Detecting Human Trafficking and Deforestation in Supply Chains

Modern slavery affects an estimated 50 million people globally. In Latin America, Brazil represents both the region’s largest economy and population, making human trafficking a significant concern. In Brazil’s agricultural sector alone, close to one million workers meet the U.S. State Department's threshold for human trafficking, with Black and multiracial communities disproportionately impacted. Trafficked workers are often exploited in illicit deforestation, converting vegetation into temporary remote charcoal production sites, fueling Brazil’s $1.8 billion pig iron industry.

Despite growing regulation and public pressure for supply chain transparency, severe exploitation is prevalent in global supply chains. A lack of comprehensive supply chain data linking abuses to specific producers limits the effectiveness of these regulations. Without transparency and microdata, compliance often relies on self-reporting from first-tier partners, while financial incentives for exploitation persist. 

To address this challenge, the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab, in partnership with Brazil’s Federal Labor Prosecution Office (FLPO), is developing Chain-Link, a new data-driven technical tool to map exploitative supply chains. Chain-Link will identify labor trafficking and illegal deforestation in distant tiers of the supply chain by integrating data from siloed publicly available administrative and legal records. The aim is to help regulators, investors, and firms make evidence-based assessments to take targeted action against illegal behavior among suppliers. Our team will test if such technologies can effectively incentivize private sector action toward environmentally and socially sustainable supply chains. 

This approach builds on five years of research collaboration with FLPO, and is the direct result of conversations with federal prosecutors and supply chain experts articulating major gaps in regulatory approaches and enforcement capacity. Our team will launch Chain-Link in Brazil’s industrial charcoal sector, rigorously evaluating its impact on procurement behavior and legal enforcement. We aim to ultimately release an open-source toolkit to enable replication in other sectors and countries, so as to advance supply chain accountability worldwide.