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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] we'll have to confront the farm-labor crisis
  • Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 21:29:08 -0600


Let me get this straight - we can't even grow our own food?

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

"In farm fields larger than even a few acres, diversified vegetable farming
is extremely labor intensive -- and in the modern U.S., farm labor generally
means immigrant labor."

To create a truly sustainable food system, we'll have to confront the
farm-labor crisis
By Tom Philpott 30 May 2008
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/05/30/?source=food

When I think about what a truly healthy, vibrant food system would look like,
I envision more farms: small farms serving specific communities, and
diversified, midsized farms geared to supplying their surrounding regions.

Many hands make site work.
Of course, there would still be interstate and global trade -- you can't grow
olives or coffee in Iowa, or enough wheat in Florida to supply the state's
bakers. But with more farms across the nation, we could all generally eat
much closer to home, consuming fewer resources and throwing off less
pollution in the process. Traveling would be more interesting as well.
Imagine finding region-specific, seasonal specialties -- not standardized
burgers -- at train stations across the land. (Oh yeah, in my vision, there'd
also be a high-functioning national rail system.)

In some ways, this scenario -- the food part, anyway -- isn't so far-fetched.
I've watched people's zeal to "eat local" rise dramatically over the past 10
years. And now, even the business media are taking it seriously. Just last
week, BusinessWeek joined the chorus heralding the "Rise of the Locavore,"
noting that, "Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh,
vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to
supermarkets from faraway lands." Nationwide, the number of farmers' markets
ballooned by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006, BusinessWeek reports.

But consumer demand alone can only create so much change. Though the locavore
movement is heartening and necessary, it remains a tiny organism compared to
our great lumbering beast of an industrial food system. By some estimates,
local-oriented farms supply something like 2 percent of U.S. food calories.
To move beyond the farmers' market box, farms producing for local and
regional markets will have to multiply in number far more than that
impressive 50 percent figure.

I've already identified one major obstacle between my reverie and reality:
infrastructure. As I wrote in a recent column on the need to revive the
dismal fortunes of midsized farms, the infrastructure needed for such farms
to thrive -- locally owned grocery stores, dairy-processing plants,
slaughterhouses, canneries -- has withered away as the food industry
consolidated over the decades.

In the weeks since that column, I've hit upon another roadblock: a growing
labor shortage that's falling particularly hard on midsized farms.

Belaboring the Point

At first glance, New York would seem a particularly ripe state for a midsized
farm renaissance. It boasts a bustling metropolis -- the nation's largest --
with a strong and growing locavore scene. Combined with population centers
like Albany and Rochester, the vast organism that is greater New York City
might be expected to provide a robust market for the midsized farms that dot
the state's landscape.

Yet those very farms are struggling to harvest their produce because of an
ongoing labor shortage. And produce unharvested means produce unsold -- and
farms in trouble.

According to a recent New York Times piece, upstate farms are suffering
because very few U.S.-born citizens will accept agriculture jobs -- and the
undocumented workers who have been staffing them for years are being hounded
out by anti-immigration zeal.

As a result, farmers are scaling back production of labor-intensive fruit and
vegetable crops and investing heavily in labor-replacing machinery.
Substituting human labor with machinery not only boosts agriculture's fossil
fuel use, it also makes farms more vulnerable by strapping them with debt.

Not surprisingly, their lenders are getting nervous. In testimony last fall
before the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, an official from Farm Credit of
Western New York estimated that more than 800 farms in the state,
representing 750,000 acres in farmland, were "highly vulnerable to going out
of business or forced to [become] part-time farms from a severe labor
shortage."

These operations, whose average size is less than 100 acres, essentially
represent New York's base of midsized farms. The Farm Credit official
predicted that if those farms fail, much of that land would likely remain in
some form of agriculture, but that "hundreds of thousands of acres would be
vulnerable to being discontinued from crop production and converted to
non-farm uses."

In other words, what's left of New York's most productive farmland may soon
be sprouting second homes and vacation condos where it once produced tomatoes
and green beans.

U.S. Farms Migrate to Mexico

The problem is by no means limited to the Northeast. In California, the
Associated Press reports, Mexican farmworkers are having trouble heading
north over an increasingly well-patrolled border -- but U.S. farm owners are
crossing the other way freely. According to AP, "Many [U.S. growers have]
moved their fields to Mexico, where they can find qualified people, often
with U.S. experience, who can't be deported."

When they jump the border to buy land -- presumably without having to risk
their lives in the desert or hire "coyotes" to ease the passage -- U.S. farm
owners find an oasis of cheap and compliant labor. AP reports that U.S. farm
employers can buy a whole day's worth of labor for a wage ($9.60) equal to an
hour's worth of work at the going rate north of the border -- while still
doubling Mexico's minimum wage of $4.80 per day.

Now, the AP article is talking mainly about large-scale agriculture here --
the kind that keeps your local Wal-Mart stocked with little bags of baby
spinach and asparagus all year. In the logic of industrial farming -- where
food is grown in vast, centralized monocrops, and then distributed in
thousand mile-plus radii -- the shift from California to Mexico makes a
certain sense. "Mexico is closer to eastern U.S. markets than California,"
Associated Press reports. "Shipping times to Atlanta are a day shorter from
Mexico's central Guanajuato state."

But the labor crunch is surely also squeezing California's midsized
operations -- the farms that will be needed to broaden local-food access in
one of the nation's most economically stratified states. In farm fields
larger than even a few acres, diversified vegetable farming is extremely
labor intensive -- and in the modern U.S., farm labor generally means
immigrant labor.

What, then, is the answer? In the short term, the U.S. should end its
ridiculous nativist immigration policies. As I've written before, Mexican
farmworkers don't sneak across one of the globe's most militarized borders to
freeload off of U.S. taxpayers, despite the fantasies of certain cable-TV
commentators. Rather, they're fleeing a near-complete meltdown in small-scale
Mexican agriculture -- one that directly implicates the free-trade zeal of
U.S. policymakers and corporations.

But even if U.S. policymakers did open the border -- highly unlikely -- we
can't build a sustainable food system in the United States on the backs of
former Mexican farmers who have been driven off their land by NAFTA and other
binational U.S.-Mexico policies. The time has come for the U.S.
sustainable-food movement to develop a North American consciousness -- to
foster a farmworker movement of its own, and to seek coalitions with Mexican
small-farm advocates to rebuild local and regional food networks on both
sides of the border.

Farm for America


Simultaneously, it's time to develop an idea floated by Anna Lappé on Grist a
couple of months back: farm work as a green-collar job. Heard of Teach for
America, the federal program that draws college graduates into critically
important, but horribly paid, public-school jobs? The time for Farm for
America is ripe -- as ripe as the fruit that will soon be rotting on vines
across the country for lack of pickers.






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