As Katy and I hurry to clear off our desks before heading to the Fair Trade Federation conference, I almost forgot this week is National Farmworker Awareness week. Luckily a new report, Children in the Fields: An American Problem, from my colleagues at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, jogged my memory and motivated me to stop and celebrate with you the lives of farmworkers such as Cesar Chavez and to renew calls for justice in the fields.

Those of us committed to Fair Trade know that coffee farmers in Nicaragua, cocoa farmers in Ghana, really producers anywhere who work to plant, cultivate, and harvest the food that finds its ways to our kitchen tables deserve to be compensated justly for their labor. More and more of us are turning our attention also to efforts to support local agriculture out of concern for our planet and a desire to build right relationships with the families that farm our food. I know a highlight of my weekend is passing through the neighborhood farmers’ market in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC

Still, much of the produce in this country is harvested by migrant farmworkers, who don’t necessarily participate in farmers’ markets because they don’t own the land they work. Instead they move from place to place following the seasons and paths trod by generations of pickers before them. In fact, when we think “farmworker,” we may conjure an image of the renowned Cesar Chavez, who led famous grape boycotts using nonviolent means. Although much has been accomplished by social action, especially the recent campaigns for tomato pickers by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, injustice is still present.

The recent report by AFOP demonstrates that hundreds of thousands of children work as hired labor in America’s fields and orchards. These kids are among the least protected of working youth in the United States due to the skewed “protections” of the Fair Labor Standards Act. While—according to Federal standards—children 14 and 15 years of age can’t work in fast-food restaurants more than three hours a day when school is in session, those children are technically allowed to pick the tomatoes and onions to put on your burger or taco for as many hours as they can fit into a day. Children can rise before dawn to plant, weed and chop. Later, when school is out, they can go outside to work well into the night. But, by law, children hired to work in air-conditioned stores and restaurants are not allowed to work after 7:00 p.m. during the school year. These scenarios assume that the children are in school, but AFOP cites reports from the Child Labor Coalition that “farmworker children have lower school enrollment rates than any other group in the United States.”

AFOP’s report spells out some recommendations for new legislation, enforcement and research to help politicians and businesses reform our agricultural system. To help us learn about the complexity of issues from a faith framework, the National Farm Worker Ministry has made many resources available for education and reflection. I also count on the work of Student Action with Farmworkers based out of Duke University and the Farmworker Justice Fund, which has consistently advocated for farmworkers inside the beltway for many years. Finally, check out the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, which applies the teachings of Jesus Christ for the betterment of rural America and care of God’s creation.

And if you have reflections about bringing the principles of Fair Trade to the farms of the United States, comment here!

Tags: Cesar Chavez, Economic Justice, farmworkers

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 6:16 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.