Hunger at the End of the Supply Chain

A Bangladeshi woman loses her factory job in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before, she was able to afford the occasional purchase of meat, fish, and fruit for her family. This is no longer the case. “Egg is a luxurious food for us now,” she says.

In Indonesia, a garment worker whose monthly income has dropped by 20 percent since the beginning of the pandemic begins her days with a devastating calculus: should she eat, or go hungry to avoid accumulating more debt?

A garment worker in Myanmar goes to the market and purchases food that would have lasted her family a week before the pandemic. But because she and her family are rationing their food intake, the same amount of food has to last two weeks instead of one.

Far from a handful of rare episodes, these stories illustrate an alarming trend in the global apparel supply chain: the people who sew clothes for major apparel giants around the globe are facing widespread hunger and destitution as a result of falling income and job loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. In September 2020, we launched a survey to understand the impact of changes to garment workers’ employment status and income levels on food security. We interviewed 396 workers in nine garment-exporting countries. Our survey respondents included workers who were temporarily suspended or permanently fired, as well as those still employed. They reported sewing clothes for well-known brands and retailers, such as Adidas, H&M, Inditex (the parent company of Zara), Nike, Target, and Walmart. In late 2020, we published our findings in a report called “Hunger in the Apparel Supply Chain,” which documented job loss, declining incomes, and food insecurity among the world’s garment workforce.

Our survey found that hunger is a growing and acute problem not only for workers who have lost their jobs, but also for those who are still working. Of the workers in our survey, 88 percent stated that diminished income—whether the result of losing their jobs without being paid a legally mandated severance, being sent home without pay from a factory that was shutting down temporarily, or losing income despite still being employed—had forced a reduction in the amount of food consumed per day by members of their households. And 77 percent told us that they or a member of their household have gone hungry since the beginning of the pandemic, while 80 percent of workers with dependent children said they are forced to skip meals or reduce the amount or quality of food they eat in order to feed their children. Three quarters of the survey respondents have borrowed money or accumulated debt in order to buy food since the onset of the pandemic. And 80 percent told us that they anticipate continuing to reduce the amount of food they eat or purchase for their family if the situation does not improve. Garment workers experienced widespread and growing hunger despite the fact that half of them had received some form of public assistance.

This growing trend of food insecurity is the result of the chronically low wages and precarity in brands’ supply chains that predated the pandemic, compounded by apparel companies’ irresponsible practices in response to the crisis.

Garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, protest forced resignations imposed during pandemic-related factory closures. (Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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In March 2020, retail stores shuttered their doors due to the spread of COVID-19, which led to a sharp and enduring decline in consumer demand for clothes. Rising unemployment and inequality wrought by the COVID-19 economic recession also led to a decrease in consumer spending on apparel. Faced with looming sales losses, the immediate response of many apparel companies was to shift the economic pain down the supply chain by abruptly canceling orders to supplier factories. In many cases, they did so retroactively and refused to pay for orders that factories were already manufacturing or had completed. Brands cited dubious force majeure clauses to skirt their contractual...