Sustainable food consumption studies have largely focused on promoting human health within ecological limits. Less attention has been paid to social sustainability, in part because of limited data and models. Globally, agriculture has one of the highest incidences of forced labour, with exploitative conditions enabled by low margins, domestic labour scarcity, inadequate legal protections for workers and high labour requirements. Here we assess the forced labour risk embedded in the US retail supply of fruits and vegetables using distinct datasets and a new forced labour risk scoring method. We demonstrate that there is risk of forced labour in a broad set of fruit and vegetable commodities, with a small number of commodities accounting for a substantial fraction of total risk at the retail supply level. These findings signal potential trade-offs and synergies across dimensions of food system sustainability and the need for novel research approaches to develop evidence-based forced labour risk mitigation strategies.

可持续食品消费研究主要侧重于在生态范围内促进人类健康。对社会可持续性的关注较少，部分原因是数据和模型有限。在全球范围内，农业是强迫劳动发生率最高的行业之一，低利润、家政劳动力稀缺、对工人的法律保护不足以及劳动力要求高，造成了剥削条件。在这里，我们使用不同的数据集和新的强迫劳动风险评分方法评估美国水果和蔬菜零售供应中的强迫劳动风险。我们证明，在广泛的水果和蔬菜商品中存在强迫劳动的风险，少数商品占零售供应层面总风险的很大一部分。