Dutch agribusiness company Nidera involved in slavery chargesUPDATE JANUARY 6TH: A professional translator has kindly corrected and improved my clumsy and inadequate original version. This new version of the article is what you are reading now. I have sent him an email asking how he wants to be credited for this amazing effort but I have yet to hear back. In the meantime, I am updating this post with the better text because I notice it is getting many page views and I prefer it if people read the best possible version I can offer. To the anonymous (at least for now) translator that took the time and effort to work on this, I cannot thank you enough. You are my personal hero.
I just spent the last two hours translating this article. Now, I am not a translator. So, it will probably be less than perfect (moreover, it will probably have some serious flaws). It is long and meandering (the writer’s style is not very suitable for my poor translation skills). Also, I am putting some of it after a jump due to length, but a good chunk of it will be before, so, I apologize in advance for that, but I want some of the main facts to be part of my blog’s front page.
This needs to be documented and I haven’t seen one single line in the international press and certainly nothing in Dutch press. This came out in today’s Argentinian Newspaper Pagina 12 (one of the biggest in the country). It is written by Horacio Verbitsky, a journalist with a career that spans for more than 50 years and who has been instrumental in Argentinian Human Rights and the pursuit of justice for victims of the dictatorship’s Junta.
I have taken the time to translate this article because it is fundamental that, as Dutch taxpayers, we know what our companies are doing in those places where they believe to be outside public scrutiny. Our welfare and food supply partially rests in the hands of these businesses. The state has an obligation to hold them accountable for the corporate practices that are absolutely forbidden by Dutch law (and in fact, they are also forbidden by Argentinian law). So, I am putting this out there. Nidera needs to be held accountable for what they do.
