How supply chain monitoring is helping us eliminate child labour

Child labour in agriculture is not a distant, abstract problem. It sits quietly inside commodity supply chains that stretch from smallholder farms to retail shelves in cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and it can take years of careful fieldwork to detect and stop. At Fresh Del Monte Produce we believe the only credible response is continuous, transparent monitoring, paired with the kind of long-term community support that removes the root causes in the first place.

Australia has become an influential market in shaping how multinational food companies behave. The federal Modern Slavery Act 2018 requires large businesses operating here to publish annual statements describing the risks of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains, and to report on the actions taken to address those risks. Consumers reading the back of a banana bunch in Coles or the label on a tin of pineapple in Woolworths increasingly expect the brands behind them to demonstrate, step by step, that no child has been involved in producing what they are buying.

That expectation shapes our approach. We treat child labour as a serious human rights issue with serious governance consequences, and we publish a detailed account of how our monitoring programme is designed and delivered on freshdelmontecsr.com. The progress described there is not a marketing line. It is the result of thousands of farm visits, hundreds of interviews with families, and patient partnerships with schools, NGOs and local authorities across the regions where our fresh products are grown.

Why rigorous monitoring matters across every link in the chain

Monitoring matters because child labour rarely matches the stereotype. In our experience it tends to hide in plain sight, in the form of children helping parents after school, in seasonal peaks when older relatives bring their families to work alongside them, or in subcontracted harvesting crews that never appear on a formal payroll. A single annual audit cannot catch those situations, which is why our monitoring model relies on a layered approach that combines scheduled third-party assessments with frequent unannounced visits by trained local teams.

Each visit follows a structured protocol. Field monitors speak privately with workers, observe school attendance in nearby communities, review hiring records and check that no minor is performing tasks that are clearly age-inappropriate. Where a concern is raised, the case is logged in a centralised system and followed up through a remediation pathway rather than a punitive one, because the priority is to get the child into education and to support the family so the situation does not recur.

The Australian context also influences how we communicate this work back to the public. Reports released under the Modern Slavery Act are reviewed by investors, journalists and civil society groups who know the difference between a glossy PDF and a serious risk register. The same standards that satisfy a NSW Treasury reviewer, a Queensland community advocate or a WA mango grower are the ones we apply to our monitoring everywhere.

A risk-based framework built on continuous audits

Our supply chain risk framework divides origins into tiers based on a combination of independent indices, government data and historical incident patterns. Tier one covers origins where residual risk is considered low and routine social audits are sufficient. Tier two covers origins with elevated risk, where audits are supplemented by unannounced spot checks and ongoing dialogue with worker representatives. Tier three covers origins with the highest risk, where we pair continuous on-farm presence with deep community partnerships.

Tiering is not static. We reassess every origin at least annually, and immediately after any credible allegation, public report or change in local regulation. When a sourcing region moves up the risk scale, we expand monitoring accordingly, and when sustained improvement allows a region to move down, we record the reasoning transparently. This dynamic calibration makes the programme harder to game, because suppliers cannot rely on a single certification to carry them through.

Independent verification sits at the heart of the framework. A meaningful share of our third-party audits is commissioned by specialist compliance partners and other independent bodies rather than by Fresh Del Monte directly, which keeps the process honest. We are also combining desktop monitoring with satellite imagery, traceability data from packhouses, and cross-referencing against public child labour databases run by international organisations and academic research groups.

Working hand in hand with growers, families and schools

Monitoring on its own, however well executed, would only ever capture the symptoms of a deeper problem. We invest heavily in the side of the work that is harder to see: providing school fee assistance, scholarships, transport to class, and even mobile learning hubs in remote areas where formal schools are scarce. The tree seedling programme we run alongside these communities is another quiet form of investment, because income from sustainable planting can shift the economics of a smallholder household away from relying on children's labour.

Community-facing work also reaches well beyond the farm in Australia. We collaborate with grower groups in the Sunraysia and Bundaberg regions on pilot projects that link Australian best practice in worker welfare to suppliers overseas. Each trial generates findings that can be adapted to the tropical origins where the bulk of our production sits, so even modest Australian investments tend to compound.

Communication with affected families is grounded in local languages and local customs. A trained community liaison walks through the implications of a remediation plan with parents and with the child themselves, explains their rights, and makes sure everyone understands the consequences of returning to school rather than to the field. Monitoring fails the moment it ignores a family's lived reality.

Verification, transparency and public reporting

We are candid about the limits of monitoring. Some farms in our extended supply chain sit several layers away from any direct contractual relationship, and discovering child labour on those farms requires cooperation with traders, intermediaries and competitors. Weaker links in those chains are exactly where noncompliant suppliers try to operate, which is why we publish a list of suppliers suspended or terminated for failing our child labour standards, alongside the reasons for each decision.

Public reporting on this issue is not optional. The data we release each year includes the number of verified incidents, the age and gender of the children involved, the type of work they were performing, the sector and region of the case, and the remediation actions taken. Independent assurance providers review that data, and we publish their findings alongside our own commentary. This level of visibility is what gives consumer-facing retailers in Adelaide, Perth and Hobart the confidence to stock our products under tight ethical sourcing policies.

Practical pathways for stronger monitoring on the ground

• Pair every audit with at least one unannounced visit within the same season, because announced checks alone tend to produce clean reports that do not reflect daily reality.
• Treat school attendance data near plantations as a leading indicator and act on sudden drops before they become embedded patterns.
• Build remediation plans around the child and the family, including school re-entry support and a realistic income alternative, before any supplier is penalised.
• Commission a meaningful share of independent monitoring from bodies that do not rely on Fresh Del Monte for fee income, so verification remains genuinely external.
• Publish what monitoring finds, including incidents, suspensions and remediation steps, rather than only reporting progress, so stakeholders can judge the system for themselves.

The next step we are taking is to roll out an independent worker voice survey across all Tier 2 and Tier 3 origins during 2026, with results aggregated, verified by a third party and released publicly, so the people closest to the work have a direct line into how our monitoring is judged.