Is your BBQ charcoal made with slave labour?

THERE can surely be few more popular summer perennials than the traditional British barbecue. The UK is now the BBQ capital of europe — the setting for about 120 million outdoor cooking sessions a year, with the market in al fresco grilling now worth around £2 billion (up from £150 million in 1997). But behind the mouth-watering sausages and burgers you enjoyed at the weekend lies a rather more unpalatable story. For much of the charcoal being used to fire up grills in gardens around the country is produced in Namibia, where it is known as ‘ black gold’. And, say campaigners, much has been produced using slave labour on the other side of the world.

In fact, if you buy a bag of charcoal in Britain, there are very good odds that it has been packed into containers in the Namibian port of Walvis Bay, and shipped more than 5,000 miles to Felixstowe, our largest container port.

Namibia is the world’s sixth-biggest exporter of charcoal, and the UK is the largest single importer of charcoal from this South-West African country.

Why is charcoal nicknamed ‘ black gold’ in Namibia? Because it produces vast profits for local farmers. And one of the reasons f or this i s that the indigenous charcoal trade is produced by sweatshop or slave labour.

A leading environmental charity, Fern, has now revealed the high price that Namibian charcoal workers pay for the cheap British barbecue. The title of its report leaves little to the imagination — Playing With Fire: Human misery, environmental Destruction and Summer BBQs.

The Fern i nvestigation f ound Namibian labourers were typically paid a pittance and live in vast shanty towns made f rom black plastic sheeting, without access to toilets or running water.

Charcoal is produced by slowly heating wood with an absence of oxygen, allowing the chemical c onversion of wood into charcoal.

The work involved is punishing: chopping trees from dawn to dusk, cutting it into small pieces to burn, then removing the charcoal from the kiln.

The workers’ living conditions are miserable.

‘Although it is tough, we have no choice — there is no alternative,’ said one Namibian worker quoted in the Fern study.

The majority come from the Kavango, Namibia’s poorest region. They are mostly employed as contractors, without the benefit of housing or social security, and are paid 700 Namibian dollars (about £35) per ton of charcoal they produce — which is typically half the price the farmer then sells it on for.

And since most of the farms are in remote areas, with little access to shops, let alone health facilities, workers have to buy their provisions on credit — sometimes at considerably higher prices — from the farmers’ stores, leaving them with precious little money at the end of the month.

most charcoal workers do not have any protective clothing, such as safety boots, gloves and masks, to protect them from smoke inhalation, sawdust, heat stroke, cuts and snakebites.

The health hazards associated with small-scale charcoal production have been well documented, i ncluding ‘increased respiratory symptoms and decreased pulmonary function’. Put simply: the conditions in which Namibian charcoal is produced are a world away from the relaxed, happy barbecues that we use it for.

Yet the UK imports more of Namibia’s charcoal than any other country — largely because of its low price compared to our domestic product. The wholesale price of charcoal produced in the UK is about £1,400 per ton, compared to just £76 a ton for Namibia’s. ‘ Consumers are oblivious to t he conditions it is produced under, with many workers livi ng i n atrocious conditions we’re more used to seeing on our TV screens beamed from makeshift refugee camps in a disaster zone,’ said Fern campaign co- ordinator Saskia Ozinga. Supermarkets and other major retailers usually only sell charcoal that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which demands environmental and social inspections.

But many consumers in Britain buy barbecue fuel from petrol station forecourts and small independent shops, where the charcoal stocked is often not FSC certified.

‘Whatever guarantees FSC does give, it’s undermined by the large amount of non-FSC charcoal entering the UK,’ says ms Ozinga. ‘ retailers should be made aware of the human and environmental costs of what they are selling.’

The Namibian government is also concerned about the conditions in which charcoal is produced.

But campaigners claim overhauling the industry is a huge task. Far easier, they say, would be changing the law so importing illegally- sourced charcoal from Namibia is a criminal offence.

meanwhile, the charcoal fuelling your BBQ may be causing misery to slave workers in West Africa.