Senator Rick Scott of Florida is pushing to crack down on imports of Chinese garlic, claiming it poses a “major threat” to security and safety because it may be grown in human sewage and harvested with slave and child labor.
Scott, a Republican, sent a series of letters to U.S. trade, labor, and agriculture agencies on Monday calling for Chinese garlic to be investigated and put on U.S. trade watchlists, saying that claims of sewer garlic, if verified, would pose a “significant ethical and legal issue” to the U.S. supply chain.
“Communist China has a clear and disturbing history of failing to meet basic standards of food safety and transparency, as well as a well-documented record of using slave labor in its supply chains, which raises red flags about the labor practices and safety of its agricultural products, particularly garlic,” Scott wrote in one letter to the Department of Agriculture.
The Senator is asking that Chinese garlic be put on the Bureau of International Labor Affairs’ List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor and be investigated under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington told The Independent the country “emphasizes food safety” and that Scott’s claims are “groundless accusations, which we firmly oppose.”
“There is no so-called ‘forced labor’ [or] ‘child labor’ alleged by some with ulterior motives,” the spokesperson said via email. “We oppose the related individuals overstretching the concept of national security, trying to abuse state power to go after and smear Chinese products and companies.”
The Senator has long accused Chinese garlic of being tainted.
“Reports indicate that Chinese garlic is grown using raw sewage, possibly including human feces, and that the garlic is then bleached to make it appear whiter and cleaner to the eye after its growth in unsanitary conditions,” he said in a January video. “It’s also processed using slave labor. Communist Chinese uses slave labor. And these poor people are forced to peel so much garlic that their fingernails — fingernails — literally fall off so they have to use their teeth to get the job done. It’s horrific. And it means that Chinese sewage, garlic should be unacceptable for human conception.”
In December of 2023, Scott asked the Commerce Department to investigate Chinese garlic and for U.S. grocery stores to stop selling it, while in January he introduced a bill to ban garlic imported garlic from China. He’s also pushed to ban the sale of Chinese garlic in U.S. military commissaries and the use of the produce in military dining halls.
As evidence for his claims, Scott has pointed to the Netflix documentary series Rotten, which features an episode accusing Christopher Ranch, a major U.S. garlic producer, of being involved in price-fixing and using garlic peeled by Chinese prisoners. The episode features what producers say is hidden camera footage of prisoners peeling garlic for the company.
“They claim forced labor went into that label,” company official Ken Christopher told KION in 2018. “It was packed specifically for us, and we have no trademarks in China. So that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
He added most of the company’s roughly 90 million pounds of garlic production is grown and processed in California, and that the roughly 10 percent of its product that is imported isn’t processed in prison. He said the undercover video was fake.
Zero Point Zero, which produced Rotten, has said it stands by its reporting.
“There is no evidence that garlic in China is fertilized in this fashion,” McGill University’s Office for Science and Society program wrote in a 2017 article on allegations of Chinese sewer garlic.
China is the world’s biggest exporter of garlic, and the U.S. has tariffed Chinese exports of garlic since the mid-1990s to protect U.S. producers, tariffs the Trump administration increased in 2019. China is the largest supplier of garlic to the U.S., according to the Department of Agriculture.
The incoming Trump administration has signaled it will seek to raise tariffs on a variety of Chinese goods.
