Fruit Recall Affects Walmart, Sam’s Club, Wegmans, Costco, Trader Joe’s Stores | WNEP.com

If you’ve picked up fruit at Walmart, Costco or Trader Joe’s stores recently, keep reading.

Wawona Packing Co. is voluntarily recalling peaches, nectarines, plums and pluots that were packed at its Cutler, California, warehouses between June 1 and July 12. Wawona believes the products may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.

Costco, Trader Joe’s, and the Walmart Corp. — which operates Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, have all posted notices about the fruit recall on their websites. The recall is nationwide, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Internal testing at Wawona revealed the potential Listeria contamination, the FDA says. The facility was shut down and sanitized; subsequent tests have been negative for the food-borne illness.

“We are aware of no illnesses related to the consumption of these products,” Wawona President Brent Smittcamp said in a statement. “By taking the precautionary step of recalling product, we will minimize even the slightest risk to public health, and that is our priority.”

Trader Joe’s has urged customers not to eat any of these stone fruits — meaning fruits with large pits — and to return them to a nearby store for a full refund.

In addition, Wegmans Food Markets, Inc. has recalled several of its baked goods that contain fruit from Wawona Packing Co. This includes cakes, pies, tarts and other pastries.

Fruit Recall Affects Walmart, Sam’s Club, Wegmans, Costco, Trader Joe’s Stores | WNEP.com

Costco, Wal-Mart Linked to Human Trafficking and Slavery Through Supplier CP Foods (COST, WMT)

The Guardian's investigation discovered that Thailand-based CP Foods, the world's largest shrimp and prawn farmer, purchases fishmeal (inedible "trash fish") from fishing boats manned by slaves to feed its farm-raised shrimps. CP Foods' shrimps are then sold to Costco, Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Tesco, and many other major supermarkets across the world in frozen or pre-cooked form.

Many of the enslaved men, from Myanmar and Cambodia, were lured to the slave ships by brokers who had promised to help them find work in Thailand's factories or construction sites. Instead, they were sold for as little as £250 ($424) each to boat captains. The slaves were reportedly chained, beaten, dosed with methamphetamines to keep going, and even executed at sea, according to the investigation.

What's even more horrifying is that CP Foods potentially acknowledged that slave labor was part of its supply chain. CP Foods' managing UK director, Bob Miller, admitted that the company knew that there were "issues with regard to the [raw] material that comes in."

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Thailand currently ranks 24th on the list of top offenders worldwide (calculated by percentage of population), with an estimated 473,000 slaves within its borders. India ranks fourth on that list, with nearly 14 million slaves -- considerably more than China, which still has nearly 3 million. But slavery is not restricted to developing and emerging markets -- there are actually 60,000 slaves in the U.S. and another 80,000 in Japan.

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But companies and corrupt governments are only half of the problem. Consumer demand for cheap products in developed nations has driven large companies overseas in a never-ending quest for low-cost labor. That "Wal-Mart mentality" lowers marketwide price expectations for goods and forces retailers to sell their products at the lowest possible margins. Although consumers benefit from this practice, it's unsustainable without the use of extensive outsourcing to politically unstable regions.

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Despite a long-standing policy restricting its vendors from using prison labor, one of Wal-Mart's main produce vendors, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Martori Farms, was found to be using female prisoners at its farms in 2011. In 2012, The Huffington Post reported that Wal-Mart was using prison laborers to strip serial numbers and UPC bar codes from returned and excess goods, which were then sold to after-market retailers.

Costco, Wal-Mart Linked to Human Trafficking and Slavery Through Supplier CP Foods (COST, WMT)

See also: Demanufacturing Wal-Mart: Profiting From Prison Labor 

 Wondering if this practice is still going on?

One thing you can say about Wal-Mart chain stores: at every link in the chain, someone is being exploited, from head to tail. The public knows next to nothing about the exploitation which takes place at the tail end of the business cycle -- something called "demanufacturing."

Every year, Wal-Mart has to dispose of millions of dollars worth of customer returns, buy-backs, over-stocks, shelf-pulls, scratch-and-dent, and excess inventories. The giant retailer sells this merchandise to liquidators, who scrub the products of any Wal-Mart serial numbers, UPC bar codes -- and then resell them to after-market retailers, who re-sell them to the public.

The workers used to strip these Wal-Mart products clean are often prisoner laborers, under a program made possible by the federal government. In effect, the liquidators are partially subsidized by federal taxpayers, who provide the 'demanufacturing' facilities, and cheap, captive labor -- usually female prisoners. This form of corporate welfare allows salvage companies to offer Wal-Mart a low price for their cast-off products.

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The federal law that makes this prison labor possible, the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP) was created by Congress in 1979 "to establish employment opportunities for inmates that approximate private-sector work... to place inmates in a realistic work environment, pay them the prevailing local wage for similar work, and enable them to acquire marketable skills..."