Agriculture, Beverages & Food

Fast food chain McDonald’s has more outlets in France than any other country in Europe. In 2013, there were 1,300 McDonald’s in France that generated €4.4 billion in revenue for the company. After McDonald’s was caught evading taxes between 2009 and 2020, the company agreed to pay the government of France €1.25 billion to avoid prosecution. Caught red handed Read More

A group of 51 farmers in Maharashtra, India, who took part in compensation discussions with pesticide manufacturer Syngenta, over the health impacts of Polo insecticide, have had their hopes dashed after the company suddenly withdrew from a mediation led by the Swiss government after several rounds of meetings. Read More

In July 2020 Maria Aparecida de Souza visited the JBS slaughterhouse outpatient clinic in Sidrolândia, in the southern Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, to complain of body aches and a cough, afraid that she might have caught COVID-19, according to Brasil de Fato, a Brazilian news site. Read More

Workers have been organizing to form unions at: Read More

“The living conditions – catastrophe: Mice running around the kitchen. When I tried opening the fridge, the door came off. You’d get a better sleep on the floor than on the beds provided,” Maria*, a Polish worker in the Netherlands employed by T&S Flexwerk, told CorpWatch. Read More

A Starbucks store in Buffalo, NY successfully voted to unionize at the end of 2021, becoming the first coffee shop in the chain to become part of a union. This created an unprecedented wave of unionizing efforts among Starbucks workers across the US.  Read More

An email titled “Why gas increase is good for hiring”, sent out by Wayne Pankratz, an executive director of operations for Applebee’s franchise Apple Central LLC, detailed how inflation and soaring gas prices are a great opportunity for lowering employees’ wages. Read More

A court in Atlanta, Georgia, has ordered Coca-Cola to turn over documents relating to the violent eviction of hundreds of families in northern Cambodia in 2008 and 2009. The families were evicted to make way for sugar plantations planned by Mitr Phol, a Bangkok-based supplier to Coca-Cola. Read More

Lawyers for a group of some 1,200 Nicaraguan banana plantation workers appeared before the Paris Trial Court in an effort to force Dow Chemical, Occidental Chemical and Shell Oil to pay $1 billion in compensation for health problems caused by Nemagon, a pesticide sold by the three companies. Read More

Stanka Becheva, a food and agriculture campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe, speaks by video with Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch about the Meat Atlas 2021, a report that documents the methods and impacts of the meat industry, naming and shaming the small handful of companies that control it. Read More