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chamerionwrites https://chamerionwrites.tumblr.com/post/636531391874711552/the-need-for-reform-of-the-food-supply-chain-is :
The need for reform of the food supply chain is far more broad-ranging than questions of targeted regulatory enforcement. The age of Covid-19 https://newrepublic.com/tags/covid-19 has revealed profound rifts in our culture concerning food production and distribution—rifts that must be bridged by more than purely economic fixes. Policymakers and consumers alike must reflect on how we have come to collectively accept a food system that is largely based on racial and ethnic discrimination. In a country with a legacy of plantation slavery, perhaps this should come as no surprise. But it’s incompatible with the free society that we claim to embrace. During this pandemic, the White House has declared https://www.cbia.com/resources/coronavirus/coronavirus-state-federal-updates/department-homeland-security-essential-industries/ all food system employees—from farm fields to factory floors to grocery aisles to restaurant kitchens—to be essential workers. But if food workers are indeed essential to our national survival, then we owe them a living wage, paid sick leave, and a safe work environment. We can no longer shrug off the meat industry’s high rates of injury, amputation, and illness as the necessary trade-off for cheap hamburgers and chicken nuggets. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be allowed full access to packinghouse workers, and the meat inspectors of the USDA, as well as the packinghouse workers themselves, should be granted a louder voice in determining safe line speeds.
Other cultural changes will have to go deeper than policy. Since the beginning of the great consolidation in the 1980s, meatpacking plants across middle America turned to refugees and immigrants to fill these dangerous and low-paid jobs. First, it was refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Then the industry saw an influx of Mexican immigrants, when NAFTA led to a rapid devaluation of the peso that hit hardest in rural communities across the border. The creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a series of high-profile raids https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/05/even-after-ice-raid-few-american-workers-showed-work-texas-meatpacking/ in the mid-2000s changed hiring yet again in ways that further diversified—and fractured—the meatpacking workforce. Today, meatpacking workers may be K’iche’-speaking Mayas from the central highlands of Guatemala; Salvadorans fleeing urban gangs; Karen people from Myanmar, many of whom grew up in refugee camps along the Thai border; Somalis, most of whom come from war-torn Mogadishu by way of the Dadaab refugee complex in eastern Kenya; and Yazidi from Iraq and Syria, who served as interpreters for the U.S. military.
Consumers will have to understand that the routine endangerment and abuse https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/04/when-were-dead-and-buried-our-bones-will-keep-hurting/workers-rights-under-threat# of these workers can no longer be the hidden cost of cheap meat. Indeed, if we can escape the stranglehold of the Big Six’s ruthless profit motive, then we can ensure fair treatment for these workers and sustainable profits for a larger group of small packers without increases in the price of food. Farmers, ranchers, and residents of rural communities must recognize that such a change will also bring them fairer livestock contracts and higher prices. They must resist the politics of division and recognize that they have common cause with meatpacking workers, even though they may look different, pray different, or speak a different language. An emergency such as the Covid-19 pandemic should make it clearer than ever that our interests and our fates are interwoven. In a just world, that would mean immediate citizenship for any undocumented immigrants who have put their lives at risk as essential workers during this pandemic. President Trump is fond of saying that this crisis is a war https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/09/donald-trump-coronavirus-wartime-rhetoric-245566—that he is a wartime president and that frontline workers are warriors. Since the founding of the country, we have granted citizenship to any foreign national willing to fight on our side. If you worked at a meatpacking plant or in a farm field, on a grocery loading dock or in a restaurant kitchen, during this once-in-a-century crisis, seeing that our nation was fed, then you should be assured a share of our national future.
–Ted Genoways, “Beyond Big Meat https://newrepublic.com/article/158679/beyond-big-meat-coronavirus-pandemic-meatpacking-monopoly ”
