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Done: Trafficking route covered

BRUSSELS – 14 / 5 / 2010 – Poor people in the Ukraine, slave workers picking asparagus in the Czech Republic, companies in the Netherlands. Three parts of the same trafficking business for cheap labour.  With the most recent publication in the Netherlands the route has been covered from start to end.  

By Brigitte Alfter

Through the years we have seen numerous media stories about trafficking from Eastern Europe: Women, workers, cigarettes, drugs – traded into the EU. Occasionally journalists have been able to address the client side of the stories: If there was no demand, the trafficking wouldn’t occur.

However a story, where journalists manage to document an entire route is rare. In the case of the asparagus-workers journalists managed to document the entire route from the Ukraine in the east to the Netherlands in the west (pdf, 915 KB).

The story goes like this: Poor Ukrainian and Moldovan workers are lured into moving to the Czech Republic. Here they live under slave-like condition in work camps picking asparagus for a Czech company. The company is owned by a Dutch vegetable trading company, who ultimately can be assumed to profit from the low cost labour.

The first part of the story was documented by an international team coordinated by Adrian Mogos from Romanian daily Journalul.ro. Along with colleagues from the Ukraine and Moldova he documented the eastern part of the story and made first contacts in the Netherlands.

The story was published widely in Romania, the Ukraine, Moldova, the Czech Republic and various other countries.

Recently it has been picked up by Dutch colleagues both at local and national level. Journalist Martijn Roessingh from daily newspaper Trouw addresses the problem and confronts the owner of the Czech company about the allegations – building upon the work of the Eastern European colleagues and thus finalising the route.

The funding for the research is diverse. The Romanian team are staff members of their daily newspaper, yet they did not have money to travel to the Czech Republic or the Netherlands, so they were granted funding from Journalismfund.eu. The Ukrainian and Moldovan colleagues co-funded their research with a grant from the Scoop project. The Dutch colleague, finally, fulfilled the research as part of his work as a staff writer at a Dutch daily.