Best international reporting in any medium dealing with human rights
Award Year: 2024
Award Name: The Joe and Laurie Dine Award 2024
Recipients: Qadri Inzamam and Megha Rajagopalan
Affiliation: The Fuller Project with The New York Times
Honored Work: “The Brutality of Sugar”
The Fuller Project and The New York Times in stories and photos give voice to one of the world’s most marginalized, powerless communities: women and children toiling in the sweltering sugarcane fields of western India. The harvesting system the reporters reveal maximizes profits for global multinational corporations, like Coca Cola and PepsiCo., while it forces children into marriage and into the fields. It encourages women to take advances on their pay and then agree to hysterectomies so they can keep working uninterrupted. Harvesters mislead the public with a compromised rating system that claims
the process respects human rights. And it is protected by the political elite, who also happen to run the mills. The package is deeply moving, evoking empathy and outrage.
Winning Work:
The Brutality of Sugar: Debt, Child Marriage and Hysterectomies
How a Sugar Industry Stamp of Approval Hid Coerced Hysterectomies
Why Politicians Ignore Abuses in India’s Sugar Industry: They Run It
To Quit Their Jobs, Sugar Workers Risk Kidnapping, Assault and Murder
Behind Our Investigation Into India’s Sugar Industry
Can Wall Street Pressure Ease Brutality in India’s Sugar Fields?
Citations for Excellence:
Kim Tong-Hyung, Claire Galofaro, Lora Moftah and Staffs
The Associated Press, FRONTLINE (PBS)
“South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning”
Staff
Reuters
“The Starving World”