A worker on a farm in Kiambu district, central Kenya, that produces tea for export. Nearly 80 percent of rural farmers in developing countries earn less than USD1.25 per day. Credit: Charles Wachira/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2018 (IPS)

The very people who help put food on our tables often face numerous human rights violations, forcing them go to bed hungry.

In an annual report set to be presented to governments at the United Nations this week, Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Hilal Elver found that agricultural workers worldwide continue to face barriers in their right to food including dangerous work conditions and the lack of employment protections.

“[Agricultural workers] are a major element of our reaching available food but they are among the world’s hungriest people,” she said, highlighting the paradoxical relationship.

“We are dealing with smallholder farmers, poverty, inequality, and land issues but we don’t deal with the actual workers working from farm to table—there’s a huge chain of production that we are not paying attention,” Elver added.

Agricultural workers make up over one billion, or one-third, of the world’s workforce.

Despite playing a critical role in global food security, many farm workers are left without enough money to feed themselves or their families in both developing and developed countries due to low wages or even late payments.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO), nearly 80 percent of rural farmers in developing countries earn less than USD1.25 per day. In Zambia, for example, agricultural workers earn less than USD2 per day on third-party farms.

In the United States, while the minimum wage is higher, 50 percent of farmworkers were paid less than minimum wage and 48 percent suffered from wage theft.

A survey by the Food Chain Workers Alliance also found that one-quarter of all farm workers have incomes below the federal poverty line, contributing to farmers’ food insecurity and trapping them in poverty.

Migrants and women in the sector often face the brunt of such violations, Elver noted.

“Employers are more likely to consider migrant workers as a disposable, low-wage workforce, silenced without rights to bargain collectively for improved wages and working condition,” she said.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Turkish lawyer Hilal Elver, in Buenos Aires. In an annual report Elver found that agricultural workers worldwide continue to face barriers in their right to food including dangerous work conditions and the lack of employment protections. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

For instance, in California, which produces the majority of the country’s fruits and vegetables, 91 percent of farmworkers are foreign-born, primarily from Mexico. The rates of food insecurity for such labourers and their families range from 40 to 70 percent across the state.

While many industries have adopted minimum wage standards put forth by the International Labor Organization (ILO), they remain unenforced.

Elver also noted that the agricultural sector is the one of the world’s most dangerous sectors with more than 170,000 workers killed every year on unsafe farms, twice the mortality rate of any other industry.

This is partly attributed to the exposure of toxic and hazardous substances such as pesticides, often leading to a range of serious illnesses and even death.

Argentine farmworker Fabian Tomasi, who recently died after contracting severe toxic polyneuropathy linked to his exposure to agrochemicals, is a reminder of this.

Glyphosate, a weed-killer developed by controversial company Monsanto, has been widespread around the world and its use has increased in the South American nation, which is one of the world’s largest soy producers.

Since its use, there has also been an increase in cancer and birth defects in farming regions in Argentina with rural populations experiencing cancer rate three times higher than those in the cities.

The World Health Organization also classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

In developed countries, acute pesticide poisoning affects one in every 5,000 agricultural workers, the report found.

In the U.S., Dewayne Johnson also used Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides while working as a groundskeeper in California. Years later, he discovered he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a debilitating blood cancer.

After bringing the case to court, a California jury ruled against the agrochemical corporation, claiming that it caused Johnson’s terminal cancer and that they acted with malice and negligence in failing to warn consumers.

Monsanto continues to deny allegations that their glyphosate-based products cause cancer.

Now, the U.S. government is trying to reverse a ban on another pesticide chlorpyrifos which has been associated to developmental issues among children and respiratory illnesses.

However, like Johnson, many agricultural workers around the world have begun to organise and rise up to the face of corporations and countries that fail to protect their human rights.

“This is an important new thing, giving the public much more understanding about pesticides,” Elver said.

Migrant farmworkers from Vanuatu recently won a settlement against company Agri Labour Australia after being underpaid and working in dangerous conditions which included exposure to chemicals.

But states must do more to protect and promote the rights of agricultural workers, Elver noted.

“Labour rights and human rights are interdependent, indivisible, and mutually inclusive. The full enjoyment of human rights and labour rights for agricultural workers is a necessary precondition for the realisation of the right to food,” she said.

The report states that governments must set “living wage” and working standards, and it should establish enforcement and inspection mechanisms to ensure such standards are being met.

The international community should also reduce pesticide use worldwide, including the ban of highly hazardous pesticides and the development of alternative pest management approaches.

International organisations such as ILO and FAO also have a role to play and should establish a fact-finding group to examine whether nations are implementing such changes.

Companies who fabricate evidence or misinform the public of health and environmental risks should be penalised, the report adds.

“It is time for States to step up, and take swift and urgent action to hold accountable those who commit human rights violations against agricultural workers and to prevent further violations,” Elver concluded.

Agroecology is a different way of seeing the food system because it deals with issues related to who gets access to resources and the processes that determine this access. Photo credit: UN Photo

By Geneviève Lavoie-Mathieu
ROME, Sep 24 2014 (IPS)

“It is time for a new agricultural model that ensures that enough quality food is produced where it is most needed, that preserves nature and that delivers ecosystem services of local and global relevance” – in a word, it is time for agroecology.

The call came from Pablo Tittonell of Wageningen University, one of the world’s leading institutions in the field of agriculture science, speaking at the International Symposium on Agroecology for Food Security and Nutrition, organised by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The symposium, held at FAO headquarters in Rome on Sep. 18-19, gathered experts from many backgrounds, including scientists, scholars, policy-makers and farmers.In times of climate change, food insecurity and poverty, “agroecology, especially when paired with principles of food sovereignty and food justice, offers opportunities to address all of these problems" – open letter in support of the International Symposium on Agroecology

In an open letter ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Summit on Sep. 23 in New York, some 70 scientists and scholars said that in times of climate change, food insecurity and poverty, “agroecology, especially when paired with principles of food sovereignty and food justice, offers opportunities to address all of these problems.”

“The FAO symposium contributes to building momentum for agroecology in Rome,” Gaëtan Vanloqueren, an agro-economist and one of the speakers, told IPS. Since 2008, there has been a renewed debate on agricultural models and the food system in general, he explained, but this symposium is, up to now, the most significant effort made by FAO.

Vanloqueren, who was adviser to former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, has a positive view of recent interest by a number of organisations in Europe and elsewhere to talk, research and promote agroecology, but “the danger”, he told IPS, “is that it becomes the new ‘sustainable development’, a new buzzword and catch-all phrase that can mean just about anything.”

“There remains a large amount of misunderstanding related to agroecology,” said Luca Chinotti, Oxfam’s GROW campaign adviser. For example, “a lot of people think that organic agriculture is the same as agroecology” and “sustainable agriculture is used by different people, meaning very different things,” the Oxfam spokesperson told IPS.

The expression ‘sustainable agriculture’, for example, is used by both Monsanto, the ag-biotech giant, and Greenpeace, the environmental organisation which strongly opposes the use of genetically modified seeds.

There is much work that needs to be done with respect to informing people about what agroecology really is, Chinotti told IPS.

According to Vanloqueren, agroecology includes a set of practices, such as the diversifying of species and genetic resources and the recycling of nutrients and organic matter. But it is also more than the scientific study of ecology applied to agriculture. It encompasses a set of socio-economic and political principals that questions the basis of the current dominant agricultural system.

“Agroecology should not be seen as a model or a technological package that can be replicated anywhere at any time. There are very few practices that can be applied to a great number of situations,” explained Celso Marcatto, technical officer on sustainable agriculture at ActionAid International.

This is why, he said, agroecology “has more to do with introducing new ways of thinking, rather than distributing ready-made solutions.”

Agroecology is a different way of seeing the food system because it deals with issues related to who gets access to resources and the processes that determine this access. That is why agroecology is also considered a social movement.

“The principals of autonomy, the importance of the combination of traditional knowledge and economic knowledge, the co-construction of solutions by peasants’ organisations, researchers and citizens are key in defining agroecology and are the basis of what distinguishes the movement from the so-called ‘sustainable ecological intensification’,” Vanloqueren told IPS.

At the centre of agroecology is the “role of farmers that needs to be scaled out and scaled across,” said Vanloqueren.

Agroeology is also about substituting inputs with knowledge, he added, and it is about fostering autonomy through both knowledge and independence from global markets. Finally, agroecology is about social equity and about democracy.

However, many obstacles remain in the way of convincing policy-makers and donors to advocate and promote the adoption of agroecology.

Quentin Delachapelle, a French farmer and vice-president of the Federation Nationale des Centres d’Initiatives pour Valoriser l’Agriculture et le Milieu rural (FNCIVAM), told the FAO symposium that one of the main obstacles to the larger adoption of agroecology is that it is based on a longer term vision.

“Unfortunately”, he said, “current public and market policies are based solely on a short-term perspective.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)