Earlier this month, President Bush roiled U.S. vegetable farmers by announcing a crackdown on undocumented workers. Last week, industrial-meat giant Smithfield Foods goosed the hog-futures market by inking a deal to export 60 million pounds of U.S.-grown pork to China.
These events, unrelated though they seem, illustrate a common point: that despite all the recent fuss around local food, the globalized food system, far from losing strength, continues to gain traction.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree -- especially if no one's there to pick it.
Unwittingly or not, Bush's move puts a heavy squeeze on large-scale U.S. vegetable growers, and will likely result in more food hauled in from nations with weaker environmental regulations. Smithfield's triumph in China reflects that nation's diminishing food-production capacity -- one of the prices it has paid for its rise to global manufacturing preeminence.
As more and more industrially produced food whips around the globe, the result is more pressure on soil and water resources, more greenhouse-gas emissions, and more fertile land made vulnerable to suburban sprawl. In this article and the next, I'll attempt to illuminate how global economic forces shift food production from one place to another, to the detriment of local communities and the environment alike.
Bottom of the Barrel
As U.S. fruit and vegetable farms have scaled up to meet the demands of increasingly large buyers like Wal-Mart, they've come to rely on a steady supply of low-wage and highly flexible workers, willing to toil long hours at peak seasons and make themselves scarce when not needed. Moreover, these mega-farms increasingly specialize in one or two crops, and rely heavily on poisons to keep pests and weeds away. Thus in addition to being poorly paid and monotonous, the work tends to be dangerous -- and undesirable for anyone with other options.
Not surprisingly, according to most estimates, 70 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, the great bulk of them underground refugees from the devastated rural economies of Mexico and Central America.
For several seasons now, fruit and vegetable farmers have had to scramble to find enough workers to harvest their crops. One factor in the labor shortage has been an increasingly militarized border, making it more difficult for would-be workers to cross over. Another has been the building boom, which has lured undocumented workers into higher-paying construction jobs.
Thus farmers in production centers like California and Arizona were already tense about the labor situation when Bush rolled out his hodgepodge of measures designed to force farmers (and other employers) to stop relying on undocumented workers. (For the record, as I've written before, I think it's schizophrenic and childish to make a big show of hunting down and deporting the people who feed you.)
Farmers across the country quickly cried foul. In New York's Hudson Valley, where workers come from Mexico and Central America, apple growers fear a bumper crop could largely wither on the branches. "We have 3 billion apples to pick this fall and every single one of them has to be picked by hand," one grower told The New York Times. "It's a very labor-intensive industry, and there is no local labor supply that we can draw from, as much as we try. No one locally really wants to pick apples for six weeks in the fall."
Down in Arizona -- epicenter of winter vegetable production in the U.S. -- farmers are taking a cue from their peers in Colorado and desperately hiring inmate labor. But an Arizona prison official acknowledged to The Christian Science Monitor that, as in Colorado, inmates can offset only a fraction of the state's farm-labor shortage.
Bush's move came at the height of harvest season in California -- source of about half of the fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. "I'm guessing 80, 90 percent of the ag work force is illegal," one grower told the Associated Press. "Implementing this rule will be catastrophic."
Less Veggies, More Sprawl
In a well-functioning market, farmers would raise wages to draw in more workers, and pass the increased costs on to their buyers: the big supermarkets, restaurant chains, and food processors. But as a California Farm Bureau official told AP, those entities will likely reject domestic price hikes and look to other parts of the world for produce. "If our guys try to raise prices, they are going to be replaced by foreign production," he said.
In essence, he's arguing that fruit and vegetable farming, like manufacturing over the past generation, has entered a "race to the bottom": a relentless hunt for cheap labor markets and lax regulatory regimes.
Is that just Farm Bureau spin? Not likely. Indeed, the U.S. is already outsourcing an increasing share of its fruit and veg production. As this USDA backgrounder [PDF] from April 2006 shows, the import share of U.S. vegetable consumption has been rising steadily, from about 7 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005. Fruit imports (excluding bananas) as a percentage of consumption have also doubled, rising from 12 percent in 1992-1994 to 24 percent in 2002-2004.
Much of that jump can be explained by off-season purchases -- the Chilean-asparagus-in-January effect. But with marketing relationships and trade infrastructure in place, nothing stops distributors from buying, say, cheaper Mexico-grown lettuce over California product, or New Zealand apples over those grown in New York or Washington. California has already seen its once-huge garlic production dwindle, overwhelmed by a flood of cheap -- and nearly flavorless -- Chinese-grown garlic into the U.S. market.
What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that's already happening in California. In the state's lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation's most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation.
Meanwhile, production of the fruits and vegetables we consume shifts to nations with even weaker regulatory regimes than ours, meaning more insecticides and other agricultural chemicals released into the biosphere. And increasing distances mean burning more fossil fuel to haul that suspect bounty from farm to table.
While these grand global trends are indeed overwhelming to think about, there's no need to feel disempowered. Get involved with burgeoning movements, nationwide and globally, to rebuild local (and, yes, regional) food systems that don't thrive by exploiting labor and trashing the land.
Meanwhile, while U.S. vegetable farming gets squeezed between labor shortages and global competition, other, less labor-intensive forms of U.S. agriculture -- namely industrial grain and meat production -- thrive in the global marketplace. And that will be the topic of the next column.
Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?
Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations
Comments
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ecojules Posted 5:07 am
30 Aug 2007
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blooc Posted 2:09 pm
30 Aug 2007
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lutz Posted 3:50 am
31 Aug 2007
I'm first generation Hungarian-American. My father was a freedom fighter in Hungary after WW2. He came to this country & was a LEGAL immigrant for 52 years BEFORE he got his citizenship. The only reason he got it was because he was going back to Hungary to see his remaining family one more time before they all take that leap into the great by & by. He's never had any trouble with the law (the occasional speeding ticket not withstanding) worked hard all his life (at one time working 3 jobs to keep food on the table & a roof over his family's heads) & he did it LEGALLY. Is there something about LEGAL you don't understand? Oh, by the way, I don't have a problem picking fruits & veggies to make a couple of bucks. it's honest LEGAL work. Enjoyable too & usually close enough to an area where I can go backpacking when I'm done & rest my bones after a few weeks of intense picking & grinning. Nothing personal but maybe, say, try looking a little deeper...the answer is already there it's just not enforced... lutz
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Brudaimonia Posted 4:58 am
31 Aug 2007
The company says it would be "more than happy" to have an election among workers to decide if the plant should be unionized, but its questionable how much we can trust that statement when, according to a 2005 Human Rights Watch report, the company has been violently anti-union at the Tar Heel plant in the past.
Smithfield workers have sought union representation from UFCW since soon after the plant opened in 1992. In the Unfair Advantage case study of the Tar Heel plant, Human Rights Watch found "not only abuses of workers' rights by management but also troubling actions by state and local authorities ... state power was used to interfere with workers' freedom of association in violation of international human rights norms.
[...]
The company is quite clear about its continued opposition to unionization of the Tar Heel plant. In a written statement to Human Rights Watch it said:
We do not believe a union is necessary or would be helpful to our employees at our Tar Heel, North Carolina plant...
[...]
In 1997, the union lost an election at the Tar Heel plant after a campaign marked by unlawful intimidation, coercion, and violence.
[...]
[In a National Labor Relations Board trial in 1998 and 1999,] the judge found that Smithfield illegally:
threatened to discharge union supporters and to close the plant if workers chose union representation;
threatened to call the INS to report immigrant workers if workers chose union representation;
threatened the use of violence against workers engaged in organizing activities;
threatened to blacklist workers who supported the union;
harassed, intimidated, and coerced workers who supported the union;
disciplined, suspended, and fired many workers because of their support for the union;
spied on workers engaged in lawful union activities;
asked workers to spy on other workers' union activity;
grilled workers about other workers' union activities;
suppressed workers' right to freely discuss the union in non-work areas on non-work time and to demonstrate support for the union at work by wearing unobtrusive union insignia;
confiscated lawful union literature being lawfully distributed by workers;
applied a gag rule against union supporters while giving union opponents free rein;
applied work rules strictly against union supporters but not against union opponents.
The judge concluded that the widespread company violations made the election un-free and unfair...
That sure puts the phrase "more than happy" into an interesting perspective.
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swan Posted 7:15 am
03 Sep 2007
We have to stop waiting for someone else to deal with this. Wherever you live, if you really want to, you can find a way to start making this happen. I put some ideas out there in my blog whenever I get the chance. See what we're doing in Austin, Texas at http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com
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michelefield Posted 9:42 pm
03 Sep 2007
Tom, you cite the rise in imports in vegetable etc production (against the rise in exports from the large-scale US crops like wheat). This has a lot to do with the quality of arable soil in the States -- the black stuff trickling through your fingers couldn't grow beans. Americans have over-used this resource (soil) and are thrown back onto the supplements to thrive (ie. chemical additions to the soil). But it's not just labour that is cheaper overseas, it's also soil that is better and less expensive to farm. A rather scary piece I read recently said that the food tastes of European cities will look to the resources of EU farms in Poland, Romania, and so on -- where the soil is still like the soil of Britain in the 19th century. Where in the States do you have 19th-century soil?--without mangling your wilderness areas?
More to say, but another time. My plea is for Grist to use its great forum to put the questions in a bigger policy picture.
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Jeremiah Posted 9:13 am
04 Sep 2007
As usual your article gets in some Bush bashing. You might have mentioned the President's proposals for immigation reform, including a guest worker program. Proposals that were shot down by Democrats and Repubicans, who cried for "enforcing our immigation laws" without easing entry for guest workers. Years ago, we could have expected better from the Democrats. You should have assigned this failure to provide a proper agricultural workforce Congress, not to the President.
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businessch1 Posted 4:07 pm
04 Sep 2007
www.businesschannel1.com
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SMLowry Posted 4:36 am
08 Sep 2007
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klbmarsh Posted 3:55 am
14 Sep 2007
the reason the school year is set the way it is, is so that kids can harvest their families' fall crops, right?
Why can't the apple growers in the Hudson Valley hire teenagers and other minimum-wagers to pick their apples? Can they hire youth/church groups to pick their apples in exchange for a sizeable donation to their group (which is less than they pay their illegals)? Do they really pay that little for the illegals? (Probably, and that's just wrong.)
The alternative is more imported, possibly unsafe, fruits and veggies: "the import share of U.S. vegetable consumption has been rising steadily, from about 7 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005. Fruit imports (excluding bananas) as a percentage of consumption have also doubled, rising from 12 percent in 1992-1994 to 24 percent in 2002-2004."
Trying to eat in-season local produce helps, but since there are fewer family farms, it's not so easy.
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John former Marine Posted 10:46 pm
27 Nov 2007
Anyways, the whole system has been gamed to exploit as many people as possible and get the poorest to bear the heaviest burdens. The people in Norwich, VT and Hanover, NH, can eat their organic, free-range, shade-grown, local foie gras and brie because they've got beaucoup buck...but not many other Vermonters can afford to buy into the "local food" movement right now because their are some huge problems built into the system. I'm sure other states are dealing with the same issues. I say tax the hell out of the second (3rd/4th/5th) home-owners and tourists. Everybody is working so hard to pull tourism into the state but they're doing the same thing Vermont was doing back in the 1840s with their economy, they're putting all their eggs in one basket. Back then, it was sheep farming and they devastated the state before leaving it dirt poor for the next century.
Anyways, if people are going to produce their own food, they need land to start with. And they need to be able to afford to grow the food. A lot of people would do it for the love of it with their own labor (forget importing illegal labor) if they could just get by.
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