Food Insecurity for Farmworkers (Response to Brown and Getz)

I find some fundamental immorality to the concept of people working everyday in the food complex having to go home hungry. In reading the article by Brown and Getz I found myself very provoked. I was emotionally invested in the plight of the farm laborers.

The article started out a bit dry discussing the methodology of their findings. What I found interesting was the constant mention of the unavailability of solid data. The struggle to interact with this marginalized community of people was evident in the data seeking process. This technicality speaks very much to the invisibility of the farm laborers, and inherently the issues that face them. The other sticking point I found disturbing was the USDA’s decision to abandon the term “hunger” in there statistical definition of food security. They instead chose the terms “food insecure” and “very food insecure”. The decision to stop using the term hunger in the discussion of food insecurity takes away from the human aspect of the issue. Perhaps it has to do with the economic status of the people who decide our language, and our policies about issues facing poor and disenfranchised communities. If you have never been really hungry, then it is difficult to understand the term hunger so deeply. Had you experienced hunger so personally perhaps you would not dismiss it so quickly.

How is it that we have a food system that leaves the very workers who put food on the nation’s tables unable to feed themselves? This problem has to do with many things. There are issues of racial inequality, of classism, and of course immigration policy. It is so disheartening to see the way our country contributes to the impoverish conditions in Mexico (and Latin America), and then treats these people as criminals when they come north seeking security for their families. Our nation’s food system has imposed commodity based agriculture onto other countries through policy like NAFTA. These trade practices mean that we take our agriculture structure and place it on Mexican soil. With the government subsidies on crops like corn still in place, big agriculture can afford to sell staple foods at lower prices than the small scale farmer. Practices like this happen all over the world; we are just more impacted on the effects of these practices on Mexico due to its proximity to our country. We see the effects in immigration of people across the border every day. We take these people seeking opportunity and use them as laborers in our low wage jobs. They pick our food, they clean our houses. Without the work of this community our current food infrastructure would collapse. We ask of these people to work for wages and conditions that rival slavery.

I believe that immigration reform and change in trade policy are imperative to the improvement of the working and living conditions of farm laborers. You cannot look at the plight of the farm workers and not consider immigration policy. To make it nearly impossible for people entering this country to gain legal status leaves these people in a vulnerable position ripe for abuse by employers. You leave them without a voice, and the agriculture industry knows this. Out of fear of deportation, they remain quiet. As long as we continue to criminalize immigrants in this country we will see no improvement in their conditions.

We can talk all day about the cost of food if we were to pay these people who work in the fields a living wage. We can say how the increase in food cost would make it impossible to afford groceries. What does that say about the real cost of our food. The real cost is paid everyday by the marginalized farm workers. They pay for our food in sweat equity so that the rest of us can continue to consume in the ways we have become accustomed.

Works Cited

https://blogs.uoregon.edu/foodsystems/files/2013/09/brown_getz-tnn3lq.pdf

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