THE FAITHFUL CONSUMER August 06
By Sarah Streed
…connecting faith and the environment
When I was young, my family would take trips to my grandparents’ farm in Minnesota. If we made the trip during harvest, the car would pass groups of Mexicans at work—hunched figures among the corn or soybeans with scarves or hats on their heads to keep out the sun. These migrant workers play a major role in the food industry today.
Unless you shop at a farmer’s market or get your produce from a Community Supported Agriculture, every vegetable or every piece of fruit you eat was handpicked by a seasonal or migrant farmworker. Mexican farmworkers pick strawberries in California, raspberries in Oregon, apples in Washington and tomatoes in Florida, detassel corn in Iowa, harvest tobacco in Virgina and tend plants in New Jersey and Illinois and even working in the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants of the Midwest.
Currently, there are 700,000 to a million farmworkers in the U.S. These workers have over 400,000 dependents, most of whom are children. These numbers do not include the seasonal farm laborers whose employment follows the changing demands of planting, tending, and harvesting our nation’s crops. Seasonal worker conditions are slightly better and bring the total population of farm labor to more than 3.5 million.
During the civil rights years in the 60s, the poor working conditions of migrant agricultural workers received national attention. Robert Kennedy visited the migrant communities to see firsthand the conditions of the workers and Cesar Chavez struggled to better migrant worker conditions. Back then, people believed migrant work would be obsolete within a decade because machines would replace human labor. Unfortunately, there are still migrant workers today and their conditions are the same as they were then.
Family farms have historically relied on the labor of family members, but with the rise of the corporate farm, workers are hired solely for the short periods in which labor is needed. The seasonal nature of agricultural production keeps workers migrating—which prevents them from settling, organizing, or making demands for higher wages. The Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act which specify minimal standards of employment for U.S. workers both exclude agricultural workers.
Migrant farmworkers earn an average of $5,000 per year and are denied most legal protections. Although the Agricultural Worker Protection Act requires a minimum wage and humane housing and working conditions, there are many growers who evade this law. Occasionally, a case is brought into the public eye, like the one my sister—an attorney in Illinois—worked on a few years ago, when a nursery owner was prosecuted for the conditions of the Mexican workers living on his property and working in his fields. But cases like these are few and far between.
Part and parcel of migrant worker conditions is pesticide use. Growers increase pesticide use in order to get the fruits and vegetables looking the way that makes you, the consumer, want to buy them in the store. This has turned the agricultural chemistry side of the food industry into a huge business. The top 10 agrochemical corporations control 84 percent of the US $30 billion agrochemical market. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that in 1993 farmers and gardeners spent 8 billion dollars on herbicides, insecticides and fungicides.
In recent years, consumers have become aware of the severe ecological consequences of high pesticide use—especially of persistent organochlorine pesticides—and they have demanded lower pesticide residues in food. The market follows the consumer, so the pesticide industry developed pesticides that are less persistent in the agricultural environment, but which are often more immediately toxic. This doesn’t affect you—the consumer—but it does affect the person who is working in the field—the migrant farmworker.
To be truly faithful consumers, we need to be consistent. It is just as bad that the migrant farmworker and his family inhale clouds of pesticides while working to bring us the food we eat, as it is for us to eat food full of pesticides. To eliminate pesticides in both places, we need to buy organic and local.
August’s tip: Shop at your local Farmer’s Market. Almost every community has a Farmer’s Market now, so it’s easy to make a trip to buy your family’s vegetables for the week.
Sarah Streed is a board member of the Wisconsin Interfaith Climate & Energy Campaign (WICEC) and runs Write Stuff Works (www.writestuffworks.com ) a writing business. She lives in Stoughton, Wisconsin with her husband and children. Email smstreed@sbcglobal.net
All rights reserved by Sarah Streed.
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