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Farmworker Awareness Week is a chance to recognize the people whose labor means we can eat

Posted by Fawn Pattison (Guest Contributor) at 4:48 PM on 31 Mar 2008

This is Farmworker Awareness Week, a time to support the millions of farmworkers whose labor puts food on every American table, and who work and live in some of the worst environmental conditions in our nation.

It's estimated that 2 to 3 million farmworkers plant, tend, and harvest American crops every year. Many farmworkers in the U.S. are migrants who move from place to place following the harvest. Where I live, in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers are the majority. The average annual income for a farmworker in the United States is about $11,000, or about $16,000 for a farmworking family (though pay on the East Coast is lower than the national average). Farmworkers live in overcrowded housing and very few receive health care or unemployment benefits. Here in North Carolina, about half of our farmworkers cannot afford enough food for themselves and their families.

Farmworkers are also disproportionately exposed to hazardous pesticides on the job. A recent study in eastern North Carolina found multiple pesticide residues on the hands and in the urine of farmworker children. Last week the produce giant Ag-Mart settled for millions of dollars with the family of a boy, Carlitos Candelario, who was born with multiple severe birth defects, which his parents attribute to their hazardous working conditions in Ag-Mart's tomato fields along the East Coast.

This week you can attend events to learn about the rich history and culture of farmworkers in the United States, and you can take action to support better working conditions for the people who harvest our food. When you sit down to your next meal, please also take a moment to give thanks for the hardworking hands who brought it to you.

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Our family friend recently gave us two

DVDs to watch--El Norte, and Missing. She and her family are Mexican immigrants. Our government has decided to start enforcing immigration laws now that all of our McMansions have been built with their cheap labor and they are no longer needed. She's getting nervous.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 7:10 PM on 31 Mar 2008

Food for Oil

We need to form a F.P.E.C. Food Producing Exporting Countries, to rival OPEC. How about quit giving the stuff away to countries with little dictators who won't allow the U.S. stamp on it and use the stuff to feed their army's and keep the people in chains.

We can be at a bushel of corn or wheat for a barrel of oil in no time.

Kind of like the Iraqi oil for food program only we control the market price and the production.

Let me see them grow the stuff in the sand or eat oil...

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

by Pompey Road at 7:27 PM on 31 Mar 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

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