Jackson interviews Salvador at FAIR: Food in the USA is a plantation economy
"It actually is a logical thing for most farmers to plow under their food"
"this issue of food waste is a serious problem. And it is not exclusively on farmers. It’s an issue of the structure of the system."
"a channel, a sector, in the food system, which is called food service. And it operates almost invisibly to the majority of us. But if you do see it, you see it in service entries and back alleys, "
"“the structure of agriculture”—is a system that looks very much like a social hierarchy that many of us will remember from grade school, where we had slaves at the bottom of the pyramid and the pharaoh or king up at the top of the pyramid, fewer and fewer people benefiting as you go up the pyramid. In agriculture, we still have pretty much that system."
"emancipation never really came to agriculture, in the sense that we still don’t pay the full value of the labor that’s required to make the entire system work."
" we recently have been forced to recognize how essential these workers are, by actually giving them that official designation. “Essential” means, “Without you, the whole thing doesn’t work.”"
"we would like to compel them to go to work so that the rest of us could have the comfort of still ordering in our T-bone steaks and what have you. But we don’t pay these people in a way that reflects how essential they are. "
" they do work that no one in this country is willing to do. "
"under high periods of unemployment, like the one that we’re going into right now, you would think that unemployed people would seek whatever job is available to them. So there is a labor shortage in agriculture to do all of the field labor and packing, processing that I just described. And Americans are not doing that work."
"There’s a demand for agricultural labor. We’re not filling in it domestically, so we bring in people internationally, migrants, to do this work for us. And we exploit them, because we don’t pay them the fair value of their labor. So that’s the structure of our food system. It’s very much modeled on antebellum plantation economics."
"it’s another category of person that has been designated “essential, but expendable,” you might say."
"they don’t see the workers as people who have the same needs as they and everybody else in this country do, to have such things as, for instance, occupational safety standards applied to their workplace, to have health benefits, to have retirement benefits, to earn enough to have dignified livelihood, meaning you can afford decent housing, you can afford to feed yourself and your family."
"We actually see them as “inputs” ... labor is seen as an input. And the way that you try to fatten up your profits is to cut the cost of your inputs, so that you get greater margin."
"What farmers actually need is fair prices for what they produce, which, by and large, they don’t get right now. They don’t exist in a competitive environment, and they don’t have the leverage where they can actually negotiate fair prices for them. But that’s actually what they need. If they could negotiate fair prices, they could afford to have it in their economy to pay all of their costs. But that’s not the situation that we have right now."
"the highly concentrated agribusiness sector, attempting to exploit the moment to cut as many costs as possible, and one of those costs is the cost of farm labor. And they’re cravenly taking advantage of the fact that, for all the reasons that I just described, these are people that are politically invisible; they don’t have muscle. Many of them are domestic guest workers in the country; they signed paperwork that says they’re only here to work in fields, that’s all, and when they’re done, they return home. Or else they’re not documented, and so what are they going to do when they’re exploited? Sue? They have no standing, and so that’s being cravenly exploited."
“If a Worker Is Essential, They Can’t Be Illegal.”
" the farmers that are doing well right now are the so-called small-scale family farmers. These are folks that produce in volumes, and who redistribute in local and regional networks, where they can respond very quickly, to where the schools are now becoming redistribution points for SNAP, for instance, or for school food that needs to be picked up by students that otherwise might not have access to that food, because they’re not coming to school every day, and so on. Or through farmers markets, another very important redistribution method which is very fungible. So we’re learning that that’s actually what works; we need to invest more in these kinds of highly distributed systems, and less in the highly concentrated systems."
"We need to reform immigration policy to recognize the economic value and the human rights that we need to accord to everyone that’s making us wealthy and keeping us well-fed in this country. We need to reform labor standards so that it’s safe for people that are working in the fields, and it looks like they’re living in the 21st century, and not back in the 19th century or the 18th century."
"every fiscal conservative is hiding their copy of Ayn Rand and is lining up for benefits from the nanny state. "
"They’re interested in maintaining share value more than they’re interested in preserving the health of their workers. They put out press releases saying that they value nothing more than the health of their workers, but they’re forcing them to work under highly unsafe conditions"
"We know how to stave further spread, but they’re actually not willing to adopt the recommendations that come from CDC, specifically, because it would slow their production line; it would slow their volume. Well, this is happening to them anyway, which is why they’re reacting in a way that demonstrates plutocracy in action: They’ve told the president what to do, and the president responded by saying, through an executive order, that these plants must remain open, implicitly that workers are compelled to show up to work against their health interests."
https://fair.org/home/our-food-system-is-very-much-modeled-on-plantation-economics/sidd
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