Title: How ethical is Starbucks Corporation? | Ethical Consumer
Headings: Starbucks Corporation
Starbucks Corporation
Starbucks Ethics
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Content: In March 2015 the British government website, ww w.food.gov.uk, declared that "almost all" of the soya from the major producers Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and the USA was genetically modified as well as "much of" the maize imported from the USA. This followed a report that the EU animal feed industry imported 70% of its maize, soya and rapeseed requirements. Starbucks had no policy or statement regarding GMOs in products or animal feed. Ethical Consumer therefore felt it highly likely that Starbucks animal products were raised with the use of GM feed and it lost half a mark in the Controversial Technology category. Politics
Starbucks lost several marks under Ethical Consumer’s politics rating for a range of concerns including tax avoidance and excessive directors’ pay. When we looked the company had a number of subsidiaries in countries considered to be tax havens such as the Netherlands and Singapore. The company made an effort to claim that they ‘support [ed] initiatives to improve transparency on tax matters including OECD measures on country-by-country reporting and automatic exchange of information’. However, when we looked, no evidence of any country-by-country reporting could be found. This provided the grounds for Ethical Consumer’s worst rating for likely use of tax avoidance strategies and lost the company a whole mark under Anti-Social Finance. When Ethical Consumer viewed the Starbucks DEF 14A SEC Filings, they saw it stated that Howard Schultz had been paid a total of $17,980,890 in 2017.