“Italian” tomato purees sold by several UK supermarkets appear to contain tomatoes grown and picked in China using forced labour, the BBC has found.
Some have “Italian” in their name such as Tesco’s “Italian Tomato Purée”. Others have “Italian” in their description, such as Asda’s double concentrate which says it contains “Puréed Italian grown tomatoes” – and Waitrose’s “Essential Tomato Purée”, describing itself as “Italian tomato puree”.
A total of 17 products, most of them own-brands sold in UK and German retailers, are likely to contain Chinese tomatoes – testing commissioned by the BBC World Service shows.
Most Chinese tomatoes come from the Xinjiang region, where their production is linked to forced labour by Uyghur and other largely Muslim minorities. The UN accuses the Chinese state – which views these minorities as a security risk – of torture and abuse. China denies it forces people to work in the tomato industry and says workers’ rights are protected by law. It says the UN report is based on “disinformation and lies”.
All the supermarkets whose products we tested dispute our findings.
China grows about a third of the world’s tomatoes. The north-western region of Xinjiang has the perfect climate for growing the fruit.
It is also where China began a programme of mass detentions in 2017. Human rights groups allege more than a million Uyghurs have been detained in hundreds of facilities, which China has termed “re-education camps”.
The BBC has spoken to 14 people who say they endured or witnessed forced labour in Xinjiang’s tomato fields over the past 16 years. “[The prison authorities] told us the tomatoes would be exported overseas,” Ahmed (not his real name) said, adding that if the workers did not meet the quotas – as much as 650kg a day – they would be shocked with electric prods.
Mamutjan, a Uyghur teacher who was imprisoned in 2015 for an irregularity in his travel documentation, says he was beaten for failing to meet the high tomato quotas expected of him.
“In a dark prison cell, there were chains hanging from the ceiling. They hung me up there and said ‘Why can’t you finish the job?’ They beat my buttocks really hard, hit me in the ribs. I still have marks.”
It is hard to verify these accounts, but they are consistent, and echo evidence in a 2022 UN report which reported torture and forced labour in detention centres in Xinjiang.
By piecing together shipping data from around the world, the BBC discovered how most Xinjiang tomatoes are transported into Europe – by train through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and into Georgia, from where they are shipped onwards to Italy.
