Writes Asclepius, Content writer, Headline Diplomat eMagazine, LUDCI.eu
Increasing demand for natural beauty products across the world could be a catalyst of modern slavery, especially child labour. Consumers want more flavours in their makeup kits. Ingredients such as cocoa, vanilla, and mineral mica are sourced using child labour. Hence cosmetics companies that are increasing the number of natural ingredients in their products are indirectly fuelling child labour. In an interview with Donna Westerman head of consumer goods at Maplecroft, told Reuters that “the cosmetic supply chain is extremely complex and loosely regulated”. Cosmetics companies are making huge profits from the strong demand for skincare products. The demand started its upward spiral with the desire of young people to look good on social media.
India is responsible for about a quarter of the world’s production of mica. Mica can be found in almost every cosmetic or beauty item. It is the ingredient responsible for the sheen, highlight, gloss, and glitter in these items. However, the glitter and gloss in our makeup come at the costs of the future, childhood, and lives of several thousands of children in regions like Jharkhand and Bihar. These Indian states employ more than 22,000 children many of who are as young as five years old to work in unregulated mines. These children earn a living from the toil of hammering flakes of rock off unstable mountainside mines all too aware of the danger of these mines collapsing on them. They then sift the rock fragments to separate the glittering elements to be given to local merchants. None of these children know where the mica goes or how much it is sold. Most earn the equivalent of 29 to 43 cents for a full day’s work of up to 15 hours.
The story is a lot worse in Madagascar where “children as young as five make up more than half the number of miners scavenging for mica”. Terre des Hommes Netherlands in their one-year-long investigation discovered that a minimum of 11,000 children between ages 5 and 17 are involved in extracting and processing the shimmery, heat-resistant mineral. The Guardian reports that “children comprise as much as 62% of the overall mining workforce” in Madagascar and they descend “deep into the ground to cut the mica by hand”.
There are substantial deposits of Mica in China, Russia, Finland, the U.S.A, and Canada. However, India remains the world’s largest supplier where children break their backs in illegal and unregulated mines. This utter lack of lawlessness and negligence is only a precursor for heightened child trafficking. The government of India has made vehement promises to regulate the sector and has put in place some stringent laws to protect children. However, there has been little or no convictions.
What has the cosmetic industry done in response? Effectively nothing! “The Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI) – whose 39 members include cosmetics firms Estee Lauder and L’Oréal, and German drugs and chemical group Merck KGaA – has raised little funds, and village activities to curb child labour have not started.” Local charity workers in an interview with Reuters said “could the companies have done more? The answer is yes. They had a year and yet there is little to show on the ground. Children are dying in these mines, but there is no sense of urgency to really tackle the problem.” This was in 2017. In 2020, there is no report of the progress of the initiative to tackle the impact of their supply chain, yet every year, they continue to use blood mica and record billions in turnover.
This lack of commitment the cosmetics industry has towards cleaning up their supply chain directly condemns more children to death in their mica mines. Cosmetics company Lush has decided to take the easy way out and cut mica out of their products. But they have just succeeded in worsening the problem. Their long-standing patronage of mica from these regions of child labour had already created dependence in these communities on mica mining. Pulling out without any support to these communities has led to the worse crime of concealing the deaths of child miners. Thomas Reuters Foundation has reported that parents and mine managers are hiding the deaths of children in mines. When they are reported by some of the children, they are quickly dismissed and hushed.
Why would parents watch their children die without speaking up only to send the surviving ones back into that death sentence? The answer is simple. Mohammed who did not report the death of his father in the mines said “I did not complain. Mica is our destiny. This is our work.”. He is 25 and uneducated, like his father and probably his grandfather. The underdevelopment of these regions is directly linked to their dependence on mica mining, which in turn is fuelled by selfish and predatory western cosmetics companies.
Conclusion:
The government is not doing enough to ensure cosmetics companies clean up their supply lines. By clean up, we are not referring to a simple boycott of mica. We mean that they should take more responsibility to ensure children are not involved in the mining communities and also pressure the government of mining regions to take the issue of child labour seriously. The laws regarding child labour needs to be updated to force these cosmetics companies to comply. We need to see some heavy fines and possible jail time for erring companies, not just mild alerts and encouragements.
Featured photo by Marcelo Moreira from Pexels
