For most tomato pickers in the US, a bucket brings in 50 cents, a piece rate that has remained virtually unchanged for more than 30 years. Because the rate is set so low, a worker has to pick more than two and a quarter tons of tomatoes per day – the weight of a young elephant – to make the minimum wage. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is transforming all of this.
Tag: racism
Harvesting Justice #6: The Consumer's Got to Change the System – Farmer Ben Burkett on Racisim & Corporate Control of Agriculture
Other Worlds’ Tory Field and Beverly Bell discuss issues of sustainability and agriculture with Mississippi farmer and member of Via Campesina’s food sovereignty commission Ben Burkett.
Harvesting Justice #5: Uprooting Racism in the Food System – African Americans Organize
A shovel overturned can flip so much more than soil, worms, and weeds. Structural racism – the ways in which social systems and institutions promote and perpetuate the oppression of people of color – manifests at all points in the food system. It emerges as barriers to land ownership and credit access for farmers of color, as wage discrimination and poor working conditions for food and farmworkers of color, and as lack of healthy food in neighborhoods of color. It shows up as discrimination in housing, employment, redlining, and other elements which impact food access and food justice.
A Meditation on Being American… and My Role in Global Sustainability
This blog post was written in response to some unusually caustic replies received on my last Sustainablog post, “The Dissonance Between Dreams: Re-writing the Sust Enable Episode Scripts.” It was [ … ]