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 non-existent in industry, which, due to its scale, instead depends upon human labour and machinery.
In 2021, Thailand exported 236,323 metric tons 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 pigtailed macaques. The former is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, while the latter is endangered.
A recent study co-authored by Nijman found that the needs of the pig-tailed macaques kept for coconut-harvesting – such as the ability to move freely and unrestrained, and to hide from stressors – were largely not met in such contexts.
It is probably the case that such monkeys are based on small farms catering to local consumption, he said, rather than farms that produce coconuts for exports.
“The total volume that potentially could be picked by macaques is small, certainly in light of the total number of coconuts that are being picked,” said Nijman. “The vast majority of coconut and coconut products do not come from farms where pigtailed macaques are employed.”
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Estimates regarding the numbers of macaques picking coconuts on farms vary, with some suggesting up to 3,000 pig-tailed macaques are involved, said Nijman. “Given that you cannot use animals that are too young, and once, especially the males, become fully grown they become more difficult to work with, there is only a few years window during which you can work with the macaques,” he said, adding that, because of this turnover, it is estimated that the number of pigtailed macaques that need to be extracted from the wild is in the low hundreds each year.
The main export market for Thai coconuts is China, he added.
Responding to HelloFresh’s decision to stop sourcing from Thailand, Peta senior vice president, Jason Baker, said: “HelloFresh’s decision will help protect monkeys from being kidnapped, chained, and whipped in the coconut trade. HelloFresh is helping Peta push the Thai coconut industry and government away from using and abusing monkeys.”
