The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer;Jim Mason

Author:Peter Singer;Jim Mason [Mason, Peter Singer;Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2008-10-13T15:49:00+00:00

UNFAIR TRADE AT HOME

If food grown in developing countries that does not come with a fair trade label will sometimes involve the denial of basic rights to workers, it would be a mistake to think that buying food produced in one's own country ensures that the workers were protected from similar rights violations. We have already seen that the chicken industry is based in the South, where workers are less likely to be in a union, that long hours of repetitive work in poor conditions at low pay are standard, and that Tyson Foods has been fined by the Department of Labor for employing 14-year-old children. So, at least in the past, Tyson Foods operations in the United States have not always met the SA8000 standard that Chiquita has achieved on all its own farms in Latin America.

In considering whether it is better to buy local food, we compared the energy involved in producing tomatoes in June at Mary Ann Masarech's local Connecticut farm with the energy it would take to truck them in from the tomato-growing region around Immokalee, in southwestern Florida. What we didn't consider then, however, are the labor conditions under which the tomatoes are grown and picked in this region, the largest supplier of supermarket and fast-food chain tomatoes in the U.S.

Forty-five years ago, Ed Murrow featured Immokalee in Harvest of Shame, a television documentary about the conditions under which immigrant tomato-pickers worked. Decades later, conditions were just as bad. Oxfam America, the international aid organization, found reports of the abuse of workers in Florida so similar to what it already knew about the exploitation of agricultural workers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia that it decided to take action, even though this abuse was happening in a developed country. Oxfam supported a group of immigrant laborers who had formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The Coalition presented evidence to the U.S. Department of justice that hundreds of immigrant workers in and around Immokalee had been made into slaves. As a result six separate modern-day slavery prosecutions have now led to convictions in southern Florida. Here are details of three of them:

* Two agricultural employers held over 400 men and women in debt bondage in Florida and South Carolina. The workers, mostly indigenous Mexicans and Guatemalans, were forced to work 10 to 12 hour days, 6 days per week, for as little as $20 per week, under the constant watch of armed guards. Those who attempted escape were assaulted, pistol-whipped, and even shot. In 1997, the employers were prosecuted on slavery, extortion, and firearms charges and sentenced to 15 years each in federal prison.

A South Florida employer held more than 30 tomato pickers in two trailers in isolated swampland west of Immokalee, keeping them under constant watch. Three workers escaped the camp, only to have their boss track them down a few weeks later. The employer ran one of them down with his car, stating that he owned the pickers. In 2000, the employer was sentenced to three years in prison.

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