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How the Agri-Food Industry's Deadly Cycle
Feeds Immigration
Poison
and Famine in the Fields
By ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ
Just weeks before the elections, Congress
is unable to agree on legislation regarding the nation's 12 million
undocumented immigrants. Legislators are at loggerheads over
such disparate proposals as conditional legalization, guest-worker
programs and massive deportations. In a sad testimony to the
lack of bipartisan leadership, the only thing Congress has authorized
this year is the construction of a $2.2 billion, 700-mile fence
on the Mexican border.
Remarkably, not one single
U.S. lawmaker has addressed why an estimated 1.1 million
people cross the border every year looking for work. This omission
allows our politicians to divert public attention away from the
way U.S. policies cause massive migrations.
In the 1960s and '70s, when
the Rockefeller Foundation's Green Revolution increased grain
production in Mexico and Central America, the world applauded,
convinced this signalled the end of world hunger. But the region's
fragile tropical and hillside soils where the majority of farmers
cultivate their grains lost organic matter under the Green Revolution's
intensive fertilizer regimes. Pest outbreaks became chronic.
Smallholder farmers took out loans to buy more and more chemicals.
When the World Bank and the
IMF imposed structural adjustment programs in the 1980s, government
loans, marketing programs, and agricultural extension services
disappeared overnight. Then the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), and its Central American cousin, CAFTA, flooded local
grain markets with cheap corn, subsidized by U.S. taxpayers and
sold below cost of production.
The region's peasant farmers
struggled, squeezing out every last ounce of family labor to
compete in the so-called free market. Debts piled up. When droughts
or hurricanes hit-as they frequently do in the tropics-the Green
Revolution hybrids withered and died. In Mexico from 1994-2004,
1.3 million smallholders went bust. Abandoned by their governments,
run over by the Green Revolution, broke, hungry, and exhausted,
they joined the ranks of the dispossessed.
Desperate to feed their families,
dreaming of a better life, small farmers send their able-bodied
family members to the United States to look for work. There their
sons and daughters find jobs in poisonous fields harvesting vegetables,
in deadly industrial slaughterhouses, and in gruelling food-processing
plants.
The U.S. Farm Bureau estimates
that immigrant labor adds up to $9 billion of the nation's $200
billion annual agricultural output. Because they are undocumented,
migrant farm workers are forced to sell their labor cheaply and
receive no health or insurance benefits. This results in tremendous
labor savings for an industry that already benefits substantially
from agricultural subsidies. The agri-food chain depends on immigrant
labor, and it requires migrants' illegal status to realize its
windfall profits.
Immigrant working families
make up a large portion of the 12 million food-insecure people
in the United States who often do not know where their next meal
is coming from. They cannot afford to buy the fresh fruits, vegetables
or meat they produce.
In order to obtain the necessary
calories for survival, like most low-income people in this country,
they substitute protein, fresh vegetables, and fiber for sugars,
fats, and starch by eating the cheap processed food sold by the
agri-food industry. These diets are the primary cause of the
obesity, heart disease, and type II diabetes epidemics afflicting
the nation's poor. Not only do immigrants give up their land
and their labor to the agri-food industry, they sacrifice their
health as well.
But the story does not end
here. Immigrants send an estimated $27 billion a year in remittances
to their families. Remittances are the second largest source
of income in Mexico and the largest contributor to GNP in Central
America. Without these remittances, the economies of those countries
and the markets for U.S.-based agri-food products would crash.
The tragic irony is that the
lion's share of remittances is spent on processed food packed
with high-calorie corn syrup, produced and distributed by the
agri-food industry. The impact on the health and family economy
of immigrant families is devastating.
The vicious cycle of dispossession,
appropriation, and substitution is complete. With help from the
Green Revolution, U.S. economic policies, and subsidies from
the U.S. taxpayer, the agri-food industry profits from every
step of the immigrant dream.
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