Produce Update-April 24 2015

We used to have a Fair Trade Day across Canada, which has slowly stretched to an entire month of Fairtrade promotions across the country, kicking off next Friday. Polling around the world has shown that consumers, more and more, are supporting Fairtrade products because of the worker rights protections that are one of the pillars of the movement. Recent protests, marches and blockades across Baja over the past 2 months have brought the endemic problems relating to wages and working conditions of field workers to the forefront, a wake-up call reported in major dailies across the US and Canada. This problem is not a Mexican problem, but a continent wide problem, with stories of mistreatment of the migrant Hispanic work force in California, Washington, and yes, even in B.C.If it were not for the migrant Hispanic work force, across the US and Canada, especially in the higher production summer months, a lot of food would go un-harvested. As famous Latino comedian George Lopez once said, “nearly everything you American’s eat has passed through a Mexican’s hands.” Here in the Fraser Valley, the harvest work used to be done by the resident South Asian work force, but a combination of increased production and a declining number of South Asian labourers in the work force required opening the doors to our temporary worker programs several years ago. It’s the same story in the Interior, where fruit-picking is now done nearly exclusively by a migrant Hispanic work force. Despite the higher wages in Canada, required medical plans and reasonable housing requirements, if all was good with temporary workers, there wouldn’t be so many local volunteers operating support programs here in BC for migrant workers, including taking people shopping who are otherwise stranded at farms miles from stores, taking workers to medical appointments, even providing free bicycles so they have some means of transportation. It’s sad that these people, who work so hard, are taken advantage of. 90% of the workers migrating to northern Mexico during the winter and through the US and Canada during the summer are indigenous people from very poor villages and towns in the very southern Mexican states.Recently, a new organization was formed in Mexico – the International Produce Alliance to Promote a Socially Responsible Industry (AHIFORES) – an attempt to clean up sometimes horrible living conditions in northern Mexico. That group is headed by Alan Aguirre, president of Grupo Alta, (Heaven’s Best / Divine Flavor), who operates what we have said before and will again, is the best farm operation any of us have visited in any country when it comes to how workers are treated, and whose FLO certified Fairtrade products we are proud to sell.There are many great examples of farms in BC, Oregon, Washington, California and Mexico where workers are treated in the most respectable of ways –and the proof is in the pudding; for these farms, the same workers return every year to the same farms because they are treated fairly, and not as machines. Just as we have worked, all of us, to promote buying local and supporting local farms, and this now has incredible traction in the minds of consumers, we hope that labour rights not only becomes a front and center issue, but consumers start asking not only where their food is coming from, but how well the people who harvested it are treated.One note on produce – it has been warmer in Vancouver for the last four days than in Watsonville – the heart of California’s strawberry production. Highs only reached 12C yesterday. Well, this is not strawberry growing weather, and the entire continent is getting shorted and prorated. Esteban Martinez is doing his level best to give us top priority and scouring fields every day, but we will not get back into high production, if weather forecasts are accurate, until mid-week.