HelloFresh drops Thai coconut milk after Peta monkey labour campaign

theguardian.com:

The meal kit provider HelloFresh has said it will no longer sell coconut milk sourced from Thailand, after campaigning by an animal rights group that accused coconut farms in the country of using monkey labour.

The company confirmed to Axios that it does not tolerate “any form of animal abuse in our supply chain” and “out of an abundance of caution” will not be placing orders for coconut milk from Thailand. HelloFresh has not yet responded to the Guardian’s request for comment.

Several companies have stopped selling some Thai coconut products over recent years after campaigning by Peta, which said that it had investigated Thai coconut farms and found chained monkeys that were forced to spend long hours climbing trees and picking coconut. Abuse of primates was “rampant”, the group has said.

The Thai government has rejected the Peta’s claims of widespread abuse, saying the traditional practice of using monkeys to harvest coconuts is almost nonexistent in industry, which, due to its scale, instead depends upon human labour and machinery.

In 2021, Thailand exported 236,323 metric tonnes of coconut milk, worth 12,800 million baht, according to the department of agriculture. It has begun issuing certificates to farms to verify that they are monkey-free to address concerns over animal cruelty.

Vincent Nijman, anthropology professor and head of the Oxford Wildlife Trade Research Group at Oxford Brookes University, who has researched the welfare of coconut-harvesting macaques in Thailand, said the practice is largely confined to the southernmost part of Thailand and involves the northern and southern pig-tailed macaques. The former is listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, while the latter