Stories without a voice / The slaves of the coconut

How disappointed would it be for a person who does not drink cow’s milk, refuses to consume a food that comes from the exploitation of animals, and while he has chosen to buy coconut “milk”, learns that his drink is the result of hard work by slave monkeys? Because it is slavery when we are dealing with thousands of chained macaques in exotic Thailand, forced to climb trees to collect coconuts, meeting the ever-increasing demand for this particular juice, which is marketed as coconut milk, at minimal cost. These are free workers who, under the watchful eye and stick of the foreman, go up and down the trees for many hours every day to cut and take down the coconuts. As for inefficient slaves and those who do not obey orders, whipping, teething so that they do not become dangerous to the overseers, and sometimes hanging are prescribed.

There are dozens of “schools” in Thailand that train macaques from a young age and then sell them to the country’s farms to spend the rest of their lives collecting coconuts, with which most of the demand in the US and EU is met. The vast majority are male animals who have been kidnapped at a very young age from their families and cut off from their natural environment and natural life to end up as slaves, wearing a metal collar around their neck and a chain to keep them company in the rest of their hard and sometimes martyred lives. They are the so-called “coconut slaves”. Animals condemned to a lifetime of forced labor and the labor of businessmen who brutally exploit them, instead of paying workers and hoists to collect the coconuts from the tops of the towering trees. And all this in a country that produces about 1.3 million tons of coconut every year, with a significant percentage of this amount being the result of the labor of slave monkeys. According to experts’ estimates, slave monkeys can harvest up to 1,000 coconuts a day, while the average worker can harvest no more than 80 coconuts. Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand, a non-profit organization that runs a captive wildlife center, estimates that Thai farmers use 4,000-5,000 monkeys as slaves to harvest the coconut.

Struggle for information and liberation

When at the end of the last decade animal welfare organizations and animal rights activists documented the exploitation and poor living conditions of “coconut slaves” in Thailand, the images they captured and the information they conveyed to both training schools and farms were at least shocking, especially to the consumer public who had rejected animal milk as a product of animal exploitation and abuse. 2019 was the year that launched a global awareness and protest campaign for consumers not to buy coconut products from Thai farms that use slave monkeys, while demanding that the animals be freed from their exploiters and returned to natural environment and to their families. The company initially targeted in Thailand was Chaokoh, which essentially maintained and still maintains most of the ring of abduction, brutal training and abject exploitation of monkeys. A company that, despite coming under fire from international animal welfare groups, has had a strong ally in the country’s government, with many officials responding to criticism by arguing that collecting coconuts is natural for the macaques and that the practice is a cultural tradition in the country. At the same time, an inadequate and misleading system of state control allows the existence of “coconut slaves” to continue in Thailand, who, as long as they are not imprisoned in cages or immobilized in squalid sheds, climb up and down the trees as long as their strength allows and before they are killed as counterproductive.

Depression and aggression

The only way out of the miserable daily life of the farm is their participation – with compensation for their owners – in shows where they entertain tourists and locals, riding bicycles or throwing basketballs in baskets, to then return to the farms and their cages until the next morning when the foreman takes them to the plantation for work. According to experts, confinement and violent coercion into hard and painful work are psychologically painful conditions for animals with developed intelligence and special sensitivities such as macaques, with the result that many “coconut slaves” show strong problems of extreme behaviors or in the form of depression either in the form of aggression.

Info: In March 2023 German meal company HelloFresh announced that it would stop using coconut milk from Thailand and seek new suppliers from farms and countries that do not use animal labour. This decision was made in the wake of protests over the forced labor of monkeys. It was preceded by more than 25,000 retailers in the US and Europe who in recent years have stopped selling Thai coconut products following the campaign against the use of slave monkeys to harvest the product.