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by Margrete Strand, Sierra Club Responsible Trade Campaign Ingracia and Jose Castillo and 1,000 of their co-workers were fired from their jobs picking grapes for Bluestone Farming Co. in California’s Coachella Valley just six days after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect on January 1, 1994. Across the Coachella Valley, acres of Bluestone's ripped-out vines were soon piled up, dead and dry, in the desert sun. Often lost in the trade statistics are the hidden costs to farmworkers, consumers, and the land itself from the unsustainable farming practices encouraged by NAFTA. Rather than learn from experience, Congress may vote this fall to give President Clinton "Fast-Track" authority to expand NAFTA to South America. The Castillo's story offers powerful evidence that U.S. trade policy needs a new approach. LOSING GROUND, IN THE U.S. Bluestone fired its workers just days before it was to sign a new contract with the United Farmworkers (UFW) -- after the company decided it could no longer compete with non-union Mexican growers. Only 43 workers, Jose among them, received NAFTA Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) -- the Clinton Labor Dept. program to ease the pain of NAFTA job loss with extended unemployment benefits and retraining. California's Employment Development Department, which administers the TAA in California, ruled that Bluestone's seasonal workers were ineligible because their layoff notice was dated January 7, a few days before they were to return to work. Of course, the Bluestone workers are just the tip of the iceberg. So far, 12 thousand workers were certified as NAFTA casualties in California. 124,000 have been certified nationwide. The real number of NAFTA job losses is probably much higher since workers frequently don't know that NAFTA adjustment is even available; others cannot prove they lost their jobs due to NAFTA. Those fortunate enough to get training often cannot find a new job at the same pay. The rest join the pool of unemployed, contributing to America's growing divide between rich and poor. If Ingracia and Jose managed to find new farm jobs, they would have found that health and safety conditions (as well as wages) had slipped in California's fields from the UFW's heyday in the 1970s and '80s. To help U.S. growers compete with surging imports, the EPA has increased chemical risks to farmworkers by reducing a critical safety factor -- the reentry period -- the time between when pesticides are sprayed on crops, and when growers can order farmworkers to reenter the fields. In 1994, the reentry period for captan, a potent carcinogen widely used to kill fungus in strawberry fields, was reduced from four days to one single day. As a result of the reduced reentry period, captan use more than doubled in 1995 while worker exposure to captan increased to several hundred times levels considered "safe." ... AND LOSING GROUND IN MEXICO In Mexico, farmworkers are even worse off than those in California. Adrian Allesquita Soto died of leukemia at age 16 after working weekends during the school year in the pesticide-coated fields of Sinaloa's Culiacan Valley. Four other farmworkers on Adrian's block were dying of leukemia. 3,000 workers are hospitalized each year from pesticides sprayed on the valley's 250,000 acres of cropland. Farm exports earn Mexico nearly $3 billion a year, and have grown 50 percent since NAFTA. Tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and other fresh fruits and vegetables from the Culiacan Valley supply nearly half of the United States market in the winter, while U.S. farmland lies fallow. Agribusiness in the valley is a textbook model of free trade. Mexican growers provide the land and workers to supply U.S. distributors and supermarket chains in exchange for U.S. capital, seedlings, and the "know-how" to grow the cosmetically perfect (but tasteless) fruits and vegetables preferred by U.S. supermarkets. Growers often slather their fields with pesticides that are prohibited in the United States. Although Mexico has strict farmworker safety laws, enforcement is non-existent. Due to lack of housing, many of the valley's 250,000 workers camp in the fields, bathing and washing in drainage canals tinted yellow with pesticides. A reporter for Mother Jones magazine spotted workers applying parathion and methamidophos, "two of the most toxic organophosphates on the market" after the local growers association claimed that neither was used in the valley. Since U.S. agribusinesses don't own the land or manage the workers, they can wash their hands of any abuses. "We just contract with them [the Mexicans] to buy the product," one U.S. grower told Mother Jones. "We do it precisely to avoid the kinds of hassles you are giving me." Understandably, agribusiness giants like Dole tout self-regulation and voluntary standards as the answer to farmworker and consumer concerns. Often maligned in the United States for taking U.S. jobs, "Mexican workers, including children," observes author David Korten, "are heroes of the new economic order in the eyes of corporate libertarians -- sacrificing their health, lives, and futures on the altar of global competition." NAFTA's environmental side agreement was supposed to ensure the effective enforcement of strong environmental laws. But in fact, the side agreement is virtually useless in taking on big polluters. Citizen complaints to the NAFTA environmental commission are rejected more often than not. FREE TRADE IN UNSAFE FOOD Consumers also have been trapped in the free trade "squeeze play." In April, nearly two hundred fifty children in Michigan were stricken with Hepatitis A after eating frozen strawberries grown in Mexico and shipped to school lunch programs in fifteen states, including California. (While Mexican produce is sold legally in your grocery store, these strawberries were shipped illegally because school lunch programs are supposed to buy American.) Some of the kids were sick for weeks with fever, vomiting and stomach cramps. To comply with NAFTA, Americans must accept Mexico's food safety inspections as "equivalent" to our own for food entering the United States. To ensure speedy delivery, the U.S. FDA inspects only 1 percent of Mexican food shipments at the border. Since Mexico has no health and safety inspections worth mentioning, NAFTA "free trade" means that potentially unsafe food now floods the U.S. market. Unfotunatly, the American media used this Hepatitis incident as an excuse to engage in another round of Mexico-bashing: Again, a convenient scapegoat was provided to divert public attention from those who bear the real responsibility for deregulating food safety and pesticides -- the politicians and transnational corporations who "Fast-Tracked" NAFTA through Congress. Rather than force U.S. consumers and farmworkers to accept a "Race to the Bottom" in food safety and pesticide standards -- as NAFTA does -- a responsible trade agreement would provide incentives to improve food safety standards and farmworker rights in both countries. ATTACKING THE CONSUMER'S RIGHT TO KNOW Not only does current free trade policy worsen health and safety conditions, but it makes solutions more difficult. For instance, a major industry coalition, including trade associations that represent agribusiness and pesticide makers, is using NAFTA's global big brother, the World Trade Organization (WTO), to attack the consumer's Right-To-Know about the environmental impacts of the products they buy. The industry coalition charges that ecolabels awarded to environmentally preferable products by independent, third-party certifiers are trade restrictive. Industry chafes at the high standards required to obtain eco-labels from independent certifiers because such eco-labels cast doubt on their own greenscamming. As a result, the WTO is now considering restrictions on ecolabels so severe that consumers will no longer be able to reward environmental leaders in the marketplace. In jeopardy are programs that use ecolabels to market coffee grown under traditional shaded conditions, which eliminates the need for pesticides and protects small farmers while preserving wildlife habitat. Also in jeopardy are experimental California labels to certify socially responsible farming practices that surpass organic food standards -- by conserving the soil and by treating workers well. FIGHTING BACK The attack on the consumer's Right-To-Know is a worrisome reminder that both NAFTA and the WTO are "self-mutating" through the continuous reinterpretation of their rules. Corporations are thereby encouraged to combine forces to press for new rules to attack environmental standards, whether governmental or private, anywhere in the world. Don't underestimate the power of corporations to kill ecolabels. Under international trade rules, says WTO spokesman Hans-Peter Werner, "It's up to the [trade] panels to interpret what, legally, is the right of governments." The globalization process can seem unbeatable, but citizens are fighting back. First, we've got to educate ourselves and organize. Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Campaign has tapped volunteers across the country to serve as coordinators in their chapters and groups to build a constituency against corporate globalization and for responsible trade. Please volunteer to serve as a coordinator in your chapter or group. Second, organize across borders to defend our common interest in decent conditions for ALL North Americans. The Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Campaign has partnered with the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade for a "NAFTA and the environment public education campaign" in Mexico. The Mexico campaign supports fishermen fighting oil pollution in Tabasco on the Gulf of Mexico coast, peasant farmers in Morelos fighting foreign investors who want to suburbanize their farms and a Natioal Park, and communities on the border fighting pollution from the maquiladoras. Third, shop your values, and take actions to support consumers' Right-To-Know. Next time you visit the grocery store, ask the manager if their strawberries were harvested by UFW workers. The AFL-CIO has made organizing strawberry workers in California its top priority, and Sierra Club’s Carl Pope supports this campaign as a member of the National Stawberry Comission for Workers’ Rights -- see related article. To help educate consumers in your area by passing out informational literature at grocery stores, contact the local Central Labor Council, or contact the UFW directly at 213-387-1974. Finally, go public with your opposition to fast-tracking NAFTA. Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Ask a local labor, farm, church, or human rights activist to co-sign as a way of building coalitions. But act now. Sometime this fall, Congress will consider new "Fast-Track" legislation to expand the failed NAFTA to Chile and the rest of South America. Tell the editor we need to Fix NAFTA, Not Expand It. Tell them we need a Responsible Trade Policy -- for a future in which unaccountable corporations no longer can profit from globalized environmental injustice. Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use |
