The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy

Introduction by Charles D. Thompson, Jr.

Introduction Charles D. Thompson, Jr. This book is about students, consumers, and advocates joining farmworkers in their struggle for justice. It introduces a variety of issues and challenges that farmworkers face in health care, housing, education, and other areas, including legal and political hurdles . And it provides guidance on what farmworker advocates can do about these challenges. We have concentrated on the southeastern United States—the region that includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi , North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia—because this is where we live and work and a region that has received too little attention in farmworker literature, even though more than 40 percent of U.S. farmworkers labor in the region today. By some estimates, farmworkers in the Southeast may number nearly one and one-half million. By targeting farmworkers in the Southeast, we locate them in a long history of mostly landless and underpaid people who have provided farm labor for centuries. The South, as the one-time bastion of slaveholding and later the Jim Crow laws of segregation, has long been known for its agricultural and labor inequities. This region, which once measured these differences in terms of black and white people, has become multiethnic as Latinos have moved into the Southeast in greater numbers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Latino population nearly doubled in the region during the 1990s alone. The Latino population of Georgia and North Carolina more than doubled from 1990 to 1998. No southeastern state is left unaffected by this Latino influx. Even West Virginia , with its relatively small agricultural economy, saw a 21 percent increase in its Latino population during the 1990s. Nationwide, the proportion of foreign-born farmworkers, most of them Mexican men under thirty-five years of age, rose from 10 percent in 1989 to 81 percent in 1998 (Mehta et al. 2000). Quite simply, inequities confronting agricultural workers, while centuries old, have new and often changing faces. 3 Introduction Along with explaining farmworker demographics and the particular challenges of various facets of farm work, we have endeavored to concentrate on farmworker lives. Challenging the notion that farmworkers are victims, we discuss farmworkers as human beings with rich cultural and religious lives well beyond their labor in the fields. Above all, we combine this information about farmworker lives and labor with a call to action among readers who want to do something to right the injustices farmworkers endure. In this spirit, we invited contributors to this volume who are experts in their respective areas and who are advocates for farmworkers. Regardless of background or vocation, the authors share a common commitment to making a difference in the lives and working conditions of the people who provide the nation’s food and to ending farmworker exploitation and injustices that persist today. These injustices are not inherent to agriculture. Rather, they have become ingrained in its very structure because of discrimination and greed, due in large part to the control of agricultural power structures increasingly centered in large corporations. Injustices in farming in the United States continue because agribusiness resists changes to farm labor practices and labor laws that threaten its power. Yet this book came about because we know change is possible. We have witnessed reforms, although change historically has occurred incrementally and with a struggle. Who Are Farmworkers? Though definitions may vary somewhat, farmworkers are laborers who cultivate, harvest, and prepare a variety of seasonal crops for market or storage, including fruits and nuts (33 percent of workers), vegetables (28 percent), horticulture (14 percent), and field crops (16 percent).The remaining 9 percent of workers may work in several categories in a single year. There are three main groups of farmworkers , though we must be aware that any of these categories may shift and change for individual workers during a single season: migrant farmworkers , seasonal farmworkers, and guestworkers. Food animal workers , such as those who work in poultry and hog processing, often share similar migration histories and labor inequities and can be called farmworkers as well. Though obtaining exact numbers is next to impossible, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates between two million and three million fieldworkers alone in the United States today. 4 The Human Cost of Food Migrant farmworkers are individuals whose primary employment is seasonal agriculture, who live in temporary housing, and who travel more than seventy-five miles...