Frothing at the Mouth Opinion: Food Insecurity Among Migrant Farm Workers and the Blind Eye of “Revolutionaries.” (A response to Brown and Getz)

The alternative foods movement in practice is largely about the dietary needs of middle-class Americans who have become increasingly aware of abusive and intentionally obscure practices of corporate agriculture. Most solutions propose to counter our dependency on these companies entail small-scale organic DIY and local farming solutions with the express purpose of increasing access to healthful foods.  Intentions are good, yet in the current paradigm, the alternative foods movement side-steps the rampant abuses of business as usual — in favor of promoting niche alternatives. The fact that modern corporate agriculture employs widespread oppression and questionable contaminants should be addressed directly. Niche solutions, while making healthy alternative available for some, fail to address these problems directly.

As Brown and Getz demonstrate, neo-liberal markets create the conditions which inspire and even necessitate the seizure of indigenous lands -resulting in mass migrations, and a corporate economy whose margins have become increasingly dependent on unrepresented, undocumented farmworkers. Ironically those who produce food in America are also most likely to suffer from food insecurity. America’s most laborious demographic essentially have no political representation and suffer unsafe and unjust labor conditions. The scale of these labor abuses is appalling and so is the relative absence of engaged response within the groups who claim to be revolutionary. I insist that the alternative food movement should include not just access to healthful foods but also just foods.  By continuing to promote only DIY and niche solutions alone, the alternative foods movement in practice has largely failed to confront these abuses by selectively ignoring the regulatory framework within the system they allegedly formed in opposition to. A truly alternative food movement should seek both to reform corporate practices and to promote alternatives.

According to Sandy Brown and Christy Getz, broader sociopolitical beliefs and neo-liberal economic arrangements have perpetuated mass migration from rural Mexico to the US, and once here these folks often become oppressed laborers of the same corporate agribusiness complex that forced them off their land in the first place. (122)  That is, NAFTA arrangements which sought the privatization of farms in Mexico, the liquidation of many social security programs, and ending the subsidies on corn (Mexico’s predominant cash crop), created the initial “push” of indigenous peoples from their land.  The same business models also create a migration “pull” by depending largely on the employment of undocumented migrant workers to produce cash crops in the US.  This system perpetuates mass migration and continually replaces migrant workers with new migrant workers rather than documenting and giving political representation to those who are essentially the backbone of domestic food production.  The Authors show how migrant workers are systematically excluded and alienated, which is a direct indicator of food insecurity. There is a “persistent devaluation of agricultural labor” while at the same time, profits of agrarian accumulation based capital have never been higher. (123)

Stats from Brown and Getz:

• There has been a decline in wages:  “Between 1975 and 1995 real wages fell at least 20-25 percent.” (Rothenberg 1998; Villarejo and Runsten 1993, p 123)
• “Between 1991 and 2001, annual agricultural worker earnings remained at $8,500 for direct-hire workers and $5,000 for workers employed by farm labor contractors, representing a 32 percent decline in inflation-adjusted dollars during the period.” (Ibid, 123)
• “Between 2002 and 2007 alone, California’s agricultural sales increased 32 percent, from $25.7 billion to 33.9 billion.” (USDA 2007, p 124)
• “Farmworkers in Fresno County reported being unable to afford enough food at higher rates than the general low-income population, 55 percent compared with 36 percent…” (UCLA Center for Healthy Policy Research 2009, p 131)

By ignoring the realities of migrant workers, the alternative food movements can only perpetuate poverty, political misrepresentation and food insecurities among America’s hardest workers.  Local solutions are only part of pursuing just and healthy access to food —  a human right according to the UN. That is, by primarily promoting dietary niche solutions that cater to the already privileged, the local foods movement (while being part of the solution) is not sufficiently scalable to fulfill the demand for justice embedded in the heart of corporate labor relations and the political economy in the US. No mass movement can be properly labeled a humanitarian effort so long as it ignores the needs of the disenfranchised. Directly or not, the mainstream alternative food movement has thus far been an exclusionary practice. A more reflexive community for food access might choose a utilitarian approach by promoting justice and all the benefits of US citizenship to those who produce our food.  This should be THE  foremost concern in acquisition: to incorporate a way to create access to just foods by promoting the health and well-being among those who need it most. We should be promoting access not for ourselves; we should be promoting access the most aggressively where the need is most pressing.

Working outside the corporate system will only continue to cater to niche markets of consumers rather than addressing in justice and equality at the heart of corporate agribusiness. Instead of turning a blind eye and proposing frameworks outside a predominant systems a humanitarian alternative foods movement should emerge that will not only create alternatives to business as usual, but will also incorporate labor protest, immigration reform, and strategic divestment from those who profit from soft-slavery.  That is, we should be working outside the combine and within it by directly addressing the existing injustices.  This is a bubble that must be burst:  corporate agriculture is not going anywhere anytime soon.   A just movement will accept this and respond not with a collective sigh of futility, but with a strong armed approach. Alternative foods should be about justice primarily.  Providing healthful foods to middle class consumers should be a secondary goal.

https://blogs.uoregon.edu/foodsystems/files/2013/09/59.2.nestle-11hesnk.pdf