Agricultural Inequality: from Guatemala to California.

I knew that life was difficult in Guatemala after I spent a week there in 2001.  I traveled to Guatemala with an aid group bringing medications and provisions to very remote mountain villages.  Because I was able to speak Spanish, the guides often talked to me about their history. I heard a lot about the “scorched earth” campaign, a military policy of complete destruction of entire villages of indigenous people.  People were “disappeared” or killed along with their entire villages.  The scorched earth campaign in Guatemala was really the genocide of the Mayan people in the 1980s.  Even twenty years later, recovery was a very slow process. 

Though I’ve been aware of the situation in Guatemala since my visit in 2001, I was surprised when reading Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating that the conditions for agricultural workers in California are not much better.   The Guatemalan people are taken advantage of by land owners, who work for large companies, as well as by the contractors who oversee their work.  Rigoberta Menchu worked very long days in extreme heat and was often cheated out of her pay.  McMillan also found herself working 12 hour days in conditions of extreme heat.  When McMillan picked garlic, she worked eight hours, but her timecard was changed to two hours because she only picked $16 worth of garlic in a day and minimum wage is $8 an hour in California.  

Menchu also mentioned children who died from pesticides sprayed on them while they worked in the coffee plantations.  Though the United States does have regulations requiring that workers not be present when pesticides are sprayed, McMillan noticed that the workers were still breathing in the air from fields adjacent to the fields being sprayed, and that workers were taken back to the fields to work just after the pesticides were sprayed in California.  

Clearly, the mistreatment and oppression of large groups of people is part of our collective history.  Just as the English landowners took advantage of the Irish, Guatemalan landowners took advantage of Mayan descendants.  Through our readings and discussion, we’ve found multiple examples of the ways our food industry takes advantage of those who work in agriculture, or in the slaughterhouses, or in Walmart.   When we look at information about wealth distribution in the United States, it becomes obvious that we are heading in the wrong direction.  What can we do?  Revolution?


Some interesting sources for more info:


Farmworker Justice is an advocacy site.  They describe themselves, "Farmworker Justice is a nonprofit organization that seeks to empower migrant and seasonal farmworkers to improve their living and working conditions, immigration status, health, occupational safety, and access to justice."


Another interesting document focusing on farmworker conditions in Michigan can be found on Michigan.gov.  This report (A Report on the Conditions of Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers in Michigan) is based on findings from 2010 by the Michigan Civil Rights Commission.  A quote from page 4 of this report: 

The working conditions faced by migrant and seasonal farmworkers were often the topic of their testimony during the forums. Problems described included the lack of drinking water, portable toilets and handwashing facilities available in fields where the hand-harvesting various types of agricultural products is taking place. Some workers said they did not have access to water in the fields at all, while others stated their employer charged them for water. Some stated there were no bathrooms and no breaks offered. Other testimony during the forums described outright wage theft and established that the accepted industry practice of growers paying piece rates to workers often results in workers being paid less than the required minimum hourly wage.