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With construction about to begin to install ICE holding cells in the federal building in Rochester, the recent arrest of farmworker Dolores Bustamante, the alarming increase in diabetes and other chronic diseases and the rapid loss of family-scale farms, it is time to examine how these things are tied together and seek alternatives.
The central orthodoxy of US food policy is cheap food. Immigration policy is one of the ways food is kept cheap. The militarization of the US border and the criminalization of those who cross it function as a huge subsidy to the biggest and worst players in US agriculture—the chemical-gmo mega-farms. These farms are supplied with workers, both undocumented and H2A guestworkers, by Farm Labor Contractors. Most of the acreage of active farmland does not produce fresh food at all. Instead, the crops (mainly soy and corn) are ingredients for ultra-processed manufactured foods, feed for livestock, and inputs for ethanol production. Chronic diseases—diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure—are caused by or exacerbated by eating ultra-processed foods. Farms that try to grow healthier food by building healthy soil, eliminating synthetic fertilizers that are derived from fossil fuels, and treating their workers decently have to compete with those mega-farms, and that is why so many are going out of business.
Since the Reagan era, ever more concentrated corporations have taken over the food system in this country and globally. As few as four corporations dominate every important food sector—beef, pork, and chicken processing, fertilizer, gmo seed and pesticide production, food retailing, and import-export. Companies like Cargill, Walmart, JBS profit enormously from US food policy while most farmers and farmworkers do not even receive minimum wages with decent benefits. Walmart’s return on stock investment is 37.03% for the past 12 months. Tyson Foods “only” earned its stockholders 22.98%. The wealth of food oligarchs like Bezos or the Waltons swells by the billions. There is plenty of money in food—but it goes to those who hold control and not those who do the day-to-day work.
On average, farmworkers earn $17 an hour, though in some big farming states like Georgia, Mississippi, Kansas and Iowa, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 prevails and work is rarely year-round. Farmworkers in most states do not have the right to unionize or to receive time-and-a-half for overtime. In NYS, the 2019 Farm Laborer Fair Labor Practices Act gave farmworkers the right to organize, but the Farm Bureau, the most conservative farmer organization, is opposing implementation in every way they can think of. Yet even the Farm Bureau admits that 92% of US farms remain in business because someone works off the farm to secure health insurance and retirement. Mid-sized and smaller farms are going out of business and the rate is accelerating again. The US food system is one big interconnected mess and arresting immigrants, farmworkers and food chain workers is part of this ugly picture.
If you don’t like it, you can join with other people in Rochester and NYS who are trying change the cheap food system. Your first step could be to change where you get your own food—instead of shopping at a big box, buy from local farms at a farmers market, the Public Market or join a CSA. You can sign up for information and action alerts from the Rochester Food Policy Council that focuses on increasing access to gardening through the Urban Agriculture Working Group, improving school food, and helping guide a Rochester Community Food System Plan that, hopefully, will lead to many coordinated programs to reduce hunger and malnutrition. You can volunteer or donate to the Food Link Community Farm, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Taproot Collective or Greentopia which offer a variety of programs on growing food and flowers, understanding nutrition and food preparation, and youth training.
You are welcome to join me as a member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York which spreads the know-how of growing food without using synthetic fertilizer, toxic pesticides or herbicides. Our New York chapter coordinates with the six other northeast chapters to transform federal policy to shift support from industrialized agriculture to farms that are resilient, build soil health, and feed local communities. Together we wrote this May Day Vision:
Our vision is that every person is able to live their life with healthy food, clean water and air, community, livelihood, dignity, and purpose within the means of our life-giving planet. We seek that vision on every level, from our households and farms to our communities, states, bioregions, nation, and world. For that vision to be fulfilled, every person, no matter their origin or circumstances, must have all their basic human needs met without degrading the air, water, soil, ecosystems, and climate which we have been given and on which we depend for our lives…
NOFA is committed to working for a future of well-being for all starting with the most marginalized.
NOFA commits to join in alliances that will swell into the massive coalitions necessary for a natural organic future to emerge.
If our values resonate for you, please join us! All are welcome.
Elizabeth Henderson
Organic farmer, co-chair of the Interstate Council policy committee of the Northeast Organic Farming Association and Interstate Council representative on the Board of the Agricultural Justice Project
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