A new documentary from the BBC World Service, Perfume’s Dark Secret, has uncovered rampant child labour abuses in Egyptian jasmine farms that supply global perfume manufacturers for leading brands and groups, including Estée Lauder and L’Oréal. The documentary explores how ineffective auditing systems are failing child labour victims, of which there are an estimated 160 million globally. Experts say incoming due diligence laws could have an impact.
The BBC found children as young as five picking jasmine from 3am in four different locations in Al-Gharbia Governorate, 120km from Cairo, including Shubra Beloula El-Sakhaweya, a small village that is responsible for producing 75 per cent of Egypt’s jasmine. The children featured in Perfume’s Dark Secret suffer from injuries and allergies caused by pollen, impacting their academic performance and causing potentially lasting health impacts. The main culprits, according to the investigation team, are beauty industry conglomerates at the top of the value chain, which are being accused of setting the low prices leading to child labour abuses in their supply chains. Parents feel forced to include their children in harvesting to compensate for the low price of jasmine, in addition to rampant inflation and the weak Egyptian pound.
Jasmine farming has been a vital source of income for Shubra Beloula since the 1960s when it was first introduced as a crop. According to a BBC story from February 2022, it’s common for entire families to pick jasmine flowers during the six-month harvesting season from June to November. “Everyone in this village from the eldest to the youngest picks jasmine flowers,” picker Mohamed Faraj told the BBC at the time. “Kids as young as seven years old wake up by dawn, pick jasmine for a few hours then head to school. I used to do so since I was nine years old.”
While children working with their families to harvest the flower isn’t considered forced labour by the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) definition, it contributes to the cycle of poverty that affects millions of individuals across the Global South, and is regarded as one of the worst forms of child labour.
The Egyptian jasmine trade is worth $6.5 million and employs an estimated 30,000 people. But with one kilogram of jasmine flowers selling for only EGP 45 (£1.46) on the commodity market, pickers are often living below the poverty line on less than £1 a day. (The price is set at the beginning of the season by the factory owners. It fluctuates depending on demand and the perfume market, but remains consistently low.) Egypt is facing an economic crisis that has seen record-high inflation as well as the falling value of the Egyptian pound, which has dropped 50 per cent against the US dollar since January 2022. Pickers tell the BBC that if the price of jasmine was kept in line with inflation, it would be worth EGP 140 (£3.50 at the time of filming) per kilogram.
“In the village, people have been complaining about the low prices for years, and factories keep telling them that this is the best price we can give you,” says BBC investigative journalist Ahmed Elshamy, who produced the documentary.
Meanwhile, consumer prices for perfume have spiked since 2020 and the global sector is expected to be worth almost $70 billion by 2030, according to market research firm Fortune Business Insights. Suppliers, however, are not benefiting from any of that growth; the prices they receive for the ingredients they supply have remained stagnant, according to the BBC. In fact, the liquid in a perfume bottle that may retail for $250 costs less than $1.50 to produce.
“Consumers witnessed an increase in perfume prices after [the pandemic], so this increase has to be reflected on the natural oil prices and the pickers’ lives,” says Elshamy. There’s little evidence of this in Egypt. “The budgets to make perfume are really tight, so we understand that when the fragrance houses are sourcing raw materials, they aim to keep costs of goods as low as possible,” says Perfume’s Dark Secret director Natasha Cox.
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