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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Price of Tomatoes: Keeping Slavery Alive in Florida
  • Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:08:06 -0700


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The Price of Tomatoes: Keeping Slavery Alive in Florida
If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was
picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery.
Published on Monday, March 2, 2009 by Gourmet

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/politics-of-the-plate-the-pric
e-of-tomatoes
by Barry Estabrook

Driving from Naples, Florida, the nation’s second-wealthiest metropolitan
area, to Immokalee takes less than an hour on a straight road. You pass
houses that sell for an average of $1.4 million, shopping malls anchored by
Tiffany’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, manicured golf courses. Eventually,
gated communities with names like Monaco Beach Club and Imperial Golf
Estates give way to modest ranches, and the highway shrivels from six lanes
to two. Through the scruffy palmettos, you glimpse flat, sandy tomato
fields shimmering in the broiling sun. Rounding a long curve, you enter
Immokalee. The heart of town is a nine-block grid of dusty, potholed
streets lined by boarded-up bars and bodegas, peeling shacks, and sagging,
mildew-streaked house trailers. Mongrel dogs snooze in the shade, scrawny
chickens peck in yards. Just off the main drag, vultures squabble over
roadkill. Immokalee’s population is 70 percent Latino. Per capita income
is only $8,500 a year. One third of the families in this city of nearly
25,000 live below the poverty line. Over one third of the children drop out
before graduating from high school.

Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and
May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from
south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area’s largest
communities of farmworkers. According to Douglas Molloy, the chief
assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to
fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.”

[Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on
a good day, netting about $50 at 45 cents per 32-pound basket. But a lot
can go wrong.]Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton
of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50 at 45 cents per 32-pound
basket. But a lot can go wrong.
The beige stucco house at 209 South Seventh Street is remarkable only
because it is in better repair than most Immokalee dwellings. For two and a
half years, beginning in April 2005, Mariano Lucas Domingo, along with
several other men, was held as a slave at that address. At first, the deal
must have seemed reasonable. Lucas, a Guatemalan in his thirties, had
slipped across the border to make money to send home for the care of an
ailing parent. He expected to earn about $200 a week in the fields. Cesar
Navarrete, then a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, agreed to
provide room and board at his family’s home on South Seventh Street and
extend credit to cover the periods when there were no tomatoes to pick.

Lucas’s “room” turned out to be the back of a box truck in the
junk-strewn yard, shared with two or three other workers. It lacked running
water and a toilet, so occupants urinated and defecated in a corner. For
that, Navarrete docked Lucas’s pay by $20 a week. According to court
papers, he also charged Lucas for two meager meals a day: eggs, beans,
rice, tortillas, and, occasionally, some sort of meat. Cold showers from a
garden hose in the backyard were $5 each. Everything had a price. Lucas was
soon $300 in debt. After a month of ten-hour workdays, he figured he should
have paid that debt off.

But when Lucas—slightly built and standing less than five and a half feet
tall—inquired about the balance, Navarrete threatened to beat him should
he ever try to leave. Instead of providing an accounting, Navarrete took
Lucas’s paychecks, cashed them, and randomly doled out pocket money, $20
some weeks, other weeks $50. Over the years, Navarrete and members of his
extended family deprived Lucas of $55,000.

Taking a day off was not an option. If Lucas became ill or was too
exhausted to work, he was kicked in the head, beaten, and locked in the
back of the truck. Other members of Navarrete’s dozen-man crew were
slashed with knives, tied to posts, and shackled in chains. On November 18,
2007, Lucas was again locked inside the truck. As dawn broke, he noticed a
faint light shining through a hole in the roof. Jumping up, he secured a
hand hold and punched himself through. He was free.

What happened at Navarrete’s home would have been horrific enough if it
were an isolated case. Unfortunately, involuntary servitude—slavery—is
alive and well in Florida. Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed
more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only
the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented,
mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves
refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried. “Unlike
victims of other crimes, slaves don’t report themselves,” said Molloy,
who was one of the prosecutors on the Navarrete case. “They hide from us
in plain sight.”

And for what? Supermarket produce sections overflow with bins of perfect
red-orange tomatoes even during the coldest months—never mind that they
are all but tasteless. Large packers, which ship nearly $500 million worth
of tomatoes annually to major restaurants and grocery retailers nationwide,
own or lease the land upon which the workers toil. But the harvesting is
often done by independent contractors called crew bosses, who bear
responsibility for hiring and overseeing pickers. Said Reggie Brown,
executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, "We abhor
slavery and do everything we can to prevent it. We want to make sure that
we always foster a work environment free from hazard, intimidation,
harassment, and violence." Growers, he said, cooperated with
law-enforcement officers in the Navarette case.

But when asked if it is reasonable to assume that an American who has eaten
a fresh tomato from a grocery store or food-service company during the
winter has eaten fruit picked by the hand of a slave, Molloy said, “It is
not an assumption. It is a fact.”

Gerardo Reyes, a former picker who is now an employee of the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers (CIW), a 4,000-member organization that provides the only
voice for the field hands, agrees. Far from being an anomaly, Reyes told
me, slavery is a symptom of a vast system of labor abuses. Involuntary
servitude represents just one rung on a grim ladder of exploitation. Reyes
said that the victims of this system come to Florida for one reason—to
send money to their families back home. “But when they get here, it’s
all they can do to keep themselves alive with rent, transportation, food.
Poverty and misery are the perfect recipe for slavery.”

Tomato harvesting involves rummaging through staked vines until you have
filled a bushel basket to the brim with hard, green fruits. You hoist the
basket over your shoulder, trot across the field, and heave it overhead to
a worker in an open trailer the size of the bed of a gravel truck. For
every 32-pound basket you pick, you receive a token typically worth about
45 cents—almost the same rate you would have gotten 30 years ago. Working
at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good
day, netting about $50. But a lot can go wrong. If it rains, you can’t
pick. If the dew is heavy, you sit and wait until it evaporates. If trucks
aren’t available to transport the harvest, you’re out of luck. You
receive neither overtime nor benefits. If you are injured (a common
occurrence, given the pace of the job), you have to pay for your own
medical care.

Leaning against the railing of an unpainted wooden stoop in front of a
putty-colored trailer, a tired Juan Dominguez told an all-too-familiar
story. He had left for the fields that morning at six o’clock and
returned at three. But he worked for only two of those nine hours because
the seedlings he was to plant had been delivered late. His total earnings:
$13.76.

I asked him for a look inside his home. He shrugged and gestured for me to
come in. In one ten-foot-square space there were five mattresses, three
directly on the floor, two suspended above on sheets of flimsy plywood. The
room was littered with T-shirts, jeans, running shoes, cheap suitcases. The
kitchen consisted of a table, four plastic chairs, an apartment-size stove,
a sink with a dripping faucet, and a rusty refrigerator whose door
wouldn’t close. Bare lightbulbs hung from fixtures, and a couple of fans
put up a noisy, futile effort against the stale heat and humidity. In a
region where temperatures regularly climb into the nineties, there were no
air conditioners. One tiny, dank bathroom served ten men. The rent was
$2,000 a month—as much as you would pay for a clean little condo near
Naples.

Most tomato workers, however, have no choice but to live like Dominguez.
Lacking vehicles, they must reside within walking distance of the
football-field-size parking lot in front of La Fiesta, a combination
grocery store, taqueria, and check-cashing office. During the predawn
hours, the lot hosts a daily hiring fair. I arrived a little before 5 a.m.
The parking lot was filled with more than a dozen former school buses.
Outside each bus stood a silent scrum of 40 or 50 would-be pickers. The
driver, or crew boss, selected one worker at a time, choosing young,
fit-looking men first. Once full, the bus pulled away.

Later that day, I encountered some of the men and women who had not been
picked when I put in a shift at the Guadalupe Center of Immokalee’s soup
kitchen. Tricia Yeggy, the director of the kitchen, explained that it runs
on two simple rules: People can eat as much as they want, and no one is
turned away hungry. This means serving between 250 and 300 people a day, 44
per sitting, beginning at eleven o’clock. Cheerful retirees volunteer as
servers, and the “guests” are unabashedly appreciative. The day’s
selection—turkey and rice soup with squash, corn, and a vigorous sprinkle
of cumin—was both hearty and tasty. You could almost forget the irony:
Workers who pick the food we eat can’t afford to feed themselves.

The CIW has been working to ease the migrants’ plight since 1993, when a
few field hands began meeting sporadically in a church hall. Lucas Benitez,
one of the coalition’s main spokespeople, came to the group in its early
years. Back then, the challenge was taking small steps, often for
individual workers. To make the point, Benitez unfolded a crumpled shirt
covered in dried blood. “This is Edgar’s shirt,” he said.

One day in 1996, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edgar briefly stopped
working in the field for a drink of water. His crew boss bludgeoned him.
Edgar fled and arrived at the coalition’s door, bleeding. In response to
the CIW’s call for action, over 500 workers assembled and marched to the
boss’s house. The next morning, no one would get on his bus. “That was
the last report of a worker being beaten by his boss in the field,” said
Benitez. The shirt is kept as a reminder that by banding together, progress
is possible.

Even though the CIW has been responsible for bringing police attention to a
half dozen slavery prosecutions, Benitez feels that slavery will persist
until overall conditions for field workers improve. The group has made
progress on that front by securing better pay. Between the early 1980s and
the mid-1990s, the rate for a basket of tomatoes remained 40
cents—meaning that workers’ real wages dropped as inflation rose. Work
stoppages, demonstrations, and a hunger strike helped raise it to 45 cents
on average, but the packers complained that competition for customers
prevented them from paying more. One grower refused to enter a dialogue
with CIW hunger strikers because, in his words, “a tractor doesn’t tell
the farmer how to run the farm.” The CIW decided to try an end run around
the growers by going directly to the biggest customers and asking them to
pay one cent more per pound directly to the workers. Small change to
supermarket chains and fast-food corporations, but it would add about
twenty dollars to the fifty a picker makes on a good day, the difference
between barely scraping by and earning a livable wage.

The Campaign for Fair Food, as it is called, first took aim at Yum! Brands,
owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s, and A&W. After
four years of pressure, Yum! agreed to the one-cent raise in 2005 and,
importantly, pledged to make sure that no worker who picked its tomatoes
was being exploited. McDonald’s came aboard in 2007, and in 2008 Burger
King, Whole Foods Market, and Subway followed, with more expected to join
up this year. But the program faces a major obstacle. Claiming that the
farmers are not party to the arrangement, the Florida Tomato Growers
Exchange, an agricultural cooperative that represents some 90 percent of
the state’s producers, has refused to be a conduit for the raise, citing
legal concerns.

When the Navarrete case came to light, there were no howls of outrage from
growers. Or from Florida government circles. When Cesar Navarrete, who
pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 12 years in prison this past December,
Terence McElroy of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer
Services offered his perspective on the crime: “Any legitimate grower
certainly does not engage in that activity. But you’re talking about
maybe a case a year.”

Charlie Frost, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office detective who
investigated and arrested Navarrete, disagrees. With one case wrapped up,
he and prosecutor Molloy turned to several other active slavery cases.
Sitting in his Naples office and pointing his index finger east, toward the
fields of Immokalee, he said, “It’s happening out there right now.”

Lucas, who received a temporary visa for his testimony, is now back in the
fields, still chasing the dream of making a little money to send back home.
Buying Slave-Free Fruits

In the warm months, the best solution is to follow that old mantra: buy
seasonal, local, and small-scale. But what about in winter? So far, Whole
Foods is the only grocery chain that has signed on to the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers (CIW) Campaign for Fair Food, which means that it has
promised not to deal with growers who tolerate serious worker abuses and,
when buying tomatoes, to a pay a price that supports a living wage. When
shopping elsewhere, you can take advantage of the fact that fruits and
vegetables must be labeled with their country of origin. Most of the fresh
tomatoes in supermarkets during winter months come from Florida, where
labor conditions are dismal for field workers, or from Mexico, where they
are worse, according to a CIW spokesman. One option during these months is
to buy locally produced hydroponic greenhouse tomatoes, including cluster
tomatoes still attached to the vine. Greenhouse tomatoes are also imported
from Mexico, however, so check signage or consult the little stickers often
seen on the fruits themselves to determine their source. You can also visit
the CIW’s information-packed website (ciw-online.org) if you are
interested in becoming part of the coalition’s efforts.





  • [Livingontheland] The Price of Tomatoes: Keeping Slavery Alive in Florida, Tradingpost, 03/02/2009

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