra led to the changing of a rule intended to prevent unscrupulous doctors from profiting off unneeded surgeries.
“Some doctors have made it a way to earn more money,” said Dr. Chaitanya Kagde, a gynecologist at a government-run facility in Beed. (Although public hospitals offer hysterectomies free or at reduced cost, they are often far from rural women.)
The new rule required the civil surgeon, the district’s top health official, to approve hysterectomies.
But hysterectomies on younger women continue. Although many doctors agree that some surgeons perform them too often, they said that patients request the surgery.
Last May, Beed’s civil surgeon at the time, Suresh Sable, said the government should not second-guess doctors. He said his office still approved 90 percent of hysterectomy requests.