Mariah has provided us with two helpful links to look at:
http://www.bridgemi.com/economy/michigan-farms-and-restaurants-who-will-fill-jobs
A quote from a farmer in this article that stood out to me is, “‘I don't think people understand just how much food is touched by migrant hands. I don't think the president understands this issue yet.’” The article is centered on the dependency of the entire agriculture system on migrant labor, and the stress the current administration and potential policies related to immigration are putting on farmers right here in Michigan.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/4-not-so-easy-ways-to-dismantle-racism-in-the-food-system-20170427
This article is a solution-oriented approach to thinking about the way we produce food in the US. Author and activist Leah Penniman writes, “Our food system needs a redesign if it’s to feed us without perpetuating racism and oppression.”
Here is another article that provides a comprehensive overview of the problems that farmworkers in the U.S. face on a daily basis: http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/03/farmworkers/
This is an 11-minute TEDx Talk providing interesting historical connections of activist movements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUcwytnlDsM
This is an interview from the Praxis Center of Arcus with two Black radical “earth stewards” that encompasses a variety of topics regarding the failure of capitalism and the importance of land ownership: https://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/when-capitalism-fails-who-will-feed-us/
As you can probably see based on the variety of links I’ve included in this post, I had a hard time narrowing down my ideas in regards to farmworkers rights. In conducting my research, I was really struck by the obvious limitations and failures of the current system and how unsustainable it truly is. I appreciated Nikki Henderson’s TEDx Talk and the historical implications of the fight for food justice, which also comes up in the Praxis Center interview. That interview is also important to me in the context of this class’s goal of being solution-oriented and doing some radical reimagining of the way we produce and consume food, which “4 Not-So-Easy Ways to Dismantle Racism in the Food System” deals with. In your reflections I am interested in hearing about how much you knew of farmworkers struggles prior to this class/post and how you plan to reconcile this information in your lives and relationship to food and farming? I am also curious to hear about what solutions and possibilities you can imagine of just farming and food production/consumption?
Before this class I knew that our farming and agricultural system is runned by immigrants. These immigrants are paid nearly nothing and are also abused and worse cases killed. Everytime I eat a meal or go to the store I wonder how many people have suffered in order to feed me. It makes me angry but you can't live without eating. This is one of the reasons why I want to have my own gardens so that I know where my food is coming from and that no one has had to suffer in order to feed me. I don't see the system changing anytime soon beacuse we live in such a capitlist society where cheaper overruels morals. I think that people should be shown how our food system works. Many people talk about places like China and thier explotation of workers but they don't even realize that the food they eat comes from modern day slavery. If we show them this then maybe they would reconsider how they think about food and eating.
ReplyDeleteEven before taking this course, I was aware that immigrants compose a large portion of the labor force on most farms in the United States. I was also aware that many of those immigrants traveled for work and that the living conditions and working conditions were very poor. I think purchasing products through a fair trade is a good start. Buying wholesome, sustainable products from companies that treat their employees and animals with respect and fairness. However, in order to purchase via fair trade, consumers need to be educated. And this might be the hardest piece of the puzzle because oftentimes the organizations and people the consumers rely on to educate us abut the industry and their products don’t have a strong desire to educate us on the detailed process of what is happening. We need to educate ourselves.
ReplyDeleteThanks Amy, for providing us with links to consider this very important issue. (And thank you to Mariah, as well!)
ReplyDeleteAs I am slightly embarrassed to admit, I’ve never thought about farmworkers’ struggles in great deal. I’ve taken a lot of classes that have asked me to consider migration and immigration, and as a result, I’ve had a lot of conversations about these groups more broadly. However, these focuses have tended to focus primarily on access to education. (Although, of course, this intersects with farmworkers’ issues, I’ve never thought about it explicitly in these terms.)
Farmworkers, sadly, often get ignored. (I’m thinking about how little they’ve come up, even within the context of this class!) Within our current food system, it’s incredibly easy to distance yourself from the people who are growing your food. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I grew up in the suburbs, which means I didn’t live near any farms. My only real interactions with those worked on farmers came from my time going to farmers markets that tended to be more small-scale. As a result, when I was a child, I certainly wasn’t thinking about those who were doing the vast majority of the United States’ food.
Between the questions you are posing and the questions that Amy had us thinking about in regards to fast food, I find myself thinking a lot about ethical consumption. How do we make decisions about what it is we eat? Are there existing ways that we can monitor the human labor that goes into our food? I want to support those farms that are providing a humane work environment (through adequate health insurance, high wages, etc.) but I’m not sure how it is that we can go about determining this. I think that lobbying the government is an important step, but as an individual, I also want to think about what I personally can do to “put my money where my mouth is,” so to speak.
As an international student, I don’t have much knowledge of the farmworkers struggles in US. To be honest, I am surprised to hear that racial discrimination exist in the agriculture industry, because the immigrants are supposed to better off in US, otherwise there is no propose for immigrating. Hope someone could explain this for me. In China, since there is no colonialism, the racial discrimination does not exist. In fact, being a minority (in any industry) could be a good thing, because they are often supported by some left-wing policies. Thus it is still not fair to say Chinese farmers got equal human rights. On the other hand, different from US, Chinese agriculture industries is dominated by large number of small farms, but in recent years, the number of small farms is also decreasing, due to the opportunity to get higher income in other industry. So one of the farmworkers struggles is there is barely young Chinese farmers working in the farm. Looking back to US, in order to solve the problem of racial discrimination in farm, one method I can think of is to build an inclusive institution that focus on this issue, another method is to let USDA set a new food category, the farmer friendly food. Just like organic food, USDA could put a tag on every farmer friendly food, which use to inform shoppers that these food companies support the human right of their farmworkers. The last method is to subsidize the immigrant farmers, let them have their own farm, maybe the discrimination can be eliminated once every farm have the same power. However, I personally think it would be less likely to work, because government won’t like to or don’t have enough budget to make the subsidy.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Amy! Before hearing about "farmworker legal services" at K college during my sophomore year, I will wholeheartedly admit that I had no consciousness to farmworker rights in the U.S. I heard of "migrant workers" and "farmworker rights" and that's when I suspected that there must be an injustice in farm worker rights and also relate to migrant workers.
ReplyDeleteThe articles in this post really have increased my consciousness to this topic-- not just my awareness but I tried to imagine myself in the lives of the workers and I'm trying to understand their positions in our society. While reading the praxis center post, specifically when she talks about permaculture and the exploitation of indigenous communities, I wonder what the balance between learning and taking from other cultures and giving back to other cultures is exactly.... but this is fraying from the topic at hand..
Anyway, I feel as if I'm still letting this information soak in, so my thoughts on how to go forward in my life knowing this are still sprouting and will evolve (hopefully discussion tomorrow will also help!) but what I can say for now is that I would like to not be a consumer in this exploitative system-- I would like to learn how to become less dependent on the system and practice a more independent and minimalistic lifestyle. At times I think of this as naive, but I have a very hard time believing that we can change our systems without truly being the change that we want to see.
Before this course as well as before this specific post, I was not fully aware of the struggles that farmworkers faced. Throughout my life, I never really thought about the lives of farmers, because I was never really exposed to farmers or knew of many farmers to heard these perspectives. Additionally, besides studying abroad in Costa Rica, I was never really educated on the lives and struggles of farmers nationally or internationally. One of the ways that I can reconcile information in my life and in my relationship to food and farming is to educate my peers around me about what I have learned within the class. Currently, I find myself sharing lessons from he course to my friends and family, because they are always interested in why I took Farming, and what could be possibly learned in the course. Additionally, although I will continue to lives in various cities after school, I have given thought to consuming food from urban gardens. I have a few solutions and possibilities for better farming and food production/consumption. As stated in previous posts, I think change starts with early education within school and other surrounding environments. Education can also be implemented within media sources, such as educational programming, online content, and other forms of media that could be used as a source of education. Another way is more community envelopment in different types of living environments. The act of bringing a community together helps to create an educational experience as well as a hands-on experience.
ReplyDeleteBeing one hundred precent honest, before this class I did not know much about farmworker struggles; I had several general assumptions (like the fact that migrant workers make up a large percentage of our farm workers), but I did not know any concrete information— I never studied it intently before. However through our many group discussions in this class, I feel as through I have learned a lot about the current state of our agricultural system. I think this is a really interesting topic that we have not covered yet in detail, besides in passing, and I am glad you chose to talk about it. One of the things that stood out to me, in the first article in particular, was the quote at the vary bottom by the farmer who mentioned how these jobs are not the type of jobs Americans, college students, or even himself would like to do. It made me first think back to our discussion on the “value” of jobs and what jobs our society looks at with esteem— and now looking at migrant workers and their importance in our agricultural system, it makes this whole problem with farmer struggles more significant today. I cannot think of any solutions off the top of my head, but in general I think part of this issue goes back to getting people more aware about where their food comes from, and who is making/preparing/growing it. I am interested to see what kinds of solutions and discussions will go one in class!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing these thought-provoking resources, Amy! I'm appreciate how the "4 Not-So-Easy Ways" article starts out by going right to the root of the problem: our US agricultural system is founded on and functions on stolen land and exploited labor. My awareness of the problems in our food and farming systems has been a life-long journey for me, but it wasn't until a couple of years ago in the Slow Farming class when this fact that our entire system is driven by an engine of oppression and exploitation became crystal-clear for me. Our current agricultural system DOES NOT FUNCTION without ongoing theft and forced labor.
ReplyDeleteWhat that means to me is that radical change is necessary. We can't "fix" this system because this system isn't actually broken--it's actually functioning exactly as it has been designed to function. It is designed to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of certain people at the expense of others and it does exactly that. Despite industry rhetoric, US agriculture has never been about "feeding the world."
Which is why I really appreciate the work that the Cookes are doing, both in teaching people to grow their own food and also in working to reclaim possibilities for land ownership for urban farmers. I think there a lot of folks out there who would like to farm if they had access to land and a way to make a viable living doing the work. Farming is always hard work, but there's a big difference between slaving in someone else's field and running your own farm. Our current model requires people who have no other viable choice to labor under painful and dangerous conditions. But couldn't we build an agricultural model in which people who are deeply called to work with the earth can do that in ways that are satisfying and enriching? A model in which being a farmer was an attractive profession, not a last-resort job? Everyone needs food to live. Why don't we honor and support the people who grow it for us?
I have spent a lot of time in a lot of my classes, especially anso and environmental studies ones, talking about this aspect of the food system and the ways in which it reproduces, perpetuates and creates racism and oppression. It's also something that I've been working through in relationship to the food choices I make, like buying organic or local or eating vegetarian or vegan. I found all of the sources you provided to be really illuminating of this issue from a lot of different angles, which I really appreciated. I was especially engaged by the yes! magazine article!
ReplyDeleteOne thing I was thinking a lot about when doing these readings was a book called "Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies" that I read for an anso class about migrant workers on a specific farm in northern Washington. In the book the author describes a labor hierarchy that is laid out by class, race, and citizenship where Triqui laborers, an indigenous group from Oaxaca Mexico, exist at the bottom of this hierarchy and experience suffering acutely and specifically because of their class, their ethnicity, and their citizenship status. This book and the framework it provides, both in this idea of a labor hierarchy and in its discussion of the violence continuum that workers experience and embody, has drastically shifted the way I think about farmworkers rights and the invisible role that migrant workers play in all of our lives. I really appreciated the way that it framed my understanding of this weeks reading and the way that this weeks reading reinforced and nuanced my previous understanding.
I am saddened when thinking about farmworkers’ struggles as I am forced to face the reality of it all and how much it has affected my own family. I do not have any direct experience working in agriculture prior to this class but my family does. My grandmother and grandfather were part of the bracero program which allowed them to come this country in the first place. They would work agriculture fields in Texas. My mother once told me that the work about the she would do in the fields picking fruit and vegetables for 9+ hour workdays for pennies an hour. She lived in a tent and my grandfather would back the truck into the entrance to the tent so that no one would try to break into the tent to rob my mom and her sisters. I still have aunts who work in fields in California picking strawberries and oranges. They tell me that the work that they do is extremely tiring and hard on their bodies. They do the work so that their children don’t have to do the same work later.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, before this class I had not put a great deal of thought into exploitative labor being used for farming purposes. I have always been aware that this was a problem in the past, but I was less aware that unfair treatment of workers was also a problem of the present. One improvement to the system that I think would be helpful is a greater transparency of who is actually putting in the labor to grow our food. This could include better education for young people about social justice issues for migrant farmers as well as greater requirements for what farm workers need to be provided (higher pay and health insurance).
ReplyDeleteBefore the class I had a relatively well-informed idea about the migrant workers in the farming industry. However, lot of that was in the global context. For example, I knew about the Chinese migrant worker system, where they have a household registration system called hook. Long story short, what it does is binds the huge population of rural workers in the farming area, to stop them from moving into the city in search of a better future. If any workers do move (they do), they become “illegal residents” in their own nation. It’s a caste system, literally dividing people based on their parents’ occupation and economic status. In Korea (with the recent presidential election), topic of migrant workers also surfaced. Lot of our workers are from Southeast Asia, and because Korea is so homogenous, we discriminate against them.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, this puts the topic of “migrant” into conversation. Who do we define as migrant workers? Because in China, white people (loosely defined, European, Caucasian Americans) were given the lovely title of “expats” shortened for expatriates, which implies that they are professionals or skilled workers, even if they were recent college graduates with no jobs (haha).
4 Not Easy Ways to Dismantle Racism in the Food System (or to include case with Korea and China, Systems of Oppression) really killed it, both with the title and the content. All these are more clearly defined (albeit really really really difficult) solutions with goals. Furthermore, they have differing levels of application - some people can help by acting as an informed consumer, continuously educating themselves. Granted, not everyone has the economic privilege to do this, but I feel like everyone in this room is in a relatively good economic standing?
As it mentioned in post, farm workers' rights is a complex issue argued for many years. After Industrial Revolution, traditional farmers come out from farms to factories. At the same time the average income increases and legal lowest pay increases when a country get developed. Food factories owners always try to seek for the way that can lower the costs and maximize benefits. They choose immigrants to do that.
ReplyDeleteThe conflict is, both government and people still want the lower pay food, however, many of them anti-immigrants and think they cause then sacrifice their rights.In the "4 Not-So-Easy Ways", it is said that historically the policies stripped out people of color out from farms. They feed many people but they are not able to access safe and healthy food.
Personally I am passionate about that, because I cannot figure a solution can be "good" for every one or it is able to be executed. Donation and assistance can help some people but cannot solve the whole issue in systematically. Owners will not do some change that may sacrifice their rights. The only thing everyone can do now is do your best on saving food. The demand of food is always constant, reduce wasting is giving other people more resource