You can see the full BBC documentary here on YouTube
youtu.be/dtv_1eafJn4?...

We also talked with several people from Xinjiang who had been forced to pick tomatoes - many were beaten and tortured, given impossible targets, denied food.

We bought samples of the own brand tomato pastes in several UK supermarkets and then sent them off to a company which could analyse their chemical make up and determine which country they likely came from. We could identify exactly which products likely contained XJ tomatoes

In Italy, they were bought by a company that produces own-brand goods for supermarkets around Europe. We knew which supermarkets bought the products because the Italian company was in their supplier lists - but we didn’t know which specific products were affected.

At the BBC we tracked the blue barrels of tomato paste as they travelled overland by trains set up specially to connect the region to Italy. Shipping records from Georgia (a country they transited through) allowed us to see which XJ and Italian companies were involved.

Instead, many of them were being bought by Italy - they had consistently been the largest importer of Chinese tomatoes for several years (and the majority of Chinese tomatoes are grown in Xinjiang and then exported as paste.)

But only the cotton one had any real impact - it lead to the Chinese government having to buy stockpiles of the material to stop the industry collapsing. The US didn’t import many tomatoes in the first place, so the effect was limited - others continued to buy them.

Cotton and tomato paste were two of Xinjiang’s biggest exports a few years ago and both commodities had huge amounts of forced labour in their supply chains. Then the US placed sanctions on the two products due to the ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs.

Twitter worked well as a broadcast/lurking space towards the end because there was a lot of good content and interaction to read and observe even if you didn't actively participate. It always felt more fun to actively engage though.

Yeah. And the light pollution too - another thing that would have messed with the birds and their migration.

If you register you'll be able to read it - you get eight free articles a month.

Thanks Alex!

The waste is genuinely obscene. That $50bn could have been used for so many other things, not to mention all the time and talent of the thousands of people who worked on this thing.

Thanks John!

The PIF took it seriously enough to have spent $50bn on it - that's the figure they gave earlier this year. But they couldn't attract the international investors that they hoped for (and needed).

Great working on this with @alisonkilling.bsky.social, Chris Campbell, @peter.andringa.me, @ian-bott.bsky.social, @sdbernard.bsky.social and @raydouglas.bsky.social.

Come for the reporting, stay for the largest map we‘ve ever built...

It's devastating.