Food Chains dir. by Sanjay Rawal (review)

“These are the forgotten people.” Thus spoke Edward R. Murrow about Immokalee, Florida, farmworkers in Harvest of Shame (1960), a landmark CBS Reports documentary directed by Fred W. Friendly and written by Murrow, Friendly, and David Lowe. Today, thanks to the efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and filmmaker Sanjay Rawal, farmworkers in Immokalee are a little less forgotten. Food Chains, directed by Rawal, focuses not only on the invisible food chains that keep Florida’s tomato workers oppressed but also on the corporate food chains that can erase their exploitation. With a cast of activists, including farmworkers themselves, executive producers Eva Longoria and Eric Schlosser, the insightful food writer Barry Estabrook, and playwright Eve Ensler, the documentary offers a biting and well crafted justice critique of our food system.

South Florida is famous for providing almost all of the fresh winter tomatoes in the United States. It is also infamous for a rash of slavery cases involving farmworkers; between 1997 and 2010, 1,200 workers in the region were freed from slavery. In addition, overcrowded and rundown housing, wage theft, sexual harassment, and sexual assault are rampant, as are the ruinous effects of pesticides on the health of farmworkers and their children (Estabrook 2011). Eighty percent of female farmworkers experience sexual harassment on the job. In comparison, an estimated 25 percent of all women in U.S. jobs are victims of sexual harassment. Most farmworkers are poor, Latino, and undocumented. One worker in the film departed for work at five in the morning and returned home at eight in the evening; his paycheck for the day was $42.76. These are poverty wages, and the work is grueling and often performed in extreme heat. Food Chains shows the rapid pace of tomato picking: workers heft thirty-two pound buckets onto their shoulders, run 100 feet or more to throw the buckets up to a handler on a truck, and then start again. Each bucket earns a worker fifty cents; 4,000 pounds of tomatoes, or 125 buckets, are picked by one worker on a typical workday. As Eve Ensler points out in Food Chains, such impoverishment destroys the potential for resistance, and being at the bottom of the U.S. class system has “disabled” these workers’ voices. Add to this the fact that Florida has no state agency to investigate wage violations. Moreover, the film reports that there are fourteen federal inspectors for Florida’s 40,000 farms.

These Immokalee, Florida, farmworkers are not alone, however, and the film offers for some context information on the conditions of farmworkers in California and around the world. In Napa Valley, we visit an encampment of homeless migrant workers who cannot afford housing. They have been priced out of the market by those seeking bucolic retreats in a scenic agricultural region that has thrived on the labor of farmworkers. We are told that whether a bottle of Napa Valley wine is priced at ten dollars or forty dollars, the labor cost per bottle is about twenty-five cents. The film also offers connections to the rash of worker suicides, fourteen in 2010 alone, at the Foxconn factories in China that implicated major consumer brands, Apple and Hewlett Packard among them (Pomfret 2010). In addition, we see footage of the tragedy at the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh, where a building collapse killed 1,129 workers who were making clothes for brands such as Walmart, Joe Fresh, and the Children’s Place. Ensler offers a blunt analysis, telling us that these workers, at the bottom of the supply chain, are not seen as people, but rather as a means to make money. Rawal also connects the dots to agricultural history, including slavery, and more recent free trade initiatives. For example, the film describes how the North American Free Trade Agreement put millions of small farmers in Mexico out of business, forcing migration to cities and El Norte.

The food chain is very well illustrated with compelling graphics that depict the consolidation of supermarket chains...