farmworkers Archives - Real Food Media

Real Food Scoop | No. 46

Tiffani Patton — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 20:26:44 +0000

If, like us, you are struggling to keep your tomatoes alive amidst sweltering temps, the climate crisis is probably looming large on your mind.

The agricultural industry has been scrambling to protect crops, too—for instance, Washington state’s cherry orchards—from drying out and causing major economic losses. And while this is an undeniably tragic effect of the climate crisis, the most urgent reality is: people are dying.

In Oregon and Washington state alone, 180 deaths and counting have been attributed to the recent heat wave (it’s also had a devastating impact on wildlife). Other severe health impacts from the heat are also reported: from heatstroke to breathing difficulties caused by smoke emitted from wildfires to kidney issues that worsen pre-existing conditions like asthma and heart disease.

Those most at risk? Farmworkers and migrants. Humanitarian organizations on the US-Mexico border report dozens of heat-related migrant deaths in the past month—a tragedy likely to worsen “as the world grows hotter, as countries in the Global South become more unstable, and as more folks head north.”

For the largely-immigrant agricultural workforce, very few US states offer heat protections—and dangerous heat is increasing rapidly: June 2021 was the hottest June on record in the United States and farmworkers die of heat at roughly 20 times the national rate, according to the CDC. This has prompted farmworker advocates to redouble efforts to enact state and federal heat protection legislation to guarantee adequate shade, water, and rest breaks for workers.

As another dangerous heat dome is set to descend on parts of the United States, this should be a wake up call to listen to farmworker-led organizations and enact not only heat protection, but broad labor protections, increased wages, access to healthcare, and legal status for frontline food and farm workers (not to mention halting the fossil fuel expansion and industrial ag model causing climate chaos to begin with). Do those who bring food to our tables deserve anything less?

In community and solidarity,

Tanya, Tiffani, Christina, and Anna

Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop

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Climate Justice and Pesticides on The Majority Report

Tiffani Patton — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 21:40:08 +0000

by Anna Lappé

I had a chance to do a deep dive on the powerful new research about the shadow of pesticide used here and around the world and what we can do about it in the first two segments of Sam Seder’s The Majority Report.

Want to learn more about this issue? Make sure you read this Q+A with two of the research paper’s authors, Wolfgang Boedeker, an epidemiologist and board member of Pesticide Action Network-Germany, and Emily Marquez, a staff scientist with the Pesticide Action Network-North America.

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Real Food Scoop | No. 43

Tanya — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 17:33:53 +0000

We need public health and immigration policies that uphold the safety and dignity of farmworkers.

This year for #FarmworkerAwarenessWeek (and beyond), we join workers across the country in calling for frontline farmworkers to be prioritized for Covid-19 vaccination and for comprehensive immigration reform in 2021.

Study after study has shown that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color face greater exposure to Covid-19 in part because they disproportionately make up the essential workforce. In California, Latinx food and agriculture workers have seen a 59% increase in mortality during Covid—compared to 6% among white Californians; 16% for white food and agriculture workers; and 28% for Black Californians.

As a recent Food Chain Workers Alliance report notes, while the CDC issued health & safety guidance for farms in June 2020, farm employers are not obligated to comply. Alliance members surveyed reported that most farmworkers received no training on Covid-19, received no PPE, and many live in crowded labor camps where social distancing is impossible. Recent Politico reporting also documents this staggering vulnerability among farmworkers.

This is why it is critical that farmworkers be prioritized in the conversation about vaccine access and broader health and labor protections. In Florida, farm labor groups are asking supporters to sign on to this open letter to Governor DeSantis to prioritize farmworkers in the vaccine rollout, including distributing in rural areas, increasing flexibility in ID requirements, and providing information in different languages.

Lastly, immigration reform—that expands access to rights and protection for all workers, especially the right to organize—is urgently needed. But these policies must be meaningful and center human rights. The Farmworkforce Modernization Act moves in the opposite direction and thus, we join the Food Chain Workers Alliance and other farm labor partners in opposing it (see Take Action below to contact your representative).

In community and solidarity,

Tanya, Christina, Tiffani, and Anna

Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop

Featured image: Farmworker Association of Florida

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The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability

Tanya — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 19:12:30 +0000

A look at how Latino/a immigrant farmers are transitioning from farmworkers to farm owners.

Although the majority of farms in the United States have US-born owners who identify as white, a growing number of new farmers are immigrants. Many of them are from Mexico and originally came to the United States looking for work in agriculture.

In The New American Farmer, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern explores the experiences of Latino/a immigrant farmers as they transition from farmworkers to farm owners, offering a new perspective on racial inequity and sustainable farming. She finds that many of these new farmers rely on farming practices from their home countries—including growing multiple crops simultaneously, using integrated pest management, maintaining small-scale production, and employing family labor.

Drawing on extensive interviews with farmers and organizers, Minkoff-Zern describes the social, economic, and political barriers immigrant farmers must overcome, from navigating USDA bureaucracy to exclusion from opportunities based on race. Immigrant farmers, with their knowledge and experience of alternative farming practices, are actively and substantially contributing to the movement for a more sustainable food system—scholars and food activists should take notice.

Click here to download the open-access book.

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Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont

Tanya — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 19:31:37 +0000

In her timely new book, Teresa M. Mares explores the intersections of structural vulnerability and food insecurity experienced by migrant farmworkers in the northeastern borderlands of the United States. Through ethnographic portraits of Latinx farmworkers who labor in Vermont’s dairy industry, Mares powerfully illuminates the complex and resilient ways workers sustain themselves and their families while also serving as the backbone of the state’s agricultural economy. In doing so, Life on the Other Border exposes how broader movements for food justice and labor rights play out in the agricultural sector, and powerfully points to the misaligned agriculture and immigration policies impacting our food system today.

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Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace

Tiffani Patton — Mon, 13 May 2019 18:55:39 +0000

From the racial defamation and mocking tone of “Mexican” restaurants geared toward the Anglo customer to the high-end Latin-inspired eateries with Anglo chefs who give the impression that the food was something unattended or poorly handled that they “discovered” or “rescued” from actual Latinos, the dilemma of how to make ethical choices in food production and consumption is always as close as the kitchen recipe, coffee pot, or table grape.

In Food Fight! author Paloma Martinez-Cruz takes us on a Chicanx gastronomic journey that is powerful and humorous. Martinez-Cruz tackles head on the real-world politics of food production from the exploitation of farmworkers to the appropriation of Latinx bodies and culture, and takes us right into transformative eateries that offer a homegrown, mestiza consciousness.

The hard-hitting essays in Food Fight! bring a mestiza critique to today’s pressing discussions of labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary.

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May Day Launch of Our Food Workers Toolkit

Tanya — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 23:00:05 +0000

We at Real Food Media are passionate about food system transformation—we want to see thriving, local, and regional food economies that produce healthy, delicious, culturally-appropriate food for all. We also know that this can’t happen without the organizing power of workers.

Many of us have been or will be food workers at some point, working for tips or low wages, working while sick or without health insurance, and even experiencing harassment or other abuses. Many of the workers who tend and harvest crops and cook and serve food can’t even afford healthy food for themselves and their families. It doesn’t have to be this way.

This May Day, as we head to the streets to support workers’ rights and protect the gains of past labor organizing (little things like the weekend and 8-hour work day) we’re also excited to launch our Building Power With Food Workers organizing toolkit. It’s the first of three organizing toolkits we’re rolling out to help you get active and inspire others to come together for healthy, fair, and sustainable food.

The toolkit includes educational materials, short films, discussion questions, activities, recipes, a glossary, and more, to explore on your own or with a group. It also includes resources to help you organize a fun and engaging film screening event around food worker justice. Check out the toolkit here.

We can transform the food system by standing up—as workers and with workers.

Get the Building Power with Food Workers toolkit

Header photo: Fibonacci Blue

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The Death of Fabián Tomasi

Tanya — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 19:31:58 +0000

Argentine farmworker and outspoken advocate against agrochemicals Fabián Tomasi passed away last week, leaving behind a defiant call to action

By Tanya Kerssen, Medium

The historic victory last month in the case of Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto reverberated around the world. It confirmed what, sadly, hundreds of thousands of people already knew: the chemicals we apply to kill weeds and pests are killing us, too. Perhaps no country knows this better than Argentina.

After Monsanto’s (now owned by Bayer) Roundup Ready soybeans were introduced to the country in 1996, the crop took over. Along with parts of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Uruguay, it is now known as the “Republic of Soy.” Between 2010 and 2016, soy has blanketed between 53 and 60 percent of the country’s total agricultural land — up from 28 percent in 1996 and 17 percent in 1986, according to FAO data.

Almost all of the soy grown in Argentina today is Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, genetically modified to resist Monsanto’s own glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide. Between 1996 and 2016, glyphosate use in Argentina jumped from 19.90 million liters to 237.6 million liters — a 1,089 percent increase. During roughly the same period, the area planted to soybeans in Argentina increased from 14.7 million acres to 47 million acres — a 216 percent increase.

In other words, glyphosate use has far outpaced the rate of crop expansion. This dispels the agribusiness-propelled myth that genetically modified crops decrease agrochemical use. The benefit of Roundup Ready soy, from the point of view of agribusiness and large-scale producers, was that you could now spray herbicide indiscriminately over large areas, without needing to carefully target “weeds.”

In Argentine provinces like Entre Ríos, where Fabián Tomasi lived and worked, communities are besieged on all sides by chemical-intensive plantations.

Such widespread use created what are sometimes referred to as “superweeds”, plants that began to develop resistance to Roundup herbicide. To keep up with these superweeds, growers ramped up Roundup applications and also started mixing in other chemicals like 2,4-D and paraquat, both also linked to major health risks.

In Argentine provinces like Entre Ríos, where Fabián Tomasi lived and worked, communities (those that haven’t yet been pushed out by the sea of soy) are besieged on all sides by chemical-intensive plantations. The high rates of birth defects, infertility, stillbirths, miscarriages, chronic respiratory illnesses, and cancers have led to rural community organizing against agribusiness and the formation of organizations like Medicos de Pueblos Fumigados (Doctors of Fumigated Communities).

An AP story from 2013 profiled Argentina’s public health crisis, including Tomasi’s story, with harrowing photographs. It describes Tomasi, a former farmworker and crop duster who had been regularly drenched in poisons, as “a living skeleton, so weak he can hardly swallow or go to the bathroom on his own.” On September 7th of this year, Tomasi finally succumbed to complications related to severe toxic polyneuropathy, a debilitating neurological disorder that doctors attribute to his occupational exposure to agrochemicals. But not before making an impassioned call to action to rid the world of these dangerous chemicals.

Tomasi wrote about the silence and fear surrounding the suffering caused by fumigation, saying: “I do not want to swallow my words. I want to scream.”

In the years before his death at 53 years of age, Tomasi frequently spoke at schools and other community spaces about his story. He was also the protagonist of a 2013 book titled Envenenados (The Poisoned Ones) by journalist Patricio Eleisegui, which featured Tomasi’s emaciated body on the cover.

In an article written a few months before his death, Tomasi wrote about the silence and fear surrounding the suffering caused by fumigation, saying: “I do not want to swallow my words. I want to scream.” He talked about the numerous threatening phone calls he received for speaking out (presumably from area soy growers), and the corrupt collusion between governments and multinational corporations: “They are not business people, they are agents of death.” (Read an English translation of the article here).

Below is a transcription, translated to English, of an open letter he read to school children in his hometown of Basabilvaso.

Open Letter to Elementary School Students of Basavilbaso

by Fabián Tomasi

You are children, but I have to explain something very difficult to you.
My story is not a nice one.
You can see that I am sick, and I want you to know why.
I used to work in the soybean fields.
I flew the planes that fumigate the soybean plants.
To fumigate is to spray poison on the plants.
This poison doesn’t kill the soybeans, it kills everything else.
The fields are full of different plants that grow naturally,
without asking for anyone’s permission, of course.
But the men who grow soybeans don’t want any of these other plants to grow.
So they call all the plants that they don’t like “weeds”
And that’s why they poison them, to kill them.
When I started this job, I didn’t know quite what I was doing.
And I would ask myself: is this good work?
But of course, after I got sick, I realized:
To kill all the forms of life that we don’t like is wrong.
It’s wrong to kill all the quails, the rodents, the daisies, and the songbirds,
only to grow a single type of plant that makes money.
It’s wrong, because it harms the earth.
Because the earth needs all of its plants, birds, and critters.
And also because it ends up hurting us humans, like it hurt me.
Even though we seem very different from one another — the animals, plants, and flowers — we’re actually very similar.
We’re all made of building blocks called “cells”
So the poison they apply to the plants hurts us too.
Plus, those plants become resistant from receiving so much poison.
They become harder and harder to kill, so more and more poison has to be used. And that’s how more and more people get sick.
Did you know it’s possible to grow crops without using poison?
But they don’t do it, because they forgot how.
And the people who sell the poison don’t want them to remember.
They don’t want us to remember that we used to grow beautiful corn and wheat without using any chemicals at all.
That’s why it’s important for you, the adults of tomorrow, to know
that people and nature have to be friends.
If we harm nature, we end up harming ourselves.
As you get older and you make decisions about your lives, whether to go to work or continue studying, I hope you’ll remember this letter.
And realize that we, the adults, did a lot of things wrong.
That you shouldn’t emulate us.
You can’t do well on your path if you harm others.
Put simply: don’t kill.

A big hug to you, my new friends.
My name is Fabián Carlos Tomasi. I hope you won’t forget me.

Translated from Spanish by Tanya Kerssen. Source: https://youtu.be/RiJmAAxzAGY

Header image: Fabián Tomasi, photographed by Pablo Piovano in Basavilbaso, Entre Ríos province, Argentina, 2014

This article originally appeared on Medium

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Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land

Tiffani Patton — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 23:26:54 +0000

Some of our most cherished sustainable farming practices have roots in African wisdom. Yet, discrimination and violence against African-American farmers has led to their decline from 14 percent of all growers in 1920 to less than 2 percent today, with a corresponding loss of over 14 million acres of land. Further, Black communities suffer disproportionately from illnesses related to lack of access to fresh food and healthy natural ecosystems.

Soul Fire Farm, cofounded by author, activist, and farmer Leah Penniman, is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. Through innovative programs such as the Black-Latinx Farmers Immersion, a sliding-scale farmshare CSA, and Youth Food Justice leadership training, Penniman is part of a global network of farmers working to increase farmland stewardship by people of color, restore Afro-indigenous farming practices, and promote equity in food access.

And now, with Farming While Black, Penniman extends that work by offering the first comprehensive manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim their rightful place of dignified agency in the food system. “Stewarding our own land, growing our own food, educating our own youth, participating in our own healthcare and justice systems,” Penniman writes, “this is the source of real power and dignity.”

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Voices of the Food Chain

Tanya — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 23:24:34 +0000

Read about our collaboration with the Food Chain Workers Alliance to produce the Voices of the Food Chain video and see other elements of the project, including Story Corps interviews.

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