“Corporate giants like Colgate, Nestlé and Unilever assure consumers that their products use ‘sustainable palm oil’, but our findings reveal that the palm oil is anything but. There is nothing sustainable about palm oil that is produced using child labor and forced labor. The abuses discovered within Wilmar’s palm oil operations are not isolated incidents but are systemic and a predictable result of the way Wilmar does business,” Senior Investigator at Amnesty International Meghna Abraham said, as quoted in the report issued by the watchdog.
The Amnesty International accused the Indonesian company of violating workers’ rights, forced labor, low wages, discrimination and exposure to toxic chemicals. The full list of global firms buying palm oil from Wilmar according to the watchdog includes AFAMSA, ADM, Colgate-Palmolive, Elevance, Kellogg’s, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever.
Wilmar International is a large agricultural company based in Singapore with revenue of more than $38.78 billion in 2015.