What’s So Unfair about Trade? PART 2: Factory Farms

In the early 1900’s, John Kenneth Turner traveled from the U.S. to Mexico to investigate claims that workers were receiving brutal, barbaric treatment. What the North American journalist found exceeded his wildest expectations:

- Yaqui natives kidnapped from their homes and sent across the country to slave away in large factory farms.

- Mayan indigenous people of the Yucatan peninsula working as virtual slaves on henequen plantations, under the guise of “debt peonage”.

- Urban poor hired and contracted as laborers in the Central Valley, roped into an endless cycle of debt and low wages which keeps them as virtual slaves.

- Factory workers paid a pittance to assemble products for export, unable to afford the most basic daily necessities.

- Workers attempting to organize unions attacked by federal troops and thugs.

- Strikes violently broken up by government troops.

Turner was horrified by the brutality he witnessed firsthand. He published his findings in a book titled México Bárbaro—“Barbarous Mexico”. The book served as an exposé of the dictator Porfirio Díaz and the astronomical blood offerings that his regime offered to the gods of Profit and Investment.

Fast forward a hundred years.

In Baja California, Mexico, not much has changed since Barbarous Mexico
was published in 1910. Indigenous people from southern Mexico are brought to the farming town of Maneadero as migrant laborers to work on enormous corporate farms. People are brought from the southern states of Oaxaca and Guerrero to harvest tomatoes, chilies, zucchinis, and strawberries in the vast fields of Maneadero. Laborers are brought in rickety vans and buses; the cost of
transportation is deducted from their pay. They are housed in crude barracks
made of cinder block or corrugated tin—if they’re lucky enough to secure a
room, which they end up sharing with eight to ten other people. The more
unlucky workers sleep on the ground, in the dirt, in low-lying shacks pieced
together from whatever pieces of tarp and plastic they’re able to scrape
together.

Malnutrition and parasites run rampant in the encampments. Many of the workers in Maneadero are only able to afford to eat once a day, sometimes just a tortilla with a few chili peppers. Children walk around with their bellies distended from disease or tapeworms, their hair discolored from malnutrition. An even more common site among the families who work on these large factory farms is that of disabled children. Pesticides and chemicals are sprayed on the fields—often while pregnant women are busy working in the fields—causing many of the women’s babies to be born with horrible birth defects.

I wish I could tell you that this was all anecdotal—that the conditions I’m describing are only the case for one particular encampment of migrant farm workers I visited, in one small corner of Maneadero. But I’m afraid it’s not. This is the norm for farming conditions in Maneadero—the rule rather than the exception.

I wish I could tell you these conditions were an accident, something not connected to you or me. I wish I could say the scene I described was simply the creation of one sociopathic madman, the result of one callous person’s indifference toward his fellow humans. But it runs much deeper than that.

You see, the agricultural fields of Maneadero do not exist in a vacuum. The fields where these tomatoes and strawberries are grown are located in Mexico. The earth is Mexican. The people picking the fruits and vegetables are Mexican. But they are part of the U.S. economy. The vast majority of the fruits and vegetables grown in Maneadero are not grown for the Mexican market—they are grown for consumption in the United States. The tomatoes picked by the migrant workers living in those encampments, they are being grown for people like us. For our supermarkets and fast food restaurants.

The simple reason they’re being grown in Mexico is that it’s cheaper and easier for U.S. agribusiness to do so. Labor is cheaper. Women and children are put to work. If they don’t fulfill their contractual obligations, or if they strike or protest, they’re sent back to southern Mexico without pay. Orr attacked by privately hired thugs. It’s relatively easy to violate labor and environmental laws in a place like Maneadero, to get away with spraying pesticides on human beings.

All of which results in a cheaper tomato for you and me.

I wish these conditions were limited to the U.S. agribusiness that is run in the town of Maneadero. But I’ve been told that pay and conditions in other towns, such as San Quintín, are even worse. These conditions can be multiplied by the fields spread across Sinaloa and Sonora. Multiply them by Guatemala. Colombia. Honduras. Multiply them by tomatoes, grapes, lettuce, apples, cherries, oranges, flowers.

The title of Turner’s book, “Barbarous Mexico”, is purposefully ironic. Contrary to the belief of many ill-informed, poorly-traveled gringos, there is not something inherently “barbaric” about Mexico as a nation or a culture. Rather, the “barbarism” that Turner found was the direct result of an economy that was based on providing raw materials to U.S. and European industry. The horrific conditions he found existed in order to provide the U.S. economy with cheap labor and products.

The barbarism and cruelty he found were not foreign phenomena—they were an indispensable part of the U.S. and European economies. Of U.S.- and Europe-based companies.

In 1910, just as today, ordinary citizens in Europe and the United States were horrified to learn of these conditions. And horrified to learn that these conditions are directly linked to the products that we consume on a daily basis. But not the folks at the top of the food chain—the people running the companies that are fueled by this sort of exploitation. In 1910 and in 2012 they were, and are, well aware of what is going on.

After all, business is business.