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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] how migrant and immigrant labour gets local produce to market
  • Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:36:30 -0600


United colours of berrydom
how migrant and immigrant labour gets local produce to market
Toronto Star July 15, 2007
Catherine Porter Environment Reporter
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/Environment/article/236050

At a distance, you can tell the migrants from the immigrants on Bert
Andrews' farms by their headwear.

Fuchsia turbans and mustard-coloured scarves mean Sikhs from Brampton.

Dark baseball caps mean Mexicans.

Today, the turbans are picking red raspberries on one side of a thick row
of maple trees. On the other side, the baseball caps are deep in the black
raspberry bushes – 30-odd flats deep, by the look of the mounting crates
sitting in the shade of a nearby tree.

"I only wanted 10," hollers Andrews, jumping out of his van and charging up
the row towards them. "You've got like 35. We've got to have berries for
all the markets, not just tomorrow. We can't keep these past tomorrow."

The group's official English speaker is off on another field, laying
irrigation pipes.

"Muchas problemas," says Gregoria Garcia, heading towards the row of black
currants. He adds, continuing in Spanish: "We have problems when we don't
know what he's asking."

Language barriers are an issue on many fruit and vegetable farms around
Toronto, where the void of native-born workers has been filled by both
migrant workers from the south and new immigrants.

That means the Ontario raspberry you are about to pop into your mouth has a
distinct international flavour – chances are its plant was pruned and
watered by Mexican hands before the fruit was picked by a landed immigrant
from India.

"There are not enough reliable Canadian workers that will do this kind of
work," says Andrews, who has owned a fruit and vegetable farm just north of
Milton for 27 years. "We've put ads in the paper for people to do weeding
and picking. First, we can't get anyone. Then, if we do, it's someone who
only lasts a day. We found one guy with a bottle of booze behind the
bushes."

This year, he's hired 15 male Mexicans through the country's seasonal
agricultural worker program. Most will stay for half a year. During the
summer, he employs an equal number of Sikhs, most of whom left farms in
India to follow their families to Canada.

They do the grunt work – the pruning, weeding, planting and picking.

In both cases, they are farmers who can't afford their own farms.

But the Mexicans come to make a better life back home, while the Sikhs are
here because the better life they thought they'd find in Canada hasn't
materialized.

Both are temporary, manual labourers – the bottom of the food chain. But
you'll rarely see them working side-by-side.

"We don't speak their language, they don't speak our language either," says
Garcia.

Ontario has a long history of foreigners and newcomers working the land.
Take Ken Forth's farm near Hamilton. He's a fifth-generation Ontario
farmer. In the 1920s, his family sponsored Czech workers. Then, they'd pick
up Italian immigrants. Then Vietnamese. For all of them, it was a stepping
stone to save money for a house and a better job.

"They did the Canadian dream," says Forth, who now employs 16 workers from
the Caribbean.

The Canadian government launched the seasonal work agriculture program in
1974 when the river of new immigrants knocking on farm doors sputtered out.
That year, 264 workers arrived from Jamaica. This year, there are 22,000
from all countries, according to Forth, who directs the board of F.A.R.M.S
– a local agency assisting farmers in bringing foreign workers to their
property. The government sets their wages and monitors their living
quarters.

Critics charge that seasonal workers have no legal rights in Canada and are
easily abused. Proponents, like Forth, say it's no different from Canadian
nurses heading to Saudi Arabia to pay off their loans. It's a temporary
cash boom.

On the Andrews farm, the Mexicans make $88 a day. That's six times what
Garcia makes during the winter in Mexico City, working as a photographer on

construction sites.

It also raises serious questions about Ontario agriculture: How sustainable
is it to rely on imported workers? If students head north into black-fly
territory to plant trees during the summer, why don't they want to work on
farms? And, how local is local food, if it's grown largely with imported
labour, flown in to do the job?

Forth brushes aside such concerns. "What's better for the economy of
Canada? A Mexican picking a tomato in Mexico that you're going to eat, a
Mexican picking a tomato in California that you're going to eat, or a
Mexican picking the tomato in Ontario? For every foreign worker that comes
to Canada, 2.1 full-time Canadian jobs – in trucking, packaging and the
supply chain – are created. We're creating more than 30,000 jobs as a
result of foreign workers."

AN EVEN BIGGER question is growing on the other side of those maples.
There, Gurmail Singh Cheema is deep down in red raspberry bushes. He's a
mango man, but his fingers are now stained red from a fruit he never tasted
before coming to Canada. He has a basket secured to his waist with orange
twine.

In 1996, he was in Punjab running his own 35-acre farm. He had five
labourers milking his cows, picking his tomatoes, cutting his sugar cane.
Now, he gets up every morning at 4 a.m. to pray, have breakfast, and leave
his Brampton home in a maroon minivan, picking up other Sikh farmers on
street corners en route to Andrews' farm.

"Now I am the labourer," says Cheema, 64.

Some mornings he picks up only four. Others, like today, it's a packed van.

He became the foreman because he speaks limited English, he says. Most of
the others don't. But they too come from generations of farmers in India.
They now get paid $8 an hour.

Why, when the Greater Toronto area is bleeding farmers – losing 16 per
cent of farmland between 1996 and 2001 – aren't immigrant farmers
replacing them?

"There are many immigrants with agricultural experience coming to this
country," says Iffat Zehra, founder of an agency called Community Economic
Development for Immigrant Women. "Why are they driving taxis and doing odd
jobs?"

Lobby groups aiming to rewire the system and get professional immigrants
out of cabs and back into offices are now well established in Toronto. But
Zehra's part of a growing movement to do the same for immigrant farmers.

It's an uphill battle. Immigrants haven't had a foothold in Canadian
agriculture for years. In the 30-year period from 1971, they dropped from
8.5 per cent of the Canadian farming population to 6.8 per cent.

Over an entire year, Peter Mitchell found only a handful of immigrant
farmers in the Toronto area.

You might think it's simple economics. But studies show otherwise.

"They're scared," says Mitchell, a researcher at the University of Guelph's
Centre for Land and Water Stewardship. "They've never farmed in this
country. They have limited knowledge of the four seasons. They don't know
soil. There's a huge uphill challenge to buying a farm."

Canadian immigration settlement programs don't help. They're aimed at the
labour needs of a "knowledge-based" economy. A new immigrant can learn how
to draft a resume and find an apartment in the city in order to secure such
work, but not how to feed their community with the crops they ate back
home.

"There's a huge demand for that in Toronto," Zehra says. "Indian and
Pakistani planes are bringing vegetables here every week. That food is
coming from halfway around the world, when it could be easily grown here."

Add global warming to the mix, and the fumes of carbon dioxide each crate
of vegetables unloads into the atmosphere, and it makes for a foolproof
argument.

But, as with everything, cash does play a role.

"I have no money," Cheema says.

Farms near Andrews are selling for $50,000 an acre – the down payment on
one of the new homes replacing it in the area. You can rent land for as
cheap as $30 an acre, but then there's still the infrastructure costs for
irrigation pipes, seeds, fertilizer, tractors.

FarmStart, a Guelph-area non-profit organization, is launching a program to
bridge the gap. It's already rented 38 acres of land from the Toronto
Region Conservation Authority. Starting next year, it will bring aspiring
immigrant farmers there for a subsidized, five-year program. They'll learn
about local farm conditions and till small plots with specialty crops from
their home countries. They'll also be linked to established farmers in a
mentorship program.

"We have to rethink how we do agriculture in Canada – from a production
perspective and an economic perspective," says Christie Young, FarmStart's
director. "We can learn a lot from farmers from other parts of the world."






  • [Livingontheland] how migrant and immigrant labour gets local produce to market, TradingPostPaul, 07/16/2007

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