Wage Improvements in Seed Hybrids (WISH)

According to various reports including organisations such as FLA and Arisa, the agriculture sector in India faces several critical and systemic issues when it comes to human and labour rights. Prevailing wages in the sector are often lower than the region's legal minimum wage, and although child labour has been greatly reduced in the past few years, it remains an ongoing systemic issue in agriculture sector. This number might have increased due to COVID-19 as many schools were closed and are again closed.

Seed providers BASF and Syngenta have looked to address these issues since the early 2000s through different programmes. A recent report, Seeds of Change, describes a pilot project of Syngenta with FLA to improve legal minimum wage compliance in the sector. The findings show a company can make important progress by taking action and that this challenge must be addressed by all players in the industry to achieve sustainable progress. The report also mentions that paying decent wages is the best remedy to many other labour issues and a lack of decent wages directly connects to the incidence of child labour.

In 2021 BASF, Syngenta and Arisa joined hands in a multistakeholder collaboration called WISH (Wage Improvements in Seed Hybrids). WISH builds on the expertise, knowledge and network of Arisa and the companies' past efforts and successes. The project will be executed in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka in India, in 28 villages, with around 500 suppliers. WISH consists of two phases. In the first phase (project A during 2022), data will be collected and analysed to determine the root causes of the non-payment of minimum wages, child labour and other labour rights violation issues. Global Research and MV Foundation, two India-based organisations, will collect this data in the two states. WISH aims to open dialogue and therefore will have different stakeholder meetings to discuss the outcomes of the root cause analyses of potential risks. Based on the efforts and outcomes of phase A, the implementation phase B will start, taking steps to ensure compliance with the legal minimum wages – ultimately aiming to end child labour in the long term.