Credits: Indiaego
When we pick up a bag of cane sugar at the supermarket we usually look at a few things like the price, maybe the brand, and at most whether it is “organic” or not, choosing it over regular sugar because it is said to be less harmful. But no one thinks about (or more likely no one knows) what is behind the people who harvested that sugar cane and especially what has been asked of certain women in order to keep working in those places.
And this is what I discovered while reading about the female workers in Maharashtra, India. Extremely poor women who work in sugar cane plantations in conditions that are close to slavery: waking up at three in the morning, shifts of 10 to 12 hours under the sun, for less than 4 pounds a day… all of this for six consecutive months involving huge numbers of people, also coming from far away. Not only women, but unfortunately many girls are forced to start working as early as 10 or 12 years old and are married at that age, so they can follow their husbands into the fields.
Even this is already a tragedy and an injustice, but the worst part is still ahead. These women and girls are forced to work in any physical condition, whether it is pregnancy, a recent miscarriage or menstruation, not even a single day of rest is allowed, under penalty of having to pay a fine to the contractor. And this is where we reach the rotten core of this story, something hard even to imagine and that leaves you in disbelief: thousands of women are more or less forced into undergoing a hysterectomy, meaning the removal of the uterus, in order to remove obstacles to productivity.
According to some local investigations by The Guardian and Envoyé spécial, in the Beed district 36 percent of sugar cane workers no longer have a uterus. The national average in India is around 3 percent. In some villages the percentage even exceeds 50 percent. More than 13,000 women are estimated to have undergone this procedure in the last decade, many under 40 and some even under 25.
The shocking part is how these women are deceived into undergoing these operations. Many women report going to doctors for infections, menstrual pain or minor cysts and being told that the “best” solution was to completely remove the uterus. All of this because missing workdays means debt, fines and reduced wages. The physical and psychological consequences after these procedures are easy to imagine.
And honestly I find it disturbing how all of this is perceived as normal within certain economic systems, because we are not talking about an isolated case, but about a model in which the female body becomes something to be modified when it slows down profit.
We need to spread awareness and make it known that behind such a common product there are women forced to choose between their own bodies and survival, and if any of us want to try to make a difference and change something, the only solution is that when we are in front of supermarket shelves choosing this product, we choose something with Fairtrade certification, otherwise this cycle will never break and thousands of future women will continue to suffer.