On a brisk afternoon in mid-January, Eloy Ortiz is pacing the back alley behind a white house in Watsonville, California, in the heart of California’s strawberry industry. The house is under an evacuation warning after weeks of torrential rain, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of women and children from crowding around the back gate. Some women are dragging grocery carts. Others are trying to entertain their very bored children. They have been waiting for hours for the bags of beans and maseca corn flour that volunteers are giving away. “I’d say we have about 300 farmworker family members here,”
says Ortiz, eyeing the crowd. He raises his voice so the women in the back
can hear him. “Please!” he says in Spanish, “there are some cars that are
trying to pass!” The crowd is blocking traffic. Ortiz is a board member and volunteer with the Center for
Farmworker Families, a nonprofit that assists farmworker
communities throughout Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties on California’s
Central Coast. The group has been distributing food for over a decade, but
this is a big crowd, even by their standards. Many of the women in line pick
strawberries for a living, and the crop has taken a beating from California’s
winter storms. Farmers face up to $200 million in damages, according to the
California Strawberry Commission. Ortiz and the other volunteers have given each woman a number
to keep the line, which stretches down the block, organized. A few women are
worried the food will run out by the time their numbers are called. “I have number 299,” says one woman in Spanish. She knew
there would be a long wait here and brought her own folding chair. “And if
your number’s around 300, sometimes you don’t get anything.” The woman is waiting with her friend, a woman in a damp pink
sweater who got caught in the rain. They both ask to remain anonymous. Like
many of the women here, they’ve worked in the Central Coast’s strawberry
fields for decades and don’t want their employers to hear them talking
frankly about their jobs.
California’s massive agricultural industry is still assessing
the damage from a relentless series of atmospheric rivers earlier this month,
which triggered mudslides, flooded communities and killed at least 20 people.
For some farmers, the storms may well have been a lifeline, bringing
much-needed rain to a state suffering from its worst drought in 1,200 years.
For others, the breached levees and flooded fields have been a disaster. For many California farmworkers, the storms have been
devastating. Some were forced to evacuate, or lost cars and other possessions
to the flooding. And throughout the state, workers have been unable to work,
losing income to buy basic necessities. According to workers and labor advocates throughout the state,
the storms amplify an already troubling situation. The farmworkers who
harvest the nation’s food are paid so little that they can’t always afford to
eat. Now, extreme weather events—many of which are fueled by climate
change—are making matters worse. Farmworker food insecurity has been a problem for years. The
federal government doesn’t keep data on this, but the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that
between 1.1 million and 1.9 million farmworkers and their family members
don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Now, with wildfires,
heatwaves, drought and floods taking a toll on California’s farmland, some
farm laborers are working less, if at all. Farmworkers are paid hourly or
piece rate, based on how many strawberries or grapes they pick, so when their
work hours plummet, their income shrinks too. Even in good times, farmworkers
in California only earned an average $12 an hour, according to a 2015-2019 federal survey. “That creates all sorts of challenges for farmworker
communities,” says Josue Medellin-Azuara, an associate professor of
environmental engineering at the University of California, Merced. “When
climate hits, these communities of farmworkers are hit harder.” In a study published last
November, Medellin-Azuara and his team found that California’s drought
eliminated more than 12,000 farm jobs out of an estimated 450,000
agricultural workforce in 2022. The losses don’t account for farmworkers who
retained their jobs but saw their hours cut. And there may be more job losses
ahead. “The droughts are not going away,” he says. Many California farmworkers are undocumented, which means they
don’t qualify for unemployment or SNAP benefits. The state’s California Food
Assistance Program (CFAP) provides food assistance for many immigrants who
are excluded from federal food assistance, and last year, the state
legislature took steps to extend the program to
undocumented residents over the age of 55. But the age cutoff will exclude
many undocumented people from those benefits. Medellin-Azuara suggests that California extend safety net
programs like unemployment insurance to farmworkers, regardless of their
immigration status. “[These are] people who belong to the lowest income
groups in the state, that are vulnerable,” he says. Back at the Center for Farmworker Families’ food distribution
event, Eloy Ortiz is handing out rolls of toilet paper. His initial headcount
has turned out to be low: there are 450 families here, not 300. Volunteers
are giving each woman in line a bag of beans or maseca, rather
than a bag of each, since there might not be enough food to go around. Ortiz agrees that the state should expand unemployment and other benefits to undocumented workers. He also thinks that farm companies that operate in California need to pay their workers a living wage. “People are living in poverty in one of the most economically prosperous areas of the country,” he says. Agriculture is a $50 billion industry in the state, but a
federal survey found that nearly a quarter of the state’s farmworkers live
below the federal poverty line. That makes them more vulnerable economically
when disasters like drought and the recent rains hit. And that, says Ortiz,
is the root of the problem. An audio version of this article originally aired with Here & Now. Audio Version It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org |
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