Tens of thousands of tons of tomato paste from the Chinese region of Xinjiang land in Italy every month. They enter some of the most important canning companies in drums of several kilos and
come out in the form of tubes or jars ready to be consumed all over the world.
These products, at least in part, are linked to a system of capillary repression that the Beijing government applies against the ethnic minority of the Uighurs. But, once “cleaned” from the
Italian factories, the link with Xinjiang disappears. It is practically impossible for the consumer to know about it.
An investigation by IrpiMedia, in collaboration with CBC Canada, has reconstructed in detail the supply chain of Chinese tomato paste: from the producers colluding with ethnic exploitation in Xinjiang to the giants of the Italian canning industry, which transform the raw material.
Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist and one of the world’s leading scholars of the Uyghur question, tells IrpiMedia that Italian canning companies should absolutely stop buying tomato paste from Xinjiang. “The enormous scale of the system of repression operated by the Chinese government in Xinjiang makes the risk of the presence of coercion in the supply chain of industries such as the tomato industry endemic,” Zenz argues. “With their behavior, the companies are making themselves accomplices in Beijing’s campaign of repression against the Uyghurs.”
