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The Current Transcript for January 2, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Pretty pretty serious right now. I don't know if the whole suburbs just going to go up in flames. Who knows? Who knows? Oh, can't even see five feet in front of me right now. So some people are staying to fight that fire, but I find this ridiculous. You just need to get out of there or you'll suffocate.

LAURA LYNCH: That's the scene as Australians flee their homes with more bushfires rolling in. People have died along with wildlife. The land is scorched. And it's far from over. We'll start there today with a view from the frontlines of the flames. After that, a startling new report suggests the clothes on your back may have been made with the product of forced labour in China as the government continues detaining Uighur Muslims. That's in about 30 minutes. And in about an hour.

SOUNDCLIP

Our foods are like a language. They tell us who we are. They are way share our culture. And when we lose a food, it knocks that leg out from under the culture.

LL: She calls herself a culinary geographer. And Lenore Newman is warning that the way we eat is changing as the threat of extinction looms over all of us. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

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Fires in Australia turn night sky 'blood red' as tourists seek refuge on beach

Guest: Mark Tregallas

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This is so close now, it's literally right behind where we're parked at the wharf, it does have water in between it but it's really, really scary. These flames, it's just caught on all the trees and it's coming straight for us.

LL: That's Jann Gilbert, a resident of Maluku to Australia, describing the bushfires coming towards her and others who were gathering near the local wharf. Thousands of people in the coastal town fled to the shoreline as winds pushed fire toward their homes and turned the sky a dark red. Massive bushfires throughout Australia are burning out of control with little sign of slowing down. At least 17 people are dead from the fires. More are missing. Mark Tregellas is in Malik to as the town cleans up and braces for possibly more fires. Hello.

MARK TREGELLAS: Hello, Laura. Good to talk to you. Sorry it couldn't be under better circumstances.

LL: Yes, I wish so too. How are you and your family?

MARK TREGELLAS: Well, both our homes survived, only just by the skin of our teeth. Our neighbours wound up saving our primary home and I managed to get to our holiday home in town just when the flames were about 10 meters from it, and managed to put them out with a hose and some help from the local fire authorities.

LL: The heat must have been intense.

MARK TREGELLAS: The fires in Australia, and in Mallacoota are at the moment have been absolutely unprecedented. It's possibly the closest thing Australia has had to a humanitarian crisis. I believe the fires in Canada this year were about 1.8 million hectares in size. The ones in Australia have just passed six million hectares. The fire drives north from where I live for 350 kilometres. It's all burning.

LL: So you sound like you're holding up okay. How about the rest of your family?

MARK TREGELLAS: Well, I have three young teenage girls. This is the first time that they've been through a fire like this. I was going to stay and defend their primary property, but because of the three girls, I didn't know how bad it was going to be. So my wife and I made the decision to evacuate to the foreshore area. We managed to get there along with 4,000-5,000 tourists. Being the Christmas/New Year period, Mallacoota that normally has a population of 1,000. But over the holiday period, it can grow at times to 12,000. Fortunately, we only had about 4,000-5,000 people who were here, but only a few of them managed to get out before the roads were closed, and the fire was coming. So all of us managed to get down either to the beach area or to the main boat ramp, which has a rock wall that abuts the caravan park to the lake in the south, where most people just sat down and waited for the fire to come.

LL: Well, what was the idea, was it that you would get into the waters if you needed to, if that was your last resort?

MARK TREGELLAS: Yes, that was the story. Basically, we stayed and waited, and the evacuation was given at 4:00 p.m. or 5:00 p.m. However, winds change and that actually dragged out until possibly six o'clock the next morning, when we realized that the fire was finally coming. At seven o'clock, it grew dark. We call it 'the black.' It became so dark that if you didn't have a light, you could not see your hand in front of your face. One of my friends actually dropped his mobile phone on the ground and he couldn't find it because it went face down and it was so dark that he went there. One of the most amazing stories we had was with one of our firefighters who was out in the commercial road area, he was riding on the top of his fire truck. He raised his arm up above his head, using his torch to see and his hand disappeared into the black. He said it was like dipping his hand into a bucket of ink, except it was above his head. He'd been through many bushfires and said that it was totally surreal, and the only time he's ever seen that.

LL: What went through your mind, though, as you fled to the beach with your family?

MARK TREGELLAS: Look, we never really felt like our actual lives were in danger, because we were right next to the water. Even if we felt that the firestorm would come through and take out the cars. There were about 300-400 vehicles that were packed like sardines into an area that was devoid of trees. We thought that if one car, through embers, caught fire and they were unable to put it out and other cars caught fire, we would at least all be able to go out into the- wade out into the water and survive. People, amazingly, were actually not panicking. I did see one or two people who were having a bit of a moment with the stress of it all. But the majority of people were actually very quiet. They were revved up, most people were well-equipped with woollen clothing, smoke masks, torches and good footwear. We didn't have sort of any idiots running around in shorts and T-shirts and everybody was talking to one another. I was walking around. I was being offered food, drinks. And it was just sort of like an inevitability that was going to happen. What happened eventually was that 'the black' turned into a glow of red.

LL: Yes, I saw that, that was eerie. That just looked so eerie, that blood-red sky.

MARK TREGELLAS: It was a blood-red sky and eventually it covered the entire sky. Then the wind came and then entire gum leaves, three, four inches long were just dropping out of the sky around us. It eventually then turned into sleet of ash. Literally like a sleet rain, except it was ash, which was coating everything. And then embers started to come. The winds picked up, at times they were in excess of 60 km-an-hour. The embers flew out into the lower lake, where there were islands and the tea tree on there caught fire and started a blaze. And it got to a point where everybody was getting ready to evacuate. The fire appliances had come down to the area where we were as last resort, to try and coat us all with fire, from fire pumps that were being filled by the lake water. And at that last minute, there was a wind change and the fire actually took off up north where we were, but took out I think at last count there are over 100 homes that have been destroyed and melted.

LL: But that's not the end of it. There's now suggestions that that those temperatures are going back up and you people there are being told to get out again. What are you going to do?

MARK TREGELLAS: Yes, well, I'm going to stay here. We have the Australian Navy just off shore with one of the humanitarian disaster relief ships, HMAS Coles. They're evacuating a thousand tourists tomorrow and returning in a couple of days to take another thousand. They may, in fact, do a third run. We've also got Australian Army Blackhawk helicopters that are coming in an evacuation. Those that have been suffering respiratory issues with a thick blanket of smoke that has been coming down here as medics and people that just had surgery, that type of thing. So. Where basically now in a position where most of my property has burnt, it's completely charred black. I've lost most of my [unintelligible].

LL: But why are you going to stay when everyone else is leaving? Why do you want to stay?

MARK TREGELLAS: Well, we can't get out. The roads are blocked. The roads are officially going to be blocked for a minimum of two weeks. It's a case of, well, we live here. It's our home. We'd like to try and if the fire does come back to stay and defend it. The issue was that we had 4000-5000 tourists here, which is great, except they're eating all the food, using all the petrol and the diesel. So if we can evacuate those people who want to go anyway to get back home and out of here because there is no power - Up until yesterday, we had to boil the water and it's just a case of they wanting to leave. So they will go. Once they leave, then it will be far easier for fire crews to be able to swap over, to bring in fresh fire crews and to be able to help defend it. If it happens again.

LL: What about your wife? What about your wife and daughters, though, even if you want to stay? What are they saying to you? What are you saying to them?

MARK TREGELLAS: Well, we discussed it as a family. We asked the girls what they wanted to do. And all three of them said that they wanted to stay and help. The area has just been devastated to the point that is very, very hard to describe. My youngest daughter, who's 13, came back yesterday in tears because she found two koalas that had been burnt to death in the fire and were curled up. Even feeling that emotion and that sadness, she's still adamant that she wants to stay and help and fight fires.

LL: We've been reading about the wildlife in the area. The sheep, as you said, found two koala bears dead. Do you have any other idea of how wildlife has fared?

MARK TREGELLAS: Yes. Unfortunately, today I had to go out and put down a kangaroo that was on a neighbor's property. It had incredibly badly burned paws and seat. Its skin was stripped off. And because the police in the area, unfortunately, absolutely flared with jobs, the neighbour just asked me to come over with a rifle and dispatch the kangaroo. It was a hard thing to do, but it was in a lot of pain. And I felt that was it. I hadn't seen any koalas, Mallacoota had a fantastic disease free, huge population of koalas. We we'd had koalas that would walk along the main street and actually go into shops. It was fantastic. And fortunately, I'm now beginning to hear some of them in the trees again. Our bird population here is magnificent. We have beautiful parrots that come around during the height of the fires where some of them, some of the flames were reaching over 100 meters high. We actually had some of those birds just dropping out of the sky in front of us. It was- It was an event that I don't think any of us had really been through before. The next day, with so many homes being devastated, everybody was just walking around shocked and trying to come to terms with what happened.

LL: Mark, this is your home. This is the place that you love. And it just sounds so apocalyptic almost. It sounds it's so ruined. What are you going to do? Will you stay there forever? Does it does this end things for you in Mallacoota?

MARK TREGELLAS: Well, that's a really good question. I've spoken to. Several locals who are elderly and a lot of them have just said, look, they just they don't want to rebuild. They want to leave. Unfortunately, the main suburb that got hit hardest was one of their lower socio economic areas. And most of the people they were renting and working at the abalone co-op, which was the second largest employer after the school in the township. Unfortunately, it exploded and it will take probably a year to get it back up and running. So those people have not only lost their homes, but they've also lost any form of income that they may have. So unfortunately, I feel that there might be a fairly big exodus from Mallacoota. The areas along the beach here were beautifully landscaped with stairs, lookouts, walkways, and all of them had just been wiped clean. It's now just basically stark ash with charred sticks with no leaves or branches just sticking up normally through the bush. You can't see more than, you know, 10 or 15 meters. And now you can see for hundreds of metres through it because all that underbrush has basically just been wiped clean. You can't get down to the beaches anymore because the stairs are no longer there. However, I've lived and worked here for 20 years. In fact, three years ago, I retired here and there are some areas that are really good. This morning I went out and one of the small patches of green in my front paddock, I saw six wallabies eating the grass that was left in the area. It's a fantastic place there. It's a world biosphere reserve. The area is just magical and it will come back but, unfortunately, will take time.

LL: And you will be there for when it comes back?

MARK TREGELLAS: Yes. I can't see us wanting to leave. The area is really good. It's one of the best places to raise kids probably in the whole of Australia. It's one of those towns where nobody locks their homes. Everybody leaves their keys in the car.

LL: But don't you fear that's changed for good now, that things are just going to be different from now on?

MARK TREGELLAS: Yes. Look, I think it will for a while. I know that the trees will grow back. I've been in areas where we've had bushfires before and I know that it will be hard. At this point in time I don't know just how big the impact will be. The heat of the fires was so intense that I don't know even if the eucalyptus trees which normally regenerate through fire, I don't know if they have been too badly burned in order to regenerate. We'll just have to wait and find out, I suppose.

LL: Mark, I am so sorry for everything that you have lost. And I wish you and your family good luck in the days ahead. Please take care of yourself.

MARK TREGELLAS: Will do. It was great to have a chat to talk to you, and hopefully this Saturday coming won't be just as powerful as what we've been through.

LL: I hope so. Thank you.

MARK TREGELLAS: Thank you very much.

LL: Mark Tregellas lives in Mallacoota, Australia, where more bushfires are expected in the days ahead.

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LL: New South Wales has declared a state of emergency starting Friday morning. It's the third in as many months with strong winds and temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius expected on Saturday. Around 100 fires are burning in the region and so far the area in flames is over four times what burned in the Amazon last year. Flames have been as high as 17 metres. That's taller than the Sydney Opera House. And since September, more than 12 hundred homes have been destroyed in New South Wales and in the neighbouring state of Victoria. Today, the smoke is so bad that one elderly woman died after exiting a plane in Canberra, the capital. Australia broke temperature records twice in December, and many Australians have been voicing their anger at what they see as a lack of action on climate change from the government of Scott Morrison. The prime minister had to cut short a visit to the hard hit town of [unintelligible] earlier today when he was confronted by angry protesters with one person yelling that he should be ashamed of himself since he left the country to burn. Historically, Australia's deadliest bushfire happened in 2009 on what's been called Black Saturday, when 180 people died in Victoria. The CBC News is coming up next. Then we've been hearing for months about the terrible conditions faced by the Muslim minority Uighurs detained in China but are the results of their forced labour ending up in your closet? We'll hear from a researcher who says it's time for Western companies to stop selling products from Xinjiang Province. I'm Laura Lynch and this is the current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. Back after the news.

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Forced labour in China's Uighur camps

Guests: Adrian Zenz, Leonie Barrie

LL: Hello, I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current.

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LL: Still to come, the future of food and it's linked to extinction. But first, forced labour in China and it's linked to the clothes on your back.

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Well, he is not a terrorist. He's just a writer. He's just a writer. That means they don't care who you are. They just took you in. They just took everyone into the camps. Here's a man that he can't bear any of those kind of abuses, human rights, those kind. So I think what impacted most is the condition there that he saw. You see, they can't even receive a call.

LL: That Zohra Ilchi in Calgary speaking to CBC's As it happens about her father, Nurmuhammad Tohti. He was one of the most famous writers in China's Xinjiang province. And he wrote about his people, the Uighurs. Last May. He died less than two months after being released from a Chinese detention camp. Zohra Ilchi said she wasn't able to get any details about his death or the conditions of the camp. According to the United Nations, at least one million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims have been held in what China calls vocational training centres. Some human rights activists have gone so far as to call them concentration camps. What you might not realize is that many Uighurs are also being used as forced labour and products they make may already be in your closet. Adrian Zenz has been investigating this. He's a senior fellow in China. Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. We reached him today in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hello.

ADRIAN ZENZ: Good morning.

LL: Just how widespread is the use of forced labour engine dying province?

ADRIAN ZENZ: The scale of this is ramping up as we are speaking because the Chinese government is gradually winding down the mass internment campaign, it is releasing the Uighurs from the re-education camps into different forms of coercive labour. And it is also sending village work teams throughout all the minority villages and then rounding up people to send them to local factories.

LL: So how many people are we talking about then?

ADRIAN ZENZ: Well, essentially, this affects the entire adult Turkic minority population of Xinjiang. Which the total population is about 14 to 15 million Turkic Muslim minorities.

LL: And so you're suggesting that they're all being used in one way or another as forced labour.

ADRIAN ZENZ: I'm suggesting that they live in a perfect police state where every person is required to be in a government approved place of work or training. And the forced or coercive labour campaign specifically firstly targets, those who have been in the re-education camps and then being shifted into vocational training camps where they have been trained. And secondly, it targets rural surplus labourers, which is basically people who don't have a regular full time job, who are traditionally engaged in seasonal farming, seasonal agriculture and odd jobs on the side. The government doesn't want these people to just hang around and do what they want. You don't want them to spend time with their families and educate them about religion. They want them to be in full time work. And many of these are being shifted to other parts of this large autonomous region to live in dormitories and to work in large groups. So those are being made to work at their local villages. And yet others are being shifted outside Xinjiang to eastern China.

LL: What kinds of products are being made using this forced or coercive labour?

ADRIAN ZENZ: The policy of the region focuses on low skilled, labour intensive manufacturing and especially textiles. Xinjiang has a policy by which by 2023, 1 million labourers are supposed to be in textile manufacturing. Of them, 650000 from the Uighur regions.

LL: So we're talking about then when you say textiles there, cotton is grown in that province. Are there people picking cotton? Are they spinning cotton? What kinds of work are they doing?

ADRIAN ZENZ: It is along the entire textile production line, but the focus of shifting up-market meaning traditionally Xinjiang has been supplying 84 percent of all cotton produced in China. The picking of cotton is done by minorities, but now, because of labour program focuses on the processing of the raw materials, on the ginning and on the making of cloth, but also moving into the making of at least the more simpler forms of textiles such as school uniforms.

LL: Which Western companies have been connected to the product of this, of course, labour and in Jiang. Well, one of the biggest companies in the region called [unintelligible] corporation, operates the world's largest dyed yarn facility in Xinjiang, but they have a huge capacity. And this company has been supplying a lot of Western companies. The supply list is very long includes H&M and several others. And certain companies like [unintelligible] The Japanese fashion brand are even openly advertising Xinjiang Cotton because Xinjiang Cotton is a quality product.

LL: So they're boasting about this as the quality of the product, even while forced labour is being used to produce it. Can you tell us how you know that these workers are being coerced or forced to work?

ADRIAN ZENZ: Yes, I can. The most obvious form of coercive labour is when those from the vocational training camps, which are highly secured compounds managed like high security prisons. The details of that of that was leaked with the China [unintelligible], which came out late November, a classified secret government documents that showed that these centres are, in fact, being run like prisons. A lot of these camps have factories built next to them in 2018 or they're located on the grounds of large industrial parks. And a lot of these former students, quote unquote, are now working in one or another factory. But the even bigger deal, in my opinion, is how the government is making other minorities who have not necessarily been in an internment camp, how they are being put into centralized training, which consists of one month military drill - according to government documents - that's supposed to produce obedience, discipline and standardized behaviour. Then one month political thought indoctrination and then one month vocational skills training. And a third form of involuntary labour, which in some ways is perhaps the most devious type, is to separate women from their children. By targeting women to work in textile manufacturing and local village factories and putting the children into [unintelligible] time facilities.

LL: So you mentioned mothers being separated from their children, but what else do you know about the conditions that they're working under?

ADRIAN ZENZ: More research is needed on that. The conditions will vary. The local satellite factories are typically small sort of workshops with a capacity of 50 to 100 workers. Predominantly women are working in low skilled textile making. A lot of the men are put into the centralized training facilities, which are probably not entirely different from the internment camps, and they often then are made to work in industrial parks, which have attached dormitories. Oftentimes they live, they're separated from their families. Sometimes the entire family can move and live on the factory dormitory.

LL: I just want to put to you something that the Chinese state television has put out a story just in the last day or so with a former trainee, and the trainee talks about how grateful he is for the opportunity to learn the training, how he has high hopes for the future. He uses a line that's apparently posed on the wall 'Happiness is earned through hard work'. He says he learned to cherish this business opportunity. What's your reaction to that?

ADRIAN ZENZ: My reaction to that is that, on an individual case by case basis, we cannot know what is really going on and what the true attitude of the minorities is, because there's no possibility of an independent audit, an independent investigation. It's 100 percent impossible. What we do know also from a secret video taken by The New York Times and published just two days ago, is that there are different forms of coercion in this incredible police state that does vocational training and employment scheme, has huge government courthouse that local governments must fulfil and that are clearly connected to the internment campaign. You know that there's no such thing as a voluntary aspect in this region because village work teams visit families and convince them that the women should be put to labour, which is oftentimes against the traditional family arrangements. And if they don't agree, they're being subjected to thought education and thought conversion. We have all kinds of government policy texts that talk about how the thinking of these minorities have to be changed, how they have to be transformed, which is the same language used for the re-education and brainwashing process. All of this makes the entire scheme incredibly problematic. We know at least part of it is highly coercive, being directly connected to internment camps. And we have a mounting, a growing amount of evidence that a substantial amount of the labour and training schemes outside the internment has strong coercive elements.

LL: If so, out in the West. Then if a company wanted to avoid using cotton that is made using this forced a coersive abour. How hard would that be?

ADRIAN ZENZ: It would not be easy because Xinjiang supplies a large amount of China's cotton. The bigger problem even is that through the Mutual Assistance Aid Program, 19 cities and provinces in eastern China are closely linked with different minority regions in Xinjiang in order to develop them. Under the guise of poverty alleviation and development aid, these regions are investing billions into these factory schemes, where minorities are being put to work. So this is a huge problem because now we have a scenario where products that may be fully or partly made by coercive or forced labour are being shipped to eastern China to become part of another product, or hundreds or thousands of minority labourers from one single company are being made to work in eastern China in a production plant in one of these 19 cities and provinces. In order to fully avoid forced labour, Western companies would almost have to avoid any cooperation of any of these Chinese companies.

LL: Right. Has this stopped buying cotton from China entirely? That is what you're saying.

ADRIAN ZENZ: That's more or less what it is amounting to if China is not allowing us to conduct a full investigation into this.

LL: In the midst of all of this, the Better Cotton Initiative, which is an industry group that advocates for better labour and environmental practices, is continuing to licence farms Xinjiang. The group says its presence there improves workers lives. And it sent us a statement that reads in part, the decision to stay or walk away from a region like Xinjiang is not an easy one. However, in the current political context and with new information emerging regularly, we need to ensure we're considering all options. And it goes on to say they're actively looking to further strengthen efforts to detect and prevent forced labour at farm level. What do you think of the initiative's decision to stay?

ADRIAN ZENZ: I agree that it's not an easy decision. I agree that Xinjiang is a huge production hub for cotton in the world. It is fully understandable that this a difficult decision to make. But I think the better the initiative has to make the right decision fast. At the moment, the right decision is to withdraw simply because it is not possible to conduct any independent audit in this police state environment. In order to send a signal and to protest against what is going on in Sinjar, western companies have to divert their presence in this incredible police state powered by digital databases and artificial intelligence. Western companies cannot make a difference in this environment. This environment is fully dominated by government policy. It is powered by billions of government subsidies. Eastern Chinese companies are flooding in, especially the Better Cotton initiative is lending a good name to products made in Xinjiang with really in no control to what extent involuntary minority labour is involved.

LL: Adrian Zenz we will leave it there. Thank you for your time.

ADRIAN ZENZ: Thank you.

LL: Adrian Zenz is a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington. We reached him in St. Paul, Minnesota. All four shoppers and fashion companies. It can be difficult to figure out whether a product was made with the result of forced labour. Leonie Barrie is an apparel editor with the corporate research firm Global Data. She is in our studio in London, England. Hello. Hi. Let me first get your reaction to what we've just heard from Adrian Zenz.

LEONIE BARRIE: Adrian has covered it extremely well. And obviously he is a massive reason why so many of these reports are actually coming out and gathering momentum. And it's invaluable research to the industry, which obviously is seeing massive concern over possible links to forced labour in the cotton supply chain.

LL: I'm wondering what do you hear from apparel brands about the situation and Xinjiang, are there are there concerns?

LEONIE BARRIE: There are massive concerns. And as Adrian explained, we're talking about the largest cotton growing region in the country. That is the world's second largest supplier of cotton. China is also the leading apparel supplier and it's also the leading supplier of textiles to companies around the world. So there are many, many different touch points. And companies, even if they're not sourcing directly from Xinjiang or even in China, there is a real risk that cotton that is harvested or processed using forced labour is actually making it into supply chains of cotton clothing in other countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh.

LL: Now, Adrian touched on this, but what is the appeal of Xinjiang Cotton?

ADRIAN ZENZ: Well, it's the region. It has the right growing conditions to generate the best yield. It has the right combination of daytime temperatures, the right sunlight hours. So really, it's the region in China where the best cotton can be produced. It's also the production hub for extra long staple cotton, which is essentially top quality cotton. It produces silky long fibres that are used in high end products such as shirting and also in the luxury sector. So we estimate that China produces around 22 percent of global product of global cotton. And around 80 percent of this is grown in Xinjiang. So the region is producing around 22 million bales of cotton every single year. This is a phenomenal amount.

LL: So you've said that simply boycotting Xinjiang cotton isn't as easy as it sounds. Why not?

LEONIE BARRIE: We already have a precedent where around 300 companies have pledged not to source cotton from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan because of the use of forced labour in their cotton harvests. But I believe it would be very hard to impose a similar boycott on Xinjiang Cotton simply because the forced labour problem extends way beyond the cotton fields. It extends to the yarn mills, it extends to the garment manufacturers. So it's not simply a case of saying we're not going to use Xinjiang Cotton because it is entering the supply chain at multiple points and it may be mixed with cotton from other regions or other countries. And it's very, very difficult for companies to determine at what point the cotton is getting into their supply chains.

LL: Is there a way to determine now if there are cotton brands that would absolutely have zero chance of using any cotton from that region?

LEONIE BARRIE: I don't believe it's possible. Companies are saying that they don't use factories based in Xinjiang, that they don't use yarn that is linked to spinning mills in the region. But the inputs may be touched by forced labour at some point. Clothing supply chains are very long. They're very complex and they're very opaque. In many cases, they cover multiple countries. The multiple steps may take place in different countries and at each point cotton can be mixed from several different sources. So I don't believe that companies can actually claim they are 100 percent free from Xinjiang Cotton.

LL: Well, that raises the question then. Why are the supply chains still opaque?

LEONIE BARRIE: It's proving extremely difficult to map the textile supply chain all the way from raw materials to finished products, and it's largely still done as the paper trail. Lots of technologies and processes are being piloted. For example, it was just two months ago that we managed to trace organic cotton from the farm to the consumer. But technology, for example, radio frequency identification, block chain forensic science, DNA tagging, they're all being trialled and they can obviously verify the provenance of a raw material. They can verify where it's from. They can verify that you are getting organic cotton into your supply chain, if that's what you want. But it's very, very difficult to understand the conditions under which those products were produced, which is why it's so, so very difficult to detect whether forced labour has been used.

LL: Something puzzles me, though, something I talked about with Adrian, which is the better cotton initiative, which is it more or less certifying the products coming from the region. Why can't that do more to be able to assure people of where these products are coming from and what kind of people are working to produce them?

LEONIE BARRIE: Well, it's not just the Better Cotton Initiative. Brands and retailers will be carrying out audits. They'll be carrying out inspections. But you can only audit and inspect what you know about in your supply chain. I think this is another layer of opacity because, for example, there might be subcontracting going on, illegal subcontracting. How do you monitor and inspect a factory when you don't even know that it's supplying into your supply chain? I think the more attention on this issue has to be a good thing. I don't necessarily believe that the better cotton initiative should step out of the region, but I think they actually have to recognise that there are limitations to what they can do.

LL: Now, U.S. Customs has banned imports from a clothing manufacturer called Hetian Taida. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. Apparel that has factories in Jin Jiang. How significant is that ban? In addressing this issue of forced labour?

LL: The band sets a precedent and it's likely that we're going to see more import bands and it's actually illegal to import products made with forced labour into the United States. So there's a very real possibility that we'll see criminal charges in the not too distant future. There may be charges brought against retail companies and executives over the issue. And I think this precedent that the US has set means that there is more pressure on all brands and retailers to show the steps that they're taking to prevent forced labour in their supply chains.

LL: So if people are listening to this, want to make sure that they aren't buying items that are made with forced labour, what do you recommend?

LEONIE BARRIE: I think consumers in general should be asking retailers and brands more questions about the provenance of the clothes that they're wearing. We rely on retailers to be vigilant on our behalf, but they must also be held accountable for the conditions in which their clothes are made. Did they list their supplier factories? It's obviously easier to identify unauthorized subcontracting if you can compare a list of supplier factories that is provided by the retailers. Companies need to be prepared to be asked these kinds of questions and they need to show what they are doing to tackle the problem. They also need to show what they are doing if they are finding violations in their supply chains, what about we?

LL: What about organic cotton? Would that be a solution?

LEONIE BARRIE: Organic cotton makes up possibly less than one percent of global cotton production. So it's not a viable solution in in the near term at all. It is possible to verify that you are feeding organic cotton into your clothing supply chain. But going back to the point I made earlier, it's almost impossible to verify the conditions under which that cotton is being grown.

LL: All right, Leonie Barrie, thank you very much. Leonie Barrie is an apparel analyst with Global Data. She was in our studio in London, England.

[Music]

LL: Coming up in our next half hour, a culinary trip around the world. It'll taste good, but the extinction level threats facing parts of our food supply paint a less than pretty picture. Stick around for that. I'm Laura Lynch. This is The Current.

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'Food is a keystone': How to save our favourite foods from extinction

Guest: Lenore Newman

LL: I'm Laura Lynch, and you're listening to The Current Lenore Newman is a culinary geographer, and if you love food and travel, she has your dream job. In her latest book, she takes us on a trip around the world. But the story she tells is delicious and troubling. Although food is cheaper, more plentiful and more varied than ever before, at the same time, the spectre of extinction is threatening to radically change the menu. Lenore Newman is a Canada research chair in food security and the environment at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. She's the author of Lost Feast Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food. I spoke with her from Vancouver in October. Here's our conversation.

LL: I want to start with the story of a creature named Martha who died in 1914. Who is Martha?

LENORE NEWMAN: Yes. Well Martha in some ways is the ultimate last thing in that she was the last living passenger pigeon and she died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo, but her species had already been gone for years and she was also the first animal to die where we knew for a fact that was it for the passenger pigeon.

LL: And why is that important?

LENORE NEWMAN: The thing about Martha that resonates so much is the passenger pigeon was the world's most plentiful bird. We think at least there were billions of them. When they flew across the sky it infamously grew quite dark and when they roosted they would cover you know tens or hundreds of acres with their nests and their eggs and we eliminated them fairly quickly. Once we had railways for fast travel to where they were roosting and telegraphs to tell hunters where they were and market places to quickly sell off the dead birds. And it is the most striking extinction in some ways because it happened so quickly from plentiful to zero.

LL: Well let's just pack it up a little. The passenger pigeons were food.

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh they were most definitely and the peoples of North America ate them before we got here, before settler culture got here. They were very important to the Iroquois Confederacy, in particular around the Great Lakes. And yet the hunting at that point wasn't at the level to really eliminate the bird because they only came in certain years, much like a salmon run. But once settlement had rolled out across the continent, we quickly started to eliminate them, mostly for food. And they were a cheap food, they were plentiful food. They kept a lot of people from starving just because there were so many of them. And even when the species started getting into trouble you could buy them for pennies apiece out the market.

LL: What kinds of dishes were made with the passenger pigeon?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well one of the more interesting ones is that torch here which course is a Canadian classic dish that actually was once made with passenger pigeon.

LL: It was?

LENORE NEWMAN: Yes. The word tourtiere is actually derives from the French word for pigeon. And so your original tourtiere would be full of passenger pigeons and sometimes they would leave the feet sticking up through the crust, so you knew what was in there. And so a lot of pies. We roasted them a lot. That was very common dish. You'd get kind of a chafing dish full of little pigeons, but they're much larger than the pigeons you see in the city now. They weren't chicken sized by any means, but they're more like a duck.

LL: So what lessons does the passenger pigeon have to teach us about culinary extinction?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well we can draw a lot. Our technologies just totally overwhelm the ability of the natural world to maintain species numbers. And because they were a flocking species what it really tells us today is that we need to be very careful with our fisheries and we may want to consider not fishing in the wild at all because fish are very similar to passenger pigeons in behaviour they flock.

LL: Why should we even worry about culinary extinction specifically?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well there's a couple of reasons. The main one is there is a cultural region certainly in that our foods are like a language they tell us who we are. They are we share our culture. And when we lose of food for example when the cod in Newfoundland decreased to the point where they couldn't be fished commercially it knocks a cultural leg out from under the culture. And one of the other things is it's just a symptom of ecosystem collapse. And really if we can protect the foods we truly care about, what hope do other wild species have?

LL: Yeah I know we hold these things dear because I think about in France they have the word terroir which is how the earth gives flavour to food and it's very cultural and tied to French wines and foods.

LENORE NEWMAN: Yes exactly and imagine if your terroir is literally being destroyed piece by piece and one day you wake up and you don't have any wine grapes left because their genetics decayed too far or the truffles are gone because they were over harvested in the wild. And we could see a world where our food system is much impoverished to where it is now and people will notice those losses.

LL: Now as you write, we humans have a long history of actually loving foods to death. When do we start becoming such a threat to other creatures?

LENORE NEWMAN: Yes well our track record goes way back certainly right to the time of the megafauna and the time when we were nomadic. And if we look at the mammoth for example, I mean a very charismatic animal that you know certainly I know a lot of kids I hang out with the love the mammoths and stories of those kind of animals. We ate them to death. We followed them and killed them. And the mammoths really didn't have much of a chance against us once we invented weaponry because they breed very slowly. They take two years to gestate young and we followed them and hunted them until they were gone and if we look at the world, anywhere humans moved, the mega fauna, those big animals disappeared very quickly. And the fact that we still have two of the six species of bison left is just pure fluke. Only a few hundred animals of the millions that once roamed the plains actually survived and every bison we have now is descended from that tiny little survival pool. But we don't go out into the Canadian wild and see mammoths, see sabre toothed tigers or giant armadillos or all the other creatures that we barbecued basically.

LL: But hat is it about human beings that makes it so dangerous to this species? Is it a hunting alone or is there something else that adds into it?

LENORE NEWMAN: We're very efficient. I think efficiency in a way is our great strength but also one of our weaknesses in that we're very good at killing and harvesting and harnessing resources. We're very bad long term thinkers. It's not in our nature to ask questions of if we keep doing this for a thousand years or you know seven generations or even 20 years. Where will we be. Those questions we really struggle with where as you know we're very good at getting dinner and I think there is an evolutionary effects there. If someone throws a baseball at you you've probably got a good chance of catching it. We're very good at that kind of thing. If climate change starts to impact your ecosystem, we're not so good at that.

LL: Now there are dire warnings in this book Lenore, but it's also clear that you love food. Why are you so passionate about food and eating?

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh I do and I do blame my family for that one. I grew up in a British Columbia fishing family. My dad and his three brothers and his father all had boats. And so I was in the food system right from the beginning and food was very much part of how we celebrated. You know as a family and we would go out and we would harvest clams and crabs and all the other wonderful things that you could literally just pick up free for the taking. And so I started early and as I trained as a physicist and Environmental Studies person I began to realize food is a keystone if we can get food right. If the food system can be sustainable and feed everyone we probably will survive as a species, but if food goes, if the food system falls apart, civilization basically is not far behind.

LL: How did growing up in a fishing family then shape the way that you thought about food later on and you think about food today?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well it definitely made me very aware of the natural world and we were already in, in the 80s and 90s beginning to have problems with stocks on the West Coast and the fish were getting smaller and less plentiful and you know they would be fished out of areas where they had traditionally been common. And so it sort of planted a bit of worry I suppose and it's definitely spending so much time in the natural world is why I became so interested in preserving it.

LL: I grew up in Vancouver as well and my father used to go out and capture sockeye salmon for dinner and it's not quite as easy as it used to be.

LENORE NEWMAN: No it isn't. And you know I kind of miss those.

LL: You've travelled all over the world as well and you've eaten some rare and special foods and I'm wondering what the most delicious thing is that you've been able to try?

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh now that is a very hard question. But I go to Iceland to a place where food was very scarce for a long time and where they're very dependent on ocean systems and the land and the special breed of cattle. And in the travel for this book I had this butter made out of Icelandic cattle milk and it was just very good. It had this sort of herbaceous overtone and you know with butter you would, they sent me a big blob of butter and I thought well that's ridiculous, I'm not going to eat all this butter. And then like a half hour later the butter was gone. I'm like oh I'm going to regret that later. And you know I look at that and what made that so special and what makes most of the things special is they're about a place and when you travel the world you know sometimes things start to feel a bit the same, especially now the hotels are sort of all the same etc. But the food, the food is different everywhere and you meet people so passionate about it.

LL: So when you think about the foods that we've lost over the years and over the centuries, what would you have been most curious to taste?

LENORE NEWMAN: I would have been very interested to try the Roman Silphium, the most famous herb of Roman cuisine which came from what's now northern Libya and went extinct around the year zero. People raved about it and it was in know almost all of the dishes where we still have recipes leftover from Roman times. And so clearly it was very good, although the Romans also used a lot of fermented fish sauce and their tastes may have not been like ours, but I would love to at least try it.

LL: And I also see that you love pears.

LENORE NEWMAN: I do. And there is such an amazing fruit and at one time there were thousands of pear varieties and probably 90 percent of those are extinct now.

LL: And is there one that you again that would have just lit your fire? That you would have loved to try?

LENORE NEWMAN: I'm very curious about this one called the onsalt, which was described as being so creamy you could spread it like jam. You could just cut it open and spread it on toast. And we know very little about what happened to it. It was apparently it wasn't the easiest orchard pear and so breeds like the Bartlett out competed it once we stopped having to eat seasonally locally once we could ship fruit around the world it made more sense to grow the pear that travelled the best. And so these on salts are kind of lost to history and I think that's a shame. I did get a chance while researching to try second pears which are still common in the Midwest although not so much out here and they're very small. They're like little mini pears and they're very sweet. And I think really exploring those varieties reminds me how much richness there could be if we moved away from eating just a few varieties all year round.

LL: How do you reconcile your love of food with the destruction that human appetites have caused?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well there's a little bit of depression some times. And I will say I'm vegetarian these days, partly because of this book and my partner is vegan and has a lot of good arguments and when I look at say the Bluefin tuna, I remember very clearly first trying raw bluefin tuna in it being a really critical experience and sending me down this road. I wouldn't eat one now. They're too rare and I think we all have to curb our appetite a little bit and it's not always easy. And I love a good steak as much as the next person, but when I see the damage that cattle are doing to the world, the cattle on Earth now graze an area bigger than the continental U.S. So we need to cut back.

LL: Which foods then are at the greatest risk of extinction today?

LENORE NEWMAN: Right now anything harvested from the wild is at immediate risk. Basically all fish species. Some of the rarer foods like the French and Italian truffles from the wild are at risk, vanilla because it involves a lot of effort. We often hear about bananas, but the real truth is bananas aren't going to go extinct. There's a lot of wild banana stock left to breed from, but they could get very expensive. Bananas are cheap compared to say a star fruit or a mango because we have a really good cloned variety that is grown right around the world. It's called the Cavendish and it's really struggling because all the bananas are the same. And so if we lost that variety bananas might become as rare as star fruit.

LL: So how much diversity have we lost in the plant world?

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh that's a number we don't quite know. And if we're a little frightened that it's getting much larger very fast if we look at say the clearing of the Amazon to provide area to grow cattle for example. We're losing plants we don't even know in great quantity. What we do know is we've lost about 90 percent 80 to 90 percent of our cultivars, which are the subspecies of food crops and that's a very big loss.

LL: Can you give me an example of what you mean by a cultivar or a subspecies?

LENORE NEWMAN: OK. So imagine I walk into the grocery store and there's probably Granny Smith apples, Red Delicious, maybe a Macintosh as well. Those are all cultivars of the apples species. And I may have had thousands of varieties of apples to pick from at one time and now I've lost 80 to 90 percent of them and that's right across the board. Cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage. We often think of cabbage as it kind of comes in three varieties, Napa, green and purple and there used to be hundreds of them. And people would pick the one they liked best and we still have a bit of that in tomatoes. If you grow tomatoes, a lot of people do heirloom tomatoes. They pick the one they like best, but we've lost a lot of those species and they're gone.

LL: But help me understand this when it comes to plant species because if we can replenish our supplies of the very narrow kinds of lettuces or radishes or apples by growing more, what do we risk by growing such a small variety of them?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well and that's definitely the good news is we can go back to a more diverse genetic base especially with plants what we risk is if we're only growing one variety of bananas for example if they fall out of the food system we lose all the cultural associations we lose all the industry with those food the food just kind of falls off the map. And even if we then manage to breed something that's suitable it may not to return to the same the same quantity. People like variety is sort of a take home message from this book and so we need to protect that variety.

LL: You talked a little bit earlier about changes that you think need to be made. What other things should we do to make our food system more sustainable?

LENORE NEWMAN: Well there's definitely a few things we can do as individuals. Anyone with a bit of a yard or a balcony garden should plant some bee friendly plants and don't use chemicals that are going to kill bees because we need bees for about a third of our plant crops and they're under constant stress. And this year for example in America 40 percent of the hives died from colony collapse and related disorders. And we need to keep those bees up and flying and so everyone should consider ripping out a bit of their lawn if they have one and planting some bee friendly plants. I do feel that the future is plant based. Going vegan is one of the best things you can do for the climate and for the environment for the biodiversity of the earth. But you don't have to do it. You can go a little bit. You can spend a few days a week eating plant-based foods and there's a lot evidence that it's healthier for us anyway.

LL: You also write about advances in what they call cellular agriculture, which is lab grown meat, lab grown dairy. How close are we getting to all of that becoming a reality? I mean I know we have beyond meat now.

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh it is very exciting and I think one of the things that I sort of came to slowly was realizing that both looking to the past in terms of local eating and seasonal eating is important, but we also have to look to the future and the next generation of genetic Technologies can really help us feed the world while using a lot less land. And the cellular meat is a little ways off, the burger and if that is still you know a few years off, but right now a company called Perfect Day is selling ice cream that is made with dairy proteins that were not made from cows. And they actually have a truck driving around L.A. selling it right now. And what they do is exactly what we do when we brew beer. We take yeast except we engineer the yeast to produce dairy proteins instead of alcohol and then we just brew the bases of milk and we add in a bit of water add in a bit of fat. Suddenly we have dairy substitute that. Is completely equivalent to milk. You can't tell them apart if you taste them. Damn you tasted them. Yes. And it's a little freaky. It's a bit like with the impossible burger. The first time I ate one I was like are you sure this isn't a beef burger? Are you sure? And it's a bit like that. I had at one point some yogurt that had been made with these proteins. I couldn't tell it apart.

LL: And that's not being mass produced yet?

LENORE NEWMAN: Not yet, but they're very close. The dairy will come first because it's easier. There's still some pretty big technical problems to address in the cellular meat, but the plant-based substitutes such as Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat are getting better every day. And one of the interesting things we see a bit of pushback people saying well it's not as healthy or maybe it's too salty, well it's a technology. So they can keep evolving it and every time Beyond Burger issues a new Beyond Burger, it will be better. Whereas cows just keep being cows.

LL: Alright. Well when you think about the future that awaits us, if we don't make these kinds of changes, I'm wondering what scares you? What keeps you up at night?

LENORE NEWMAN: Oh I don't even like to think about that too much because it's I think right now anyone who does work around climate change, we're all a little scared. We're on track for a four or five degree increase in temperature, which would be catastrophic. The World Food System would probably collapse and we would have mass migration. We could have mass starvation. That's the worst case terrible scenario, but I will admit I remain pretty hopeful. We are getting better at better at producing more food on a smaller area. We could move to a future where we're putting a lot of marginal land back into wilderness, so we could protect some of this biodiversity.

LL: So that's the beginning of the next thing I wanted to ask you about because it would be nice to end on a point of optimism here. If we do make these kinds of changes, tell me what kind of future you foresee.

LENORE NEWMAN: If we eat more plant based foods, we shift our farming techniques to be intensive, more indoor farming, that kind of thing, I think we could very quickly hit the point we called peak farm land, where we're using as much farmland as we ever will and we can start putting some of the farmland that isn't that greater is a bit degraded, we can put it back into wilderness. In a way I'd like to call it kind of the return to the garden where much of the earth is green and wild and we can go out in it and look at all the wonderful species wandering around and we can eat better and more healthily and more diversely than ever before and I'm a bit of a dreamer. I do think that future is still possible, even though there's days I listen to the news and have to you know go back to bed and pull the covers over my head.

LL: I like the optimistic part of that. So I think we'll leave it there. Lenore Newman, thank you so much.

LENORE NEWMAN: Great. Thank you.

LL: Lenore Newman is a culinary geographer and a Canada Research Chair in Food Security and the Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. Her most recent book is, Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food. I spoke with her from Vancouver in October. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for q. Sheryl Crow's star-studded new album "Threads" includes collaborations with everyone from Emmylou Harris to Willie Nelson. She talks to Tom Power about her musical influences, her politics and her future. And check out CBC Listen, the new, free app that lets you discover the very best in Canadian audio, from CBC Radio, CBC Podcasts, and CBC Music. Lenore Newman talked about the bison and how they barely escaped being killed off because of our voracious appetites. In tribute to their resurgence, we're going to close the show with the American indie band the Granddaddy and their song Bison on the Plains. I'm Laura Lynch, and this is The Current. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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[Song: Bison on the Plains by Granddaddy]

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