Guest Blog: Farm workers, hunger, and anti-immigrant hysteria

Moderator's Note: This is the fourth in a series of guest blogs by students in my University of Washington food sovereignty seminar. Teresa Bailey presents an insightful analysis that links anti-immigrant hysteria to the high incidence of hunger among undocumented farm workers.

Farm Workers: Fuel the U.S food system while going hungry

Teresa Bailey

The backbone of United States food production is the labor of immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, many of whom are not U.S. citizens. The agricultural labor force is estimated to consist of 75 percent people born in Mexico; some estimates are that at least 53 percent of farm workers are undocumented.1 Undocumented and documented immigrants from Mexico are undoubtedly an integral part of the U.S. agricultural labor force.

When discussing immigration I must emphasize the structural violence perpetuated by the United States government that has devastated the Mexican economy, resulting in the high rates of immigration from Mexico. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) enabled the dumping of U.S. subsidized corn and other crops on the Mexican market and at the same time the Mexican government discontinued land subsidies for campesinos. Local farmers, unable to compete with U.S. subsidized imports, went out of business. Thus, many former farmers were left with few to no options other than to travel to the U.S in hopes of making a livelihood to support their families.

Increasing violence associated with the drug cartels also contributes to the migratory flow and the inability of many to return to Mexico. United States residents are the number one consumers of the illicit products of the Mexican drug industry; this is another way in which the U.S. creates the conditions, which force many people in Mexico to risk crossing the border into the U.S. Finally, the increased militarization of the border has put an end to the revolving door policy in which Mexicans could work in the U.S. and then return to their families seasonally. As border crossing becomes more costly and dangerous, immigrants increasingly must remain in the U.S once they have crossed, and thus many are separated from their families for longer periods than was traditionally the case.

Mexican farm workers are filling a labor need that Americans are unwilling to fill, and are thus vital contributors to the U.S. economy.  Despite this, as unemployment rates in America reach record highs, Mexican immigrants are scapegoated as villains stealing American jobs. Consequently, this has given rise to a wave of anti-immigrant legislation in many states across the U.S. The first being the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB1070), signed into law by the Governor of Arizona on April 23, 2010. The law requires immigrants to carry documentations at all times and allows law enforcement to ask for such documentation without a crime being committed. This is widely seen as racial profiling.

Many states have followed Arizona’s lead as extremist right wing groups in the country fuel anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation including laws passed in Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina, and Alabama. In Alabama, HB 56 is the most extreme of this state-level anti-immigrant legislation to date; it was passed in June 2011. This law requires public schools to check for documentation of school children, electronic verification of citizenship status by employers, and legalized racial profiling of Latinos. The law has been devastating to Alabama’s agricultural economy, as farm workers have left the inhospitable state causing a huge shortage in agricultural labor and billion dollar losses in the sector. This situation in Alabama is just one example of how important undocumented farm workers are to food production in this country.

These states, with their overtly racist and anti-immigrant agenda, do not reflect the only strategy adopted ort pursued by state legislators to make their states inhospitable for immigrants. In Washington state the 2011 legislative session witnessed numerous legislative proposals that used budget cuts to target legal and undocumented immigrants. The budget cut proposals included eliminating the State Food Assistance Program and cutting 26,000 undocumented immigrant children from access to health care through reductions to Apple Health for Kids.2 As far as passing anti-immigrant laws in Washington State, numerous proposals have been introduced including efforts to ban undocumented immigrants from acquiring driver’s licenses. What we saw in Washington was a covert attack on the undocumented immigrant community. Washington state may not require immigrants to carry documentation at all times or legally condone the racial profiling of Latinos, however it will cut health care for immigrant children and get rid of food assistance for immigrant families.

The Washington State Food Assistance Program was created under the governorship of Garry Locke in response to the Congressional decision in 1997 to bar immigrants from the receiving federal food stamps until they can provide documentation of five years of legal residence. The State Food Assistance program perfectly mimics federal food stamps, yet directly fills the gap felt by the immigrant community.

However, during the 2011 legislative session Governor Gregoire, with a 2 billion dollar budget deficit, proposed to eliminate the program entirely. To be fair, cuts were being made to many different government services and departments, however a heavy burden was on social safety net programs. But to eliminate a program completely rather than reduce its funding is a drastic step because there is a very small chance of the program being re-instated. This would have had a devastating blow, with 31,000 people losing their food stamps.2 The legislature decided to save the program, but cut the funding in half.

As the 2012 Washington State legislative session is set to begin, the state faces a fourth year in a row with a major budget shortfall and Governor Gregoire is proposing an additional round of 2 billion dollars in cuts. What is left of the State Food Assistance program, saved last year, is once again on the chopping block for complete elimination.3

The audacity of barring people from food assistance because of their citizenship status is disgusting. The bitter irony of such a decision is intensified when considering that the very same farm workers who put the food on everyone’s table have extremely high rates of food insecurity. In Washington State and across the nation, farm workers go hungry at rates several times higher than the national average, estimates show that 86 percent of farm workers experience food insecurity.4 , 5  Farm workers have very low incomes, averaging $11,000 nationwide.1 The nation’s food security depends on Mexican farm workers, yet these same farm workers struggle to put food on their own tables because they are paid so poorly and are barred from food assistance programs that other people with the same low incomes have access to. The Governor should not be eliminating the last remnants of food assistance to immigrant families, but should instead expand the program by not requiring any identification so that undocumented immigrants will have the option to support themselves and their families with food assistance. There needs to be a shift in the rhetoric that recognizes the important role undocumented immigrants have in our community.

 

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1 U.S. Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey (2005).

2 Children’s Alliance, The Facts about the State Food Assistance Program (2010).

3 Office of the Governor, State of Washington, Proposed 2012 Supplemental Budget (2011).

4 Washington State Department of Health, Hunger in Washington (2008)

5 Weigel M M, Armijos R X, Hall Y P, Ramirez Y, Orozco R. The household food insecurity and health outcomes of U.S.-Mexico border migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 9:157-69 (2007).

Guest Blog: Grocers in a Box?

Moderator's Note: This is the third in a series of contributions by students from the food sovereignty seminar I am teaching at the University of Washington this autumn 2011 quarter. This post is from Laura Christie, who is pursuing a self-designed major in food studies. Ms. Christie’s contribution focuses on the development of a new model to address food deserts in the Seattle area, the so-called “Stockbox Grocer.” This concept is reminiscent of the traditional green grocer that was once a fixture in inner-city neighborhoods and is indeed making somewhat of a comeback today in many Seattle-area ethnically-diverse neighborhoods.

Stockbox Grocers Aims to Fight Food Deserts

Laura Christie

            Food deserts are a well-worn topic in the food sovereignty discourse. Food deserts are residential areas lacking establishments selling fresh produce, meats, dairy and whole grains. Typically, inhabitants must travel several miles to find such whole foods; for urban residents that distance is one-mile and for rural residents it is ten, according to the USDA. In many food deserts, residents also lack personal transportation and must rely on increasingly inadequate public transit to get to grocery stores. What should be a ten or twenty-minute trip often turns into a two hour-long travail. 

            Using the census to quantify, the USDA estimates that 23.5 million Americans live in food deserts and unsurprisingly more than half (13.5 million) are low-income (USDA 2011).  This number is likely an underestimate, especially if we account the number of undocumented immigrants and their families who are typically not included in the census, but are more likely to be both low-income and living in food deserts. 

            King County is relatively free of food deserts, as defined by the USDA. There are exceptions including south-end neighborhoods like Delridge, White Center, High Point, South Park, and others.  Delridge is a neighborhood at the southern end of West Seattle; the majority of residents in this 8.5 square mile area are people of color with the largest population being Asian American, then African American, followed by Latina/o, with other ethnicities making up the balance (“City-Data”).  A quarter of all Delridge residents were born outside of the United States, almost 10 percent speak very little English or none at all; Delridge has far fewer higher education degrees than the Seattle average and a lower yearly income (“City-Data”).

            These demographics trends are consistent with areas considered food deserts.  In the case of Delridge, shopping options are limited and consist of convenience markets that do not stock fresh fruits and vegetables.  Grocery stores apparently find few business incentives to build stores in the area due to high start-up and operational costs and the perception of the lack of a guaranteed market that would take produce off the shelves before it must be thrown out. Of course, grocers in low-income and communities of color often sell produce well past expiration dates and are also known for selling inferior quality perishable goods.

            What is the solution to the type of food desert faced by a neighborhood like Delridge? One possibility is the concept of Stockbox Grocers – an idea that is the brainchild of two graduate students from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.  The goal of these students was to find a small business solution to the challenge of getting fresh produce and whole foods to low-income, low-access areas.  Their solution was to turn an old shipping container into a mini-grocery store that provides grocery staples (chicken stock, vegetable paste, etc.) and fresh foods (milk, eggs, produce, grains).  Not only does this business plan get whole foods to food deserts, but they are able to do so and charge far lower prices because their overhead does not include high start-up costs, utilities, or worker wages. 

            One of the founders, Carrie Ferrence, states: “We take away the high set-up cost…We take away the high ongoing operating cost, and we focus on the inventory that moves most efficiently” and adds “Huge grocery stores are fairly inefficient…They depend on 15 percent of their inventory to carry the profitability of the rest of their store” (Bruder).  Modern technology is also key to their low costs and efficiency.  The store uses an iPad and a “Square” (a small credit card swiper that can be plugged into a smart phone) to process electronic payments and track inventory (Woodward). 

The inception of Stockbox received a lot of attention; they are the recipients of a $20,000 grant from the Seattle Office of Economic Development and the King County Dept. of Health and another $12,500 from the University of Washington Foster School of Business.  The $20,000 provided by King County is part of a larger $1.1 million dollar grant to get more produce and whole foods in convenience stores and corner stores in areas of low food access. 

Stockbox Grocers debuted their shipping-container-store in Fall 2011 in the parking lot of an apartment complex in the Delridge neighborhood.  Their first pop-up store was open for an 8-week trail period, closing in the first week of November (Ferrence, and Gjurgevich).  Stockbox offered healthful options like fresh fruits and vegetables, dried beans, rice, pasta, milk, yogurt, cheese, eggs and nuts; but they also carry less health oriented foods like Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, packaged macaroni and cheese and Jiffy Peanut Butter, because they wanted to provide foods people would actually buy (Thompson). 

In deciding what to stock, the founders noted that: “Most families, most communities, buy the same five to 20 items, week in and week out, so they only need to go to a huge grocery store once or twice a month to get the remaining items” (Bruder).  During their 8-week run they found that 25-30 people came in to shop each day, often commenting on how nice it is to have groceries nearby and telling their stories of previously having to walk very far or take several buses to grocery shop. 

The founders are receptive to any advice or suggestions and when a customer suggests that they carry a certain ingredient that is more culturally or regionally appropriate, they quickly can add that to the shelves.  Since Stockbox’s infrastructure consists of preexisting shipping containers, they "can drop a store into a community and have it up and running pretty quickly, rather than having to spend months building out a brick and mortar location” which increases Stockbox’s potential to have a huge impact on food sovereignty by being able to quickly target and act in the highest need areas.

So what does this do for food security?  It is a necessary step towards better access to healthy foods. Of course, there are much more deeply seeded problems of income inequality, structural racism in the housing and employment sectors, and the demands placed on those working in low-income jobs (e.g., often longer hours, harder physical labor, poorer or non-existent benefits, and much lower pay); these conditions take time and energy away from one’s ability to grocery shop and prepare healthy meals. 

The way jobs and hourly wages are structured make it much easier to stop at a fast food restaurant after work for dinner or to feed a family Of course, the ideal solution is to deal with the huge income inequalities in neighborhoods like Delridge, especially since those inequalities disproportionately affect communities of color.  In the mean time, making real food accessible to low-access areas is critical.  The stockbox idea provides one viable option, even under the structural inequalities that favor fast-food chains.

With its mobility, minimal input costs, and low prices, Stockbox Grocers may be an important “transitional” answer to the challenges and deprivations posed by urban food deserts.  While it may be a temporary institution, it has potential to become a more permanent structure, especially if it can continue to sell at lower prices because of its lower operating costs.  It would be fascinating to see if the Stockbox model became a neighborhood-managed worker co-operative.

Stockbox is still in its infancy but is proving to be innovative and receptive to criticism. For example, I would push Stockbox to have at least 50 percent of its product available for purchase with either SNAP or WIC credit, including all of the produce available for purchase by those programs.  I would also suggest that anyone working at Stockbox be knowledgeable of food preparation; if a customer asks what s/he could make that is quick, easy and healthy, I would expect the Stockbox employee to be a source of accurate knowledge.  I would encourage Stockbox to have recommended recipes posted next to certain items and provide short instructions on how to prepare certain vegetables, grains and legumes.   

It is easy to critique any start-up and I am not without my own criticisms, but overall the Stockbox idea is innovative, resourceful, and so far relatively effective.  With the success of the first one, they team is looking to open a permanent Stockbox in Delridge, Skyway and/or Southpark in Spring 2012 (Thompson). I encourage readers to go and see it first hand and offer necessary suggestions on how to improve this model; I also encourage readers to ask the more important questions about food deserts.  How has structural racism manifested to create food deserts and whom do they effect?  What is the point of having access to fresh, whole foods if the people in that neighborhood do not have the time to prepare it?  How do structural inequalities affect access to healthy foods?   While operations like Stockbox are helpful, they do not solve the

           

Bruder, Jessica. "A Start-up Tried to Eliminate 'Food Deserts'." New York Times 01 Nov

2011, n. pag. Web. 28 Nov. 2011

"Delridge Neighborhood." City-Data. City-Data.com, 2009. Web. 27 Nov 2011.

<http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Delridge-Seattle-WA.html>.

Ferrence, Carrie, and Jacqueline Gjurgevich. "Delridge Stockbox." Stockbox Grocers

Stockbox Grocers, 2011. Web. 26 Nov 2011. <http://stockboxgrocers.com/stockbox

-pop-up/>.

"Food Deserts." USDA. USDA, n.d. Web. 27 Nov 2011. <

http://apps.ams.usda.gov/fooddeserts/foodDeserts.asp&xgt;.

Thompson, Lynn. "Stockbox Brings Good Food To Where People Live." Seattle Times 06

Nov 2011, n. pag. Web. 28 Nov. 2011.

Woodward, Curt. "Stockbox Grocers: the Food Store That’s Kind of a Tech Startup (Inside a

Shipping Container)." Xconomy; Seattle. Xconomy, 11 Nov 2011. Web. 17 Nov 2011. <http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2011/11/09/stockbox-grocers-the-food-store-thats-kind-of-a-tech-startup-inside-a-shipping-container/>.

Guest Blog: Food Sovereignty for all Bodies

Moderator's Note: This is another contribution from students in the food sovereignty seminar I am teaching at the University of Washington this autumn 2011 quarter. This post is from Zoe Emery Handler and it focuses on a seldom examined dimension of the struggle for food justice, namely the challenges faced by persons with differently bodied (qua, disability) experiences. I have certainly learned a lot I had never considered from this wonderful post by Ms. Handler.

Food Justice for the Differently Bodied

Zoe Emery Handler        

            Food security is an extremely flawed paradigm and yet still dominates contemporary conversations and discourses addressing world hunger. Working to only meet the caloric needs of the world’s poor oversimplifies the various types of nourishment – nutritional, cultural, and spiritual – that food plays in fulfilling people’s lives. Additionally, such a conventional model encourages the proliferation of monoculture profit-motivated mass food production that further disenfranchises peasant farmers and makes it nearly impossible for migrant workers and others involve in food production worldwide to earn a living wage.

            Mainstream discourse about ‘food security’ only focuses on the need for the re-distribution of food rather than proposing radical re-imagining the way in which food is produced. However there is an emerging global movement calling for ‘deep food’  – food that is nutritionally adequate, environmentally sustainable (i.e. local, organic), culturally appropriate, and ethically produced. Leaders of the movement – including organizations like La Via Campesina  –  cite equality as a prerequisite for the attainment of universal ‘food justice’ and work to eradicate racism, sexism and classism across the globe.

            Yet, in spite of their recognition of the role that structural violence and institutionalized oppression plays in food distribution, even these progressive forces for food justice fail to consider or propose solutions that can address the food inequality faced by differently-bodied persons. Recent research “suggests that more than a billion people in the world today experience disability” (World Health Organization); this constitutes a great segment of the global population. It has been proven that “work-limiting disability substantially increases the risk of food insecurity for low-income families” (Nord 2008). Such a significant and marginalized portion of the world’s population cannot be excluded from the conversation of food sovereignty any longer, and their participation is necessary in order to truly meet the goals of food sovereignty for all.

            Barriers that now restrict differently bodied persons from accessing ‘deep food’ are multi-faceted, but primarily are rooted in economic inequities. Food insecurity disproportionately affects disabled persons simply because of lack of access to equal educational and employment opportunities that then decreases their earning power, limiting their options vis-à-vis food purchasing. Current programs in place in the U.S. that help persons with food insecurity - both with and without disability - are inadequate to meet the needs of their food consumption. One such example of a program is SNAP.  “The average SNAP beneficiary received $125.31 per month in fiscal year 2009. If food stamps constitute a person’s entire food budget—as often happens, even though the program is intended to supplement recipients’ own money—that translates to just under $1.40 per meal”(Mason). It must be remembered that those who are differently bodied may also incur living costs directly related to the maintenance of their disability, making it more likely that food stamps will be the only resource for putting food on the table. Such a low budget for food limits the SNAP users access to fresh nutritionally dense foods, and instead drives beneficiaries towards convenience and ‘junk foods’ that are available in larger quantities at a lower price.

            For differently bodied persons ‘deep food’ will also require things beyond the standard definition of nutritionally adequate, culturally appropriate, and ethically produced. Management of certain chronic illnesses - e.g. Diabetes - will require specific nutritional adjustments that differ from the nutritional needs of typically bodied persons. Additionally deep food must be physically accessible, something which will require the construction of food delivery systems which provide nutritionally and culturally adequate foods and the revamping of farmers markets and other such food sources so that they are equipped to deal with handicaps. Although adjustments in physical structure and accessibility are vital for including differently bodied persons in food sovereignty and deep food, such spaces must also be emotionally accessible. Widespread discomfort with disability and general misinformation about what it means to be disabled often results in differently bodies persons being subjected to demeaning behavior while exercising their right to autonomous food purchasing decisions.  Making deep food accessible to disabled persons is a complex process but at the root of all such efforts there must be a push to work towards the elimination of the idea that the differently bodied exist as the ‘other’. Structural inequities of the disabled, emotional and physical inaccessibility and discrimination all result from the dehumanization of disabled persons. Before there can be true universal food justice for differently bodied persons, differently bodied persons must be seen as intrinsically as valuable as their typically bodied counterparts. 

Works Cited

Mason, M.. "Food stamps for good food." The Nation. N.p., 2011. Web. 20 Nov 2011. <http://www.thenation.com/article/159160/food-stamps-good-food>.

Nord Mark, . "Disability Is an Important Risk Factor for Food Insecurity ." Amber Waves. N.p., 2008. Web. 25 Nov 2011. <http://www.ers.usda.gov/Amberwaves/february08/Findings/Disability.htm>. 

World Health Organization, The World Bank. "World Report on Disability." World Health Organization. N.p., 2011. Web. 30 Nov 2011. <http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/9789240685215_eng.pdf.