As a fairly young, and frankly neophyte, practitioner in the field of social development it has been a consistent challenge to understand the trends the world has been taking over the last few years. Supply chain sustainability has been my bread and butter for the last three years. The systems we build to ensure that global commerce causes less harm than it otherwise might: that is my work. In this time I have witnessed seismic changes in the way these systems are being organised. As a young professional, these alterations have seemed rude and jarring in their suddenness.
However as a student of politics, history and anthropology, these movements seem common sense and commonplace. Any halfway generous reading of global politics over the last 500 years tells us the same story, the story of extraction, the story of colonialism, the story of supremacy over the natural order, the story of man desperately trying to engineer the social, the natural and the physical. In the pages of this story we find a common plotline emerge; that of the imposition of a particular and sometimes sinister project by the global north to establish a trend of defining the world around them in terms of pure negation.
In Orientalism, Edward Said showed us how European and American scholarship constructed the East not as it was, but as the West needed it to be, exotic, irrational, subordinate, and available. The "other" was not a neutral description. It was a political instrument. As the colonial program drew to a close the content of these definitions changed but their form, their essence, remained the same. In the late 60s and early 70s the world was broken down into other categories that served European and American identities. Developed and Developing, Less Developed and Highly Developed, the rich and the poor, the resource rich and the producers, those that had raw value and those that could refine it.
With the advent of HREDD legislation across the world, this project has taken another twist in its long and storied past. Articles of legislation emanating from Europe, the United States, Britain and Australia have begun to divide the world into new categories of risk. The CSDDD, not the first of its kind, but the most wide ranging piece of legislation, provides the foundation for the world to yet again be engineered into those that are defined as high risk for environmental and human rights impacts and those who are not.
There are no points available in determining which of these categories those of us in the global south fall into.
In Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and India, I have had the pleasure of speaking with business owners from a variety of sectors. From garment suppliers in Bangladesh to manufacturers of tea in Sri Lanka to operators of India's largest tanneries, the spate of due diligence legislation comes as a rude and jarring shock to many. One such owner in India remarked to me as I was introducing this legislation to him that he just couldn’t understand how they were expected to read, parse and enact legislation like the CSDDD. He went on to remark that these laws did not seem to serve any other purpose than to increase the burden on global south suppliers while ensuring that global north brands, like Pontius Pilate, washed their hands in absolution of human rights and environmental risk. At the time, I thought he was wrong. Enamoured as I was by the grandeur of the manner in which the Green New Deal had promised to break-down the status quo of global supply chains, I truly believed that, in time, legislation like the CSDDD would serve to bring human rights and environmental compliance further down into the furthest reaches of global supply chains.
I now realise that both of us were wrong. My fault was pure optimism and his pure cynicism. The truth in this debate, as with all things, lies in the middle. Is mandatory due diligence an interesting vehicle to bring human rights compliance further into the supply chain? Yes it is. Do these pieces of legislation place an unacceptable burden on the resources of global south suppliers? Most definitely.
It is this new burden on global south suppliers that is the hardest to swallow. For three decades the global south paid the price of admission. We are now being told the price has changed. For nearly thirty years, suppliers, farmers, cooperatives across Asia, Latin America and Africa have put their management capacity and their time into the architecture of voluntary certification that the global north built and sold as the price of market access. They are certified to Rainforest Alliance, to Fairtrade, to Bonsucro, to SA8000, to SMETA, to RSPO and to dozens of others. They paid audit fees to certification bodies headquartered in Amsterdam and London. They retrained workers, rebuilt grievance systems, and restructured their supply relationships. They did, in other words, exactly what they were asked to do.
None of it is enough. A Bonsucro-certified sugarcane mill in Brazil still needs CSDDD-compliant due diligence documentation. An SA8000-certified garment factory still needs to establish grievance mechanisms that satisfy the LkSG. Fairtrade certification, with its audits, its community premiums, its worker rights provisions, does not constitute legal compliance under the Norwegian Transparency Act. The voluntary certification system, which the global north spent three decades constructing and the global south spent three decades paying for, has been quietly declared insufficient by the same institutions that built it.
The goalposts have moved and the people who moved them are the same people who set them.
This is not a call to disengage. The legislation is here. It will multiply. The instinct to refuse it on principle is one I respect and one that will not change a single procurement decision in Stuttgart or Lyon. The relevant question is not whether to engage but how, and on whose terms.
The first condition of engaging on your own terms is understanding what you are actually being asked to do. Right now that understanding is almost entirely mediated by European law firms writing for European procurement teams, by NGO commentary written for European policymakers, by tracker databases built for compliance officers in Frankfurt. The supplier in Tamil Nadu, the cooperative in Tigray, the factory owner in Dhaka — they have access to none of this in a form built for them.
hredd.org is a passion project of mine. A monthly tracker of global HREDD legislation, written for the people most affected by it. Practical analysis from the very supply chains the laws are about. A small attempt to refute one premise of the original Saidian project: that the south is a place to be defined rather than a place that defines itself.