As a percentage of their personal income, Americans pay less for food than the people of any other nation on earth.

But the costs of that cheap food are considerable, not only for their own health but for the health, safety, wages, and working conditions of the largely migrant labour that plants, harvests, and processes that food.

The industrial agriculture system that supplies this cheap food is predicated on cheap labour, lax enforcement of already weak labour regulations, often hazardous working conditions, and physical and sexual abuse that in extreme cases has been likened to modern-day slavery.

In some respect, conditions for migrant workers remain little better than those documented by journalist Edward R Murrow a half century ago in his classic TV special “'Harvest of shame,” which revealed the existence of a hitherto hidden underclass of migrant workers who endured substandard housing and sanitation, abysmal working conditions, and exploitation of many kinds in the course of harvesting tomatoes in mid-fifties Immokalee, Florida.

There as elsewhere in the US, rootless immigrants, largely from Central America, plant and harvest crops they themselves can't afford to buy.

Epic struggle

Now the very same region is the scene of an epic struggle by migrant workers for decent working and living conditions and a livable wage.

Immokalee is the state’s largest farmworker community and the most important centre of agricultural production. Field labourers here pick crops on vast holdings owned and operated by giant multinational corporations.

It’s been the same for decades: long hours of back-bending labour, staying in substandard housing, exposed to toxic pesticides, isolated by language, and exploited by labour bosses preying on their vulnerabilities.

Migrant labour has always been a hard row to hoe. Workers live an average of just 49 years; the US average is 78. The median annual income of migrant workers is just $6,500 in Florida; the median US household income is $ 48,000. Adjusted for inflation, migrant labour income has fallen by 60 per cent in the past twenty years.

Each year 20,000 farmworkers require medical treatment for acute pesticide poisoning and that many more cases go unreported. Nationally, 50 per cent of migrants – 80 per cent in Florida – lack legal work papers.

While Florida farmers are paid $10 per twenty-five-pound box of tomatoes, the tomato pickers are paid 45 cents per 32-pound bucket, less than 5 per cent of what the farmer gets. To earn 50 dollars, a picker must harvest 2.5 tonnes in a typical ten-hour day, twice as much as thirty years ago, just to earn the same minimum wage.

The Big winner

Yet the farmer is not the big winner in this system. Fast food chains with enormous buying power exert intense downward pressure on the prices they are willing to pay farmers, who in turn squeeze workers to retain their own profit margin.

Most Americans don’t want to do such backbreaking work but few are aware of the working and living conditions of those who do. However redressing the inequities of the current industrial food production system is not easy.

To begin with, it’s hard to make sure that extra money spent in the supermarket will filter down the food chain to the migrant labourers at the bottom.

The poorest and weakest work longest and hardest and receive the last and least. To provide a living wage to those at the bottom will take more than a piece work rate hike.

It will require a systemic shift, with those of us higher on the food chain pulling it hard in the direction of those at the bottom. Not only must farmworkers be paid living wages for their labour and farmers a fair return on their crops, but governmental regulations must bring farm labour practices up to global human rights standards.

– IPS