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The Exploitation and Opacity report on Nestlé’s and Starbucks’s Mexican coffee supply chains reveals systemic human rights abuses, poverty wages, deforestation, and government collusion that sustain corporate dominance.
It documents how multinationals rely on traders like ECOM, NKG, and LDC to dictate prices and conditions, leaving small producers in Chiapas and Veracruz trapped in poverty. Workers earn on average just USD $106 per month compared with CEOs earning millions, with widespread informality, child labour, and repression of protests.
Both companies’ certification schemes (Starbucks’s C.A.F.E. Practices and Nestlé’s 4C) are shown to be opaque, biased, and complicit in greenwashing, excluding the poorest farmers while legitimising exploitative practices. Corporate capture of Mexican state programmes and subsidies further entrenches robusta monocultures, driving deforestation and biodiversity loss.
The report highlights police violence linked to coffee trader interests, manipulation of cooperatives, and predatory middlemen (“coyotes”) that perpetuate exploitation. It also shows how certifications and “sustainability” programmes mask violations of EU due diligence laws, the EUDR, and human rights frameworks.
Ultimately, it calls for full supply chain transparency, fair prices, accountability for deforestation, and protection of Indigenous and rural communities, urging governments and civil society to hold Nestlé and Starbucks to account and demand a just, sustainable coffee sector.
