An assessment by the Rights Lab suggests that about a third of human trafficking this is detectable in some form from space — particularly slavery that occurs at sites within commodity supply chains, such as in stone quarries, brick kilns, fisheries, mines, forests and construction sites. For example, across south Asia, there is a vast “Brick Belt” — a network of tens of thousands of brick kilns that employ some 23 million workers across India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Researchers at the Rights Lab recently used satellite imagery and machine learning techniques to map the entire Brick Belt in unprecedented detail. Other commodity production systems have similarly observable dynamics. A coalition of global chocolate companies such as Nestle and Cadbury have recently announced new plans to reduce slavery in the cocoa supply chain in Ivory Coast and Ghana 70% by 2020. Planet’s satellites can precisely track cacao-related deforestation and the cacao harvest in close to real-time. This kind of monitoring will be an essential tool to help supply chain actors who want to improve their human-rights performance, and validate that promises are being kept.
Keywords: Preventing Human Trafficking, Planet Labs, Data analysis and visualization for human rights, Nestlé, Cadbury, Satellite imagery analysis for human rights.