Olam International Cocoa Code d’Ivoire and Hazelnut Turkey supply chains are assessed by the FLA.
From the Olam website: As Olam has grown, so has our direct workforce – employed across our upstream operations in plantations, concessions and farming to our downstream processing. These employees and contractors are governed by the Olam Code of Conduct and ILO compliant labour standards.
Every summer, tens of thousands of seasonal workers migrate to agriculture production areas across Turkey. A majority of these workers are from the southeastern Turkey and they travel as family groups moving from crop to crop for six to eight months each year. Often, the children work alongside their migrant parents, contributing to the household income, but at the expense of their personal development.
The FLA outlines the findings of research to test interventions designed to protect workers in the supply chains of three affiliates. The evaluation, called a social impact assessment, included interventions executed by Nestlé and its two suppliers, Balsu and Olam, in the hazelnut supply chain in Turkey and identified the most effective at upholding workers’ rights.
In March 2018, the FLA received a Third Party Complaint from the Tekgida-IS trade union (Tekgida) in Turkey concerning allegations of noncompliance with ILO Conventions 87 and 98 (freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively) and, by extension, relevant provisions in the FLA Workplace Code of Conduct and Benchmarks at the Progida production facility in Piraziz / Giresun owned and operated by Olam Group (Olam), an FLA-affiliated company. Olam had acquired the Progida Group, a leading hazelnut exporter with headquarters in Istanbul, in 2011, including this proce
The Fair Labor Association commissioned this study to explore the relationship between the procurement price and working conditions in hazelnut production in Turkey (with a special focus on child labor and forced labor), and review different actors’ roles in the supply chain, as part of the project “Piloting the USDA Guidelines for Eliminating Child Labor and Forced Labor in the Hazelnut Supply Chain in Turkey”.
The Fair Labor Association conducted its annual Independent External Monitoring (IEM) in a sample of Olam’s traceable cocoa supply chain in Côte d’Ivoire. The 2017 FLA IEM visits took place in four cooperatives that had never been assessed before and one cooperative that was previously assessed in 2014 for verification. According to information provided by Olam, the company’s traceable cocoa supply chain of represents 90 percent of its entire cocoa supply chain, involving 120,000 cocoa farmers, grouped into 192 cooperatives.
In August 2017, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) conducted independent assessments in the Turkish hazelnut supply chain shared by three FLA affiliates – Nestlé, and its two strategic first-tier suppliers, Balsu and Olam Progida, which together account for 100 percent of Nestlé’s hazelnut volume in Turkey.