Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands: “In 2010 when we partnered there were a lot of folks who said we were crazy. And maybe we were… I mean farmers and farmworkers coming together to ensure a fair and safe workplace. That’s nuts. Within a few months the evidence was clear that the program worked and the culture in our farms was changing for the better.”
Gerardo Reyes Chavez, CIW: “To protect workers and give the program’s human rights standards real teeth, the FPP harnessed buyers ’massive market power to reward growers who respected their workers’ rights and to stop buying from farms where workers were mistreated.”
As the Fair Food Program expands dramatically across the US and receives national and international attention as a blueprint for guaranteeing workers' essential rights in a wide variety of industries, two FFP leaders gave a joint TED Talk -- a rare "duet" in TED Talk parlance -- on the groundbreaking partnership at the heart of the Program. Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and senior staff member of the CIW, and Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands and the first major grower to join the FFP back in 2010, shared the TED stage in New York where they discussed what the FFP's transformative power means to them and to the broader agricultural industry. As Esformes said during the talk: "From tomatoes to flowers to seafood we’ve created the basis for real and sustainable change."
The two-day TED event featured a wide array of academics and industry experts discussing ways to mitigate the growing impacts of climate change and build a resilient, sustainable food system that includes protections for all those whose labor feeds the rest of the world in an age of rapidly rising temperatures.
Chosen to deliver the event’s closing talk, Chavez and Esformes spoke to the audience of climate change experts and human rights advocates about the heat stress provisions of the Program — protections recently called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” by The Washington Post — and the urgent need to expand the Presidential Medal-winning program as far and wide as possible.
Check out their full TED Talk below, and stay tuned for more news on the Fair Food Program's nationwide expansion!
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Gwen Cameron, owner of Rancho Durazno: “[The Fair Food Program is] not the only social responsibility certification out there for farm workers, but one of the few with real teeth that holds farmers and buyers accountable.” Keep it Colorado: “Workers benefit from increased pay by the Fair Food premium, which buyers cover. Following an annual farm audit, workers receive the protections and benefits required by law. They also benefit from the work of a new health and safety committee as well as an anonymous 24- hour hotline.” Last week, we shared the exciting news that the Fair Food Program — […]
Fair Food Program set to expand to 27 more farms, 13 more states with support from United States Department of Agriculture USDA announcement marks latest instance of CIW/FFP innovations adopted as policy by the public sector USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack: “Improving working conditions and quality of life for farmworkers, both U.S. based workers and those that come to our country to work, is one key step in building a stronger, more resilient food supply chain.” Cruz Salucio, CIW, Fair Food Program: “We are very happy to join with the USDA today in launching this project and providing this incentive to […]
Gerardo Reyes Chavez, CIW: “To protect workers and give the program’s human rights standards real teeth, the FPP harnessed buyers ’massive market power to reward growers who respected their workers’ rights and to stop buying from farms where workers were mistreated.” Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands: “In 2010 when we partnered there were a lot of folks who said we were crazy. And maybe we were… I mean farmers and farmworkers coming together to ensure a fair and safe workplace. That’s nuts. Within a few months the evidence was clear that the program worked and the culture in […]
CIW: “The promise of Worker-driven Social Responsibility – a model by which workers are able to define and enforce their own rights – is to modernize workers’ human rights by flipping market incentives and conditioning profits on respect for workers’ human rights.” “Workers everywhere deserve safety, dignity, and a fair wage: with the emergence of WSR, they now have a novel tool to empower themselves to become the frontline monitors of their own rights, and to usher in a new day of real, measurable human rights enforcement in the global economy.” Against a backdrop of cascading climate catastrophes; surging authoritarian […]
Lucas Benitez, CIW: “It hurts to think about how their families have yet to learn about this, that their loved ones cannot come home to their country and hug their children, their spouses, their parents.” At 6:30 in the morning of Tuesday, May 14, an oncoming pick-up truck veered out of its lane on a two-lane stretch of State Road 40 near the central Florida town of Ocala and sideswiped a bus full of farmworkers heading to the fields to harvest watermelons. The collision caused the bus to swerve off the narrow road and lose control, careening first into […]
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