Ganga Sekar, a coordinator of ISWA: "By coming together, sugar workers break the silence around long-standing abuses and begin to build the trust, confidence, and collective voice needed to support a rights-based program like the Fair Food Program."
Something incredible is underway in India right now.
While the award-winning Fair Food Program continues its domestic expansion here in the US, covering more farms and crops than ever before, the groundbreaking program is inspiring and informing efforts to replicate its unique success by workers across the world. In March of this year, we shared the news with you that a coalition of sugarcane workers and human rights groups in India has come together to build a Worker-driven Social Responsibility program for the sugar industry, modeled after the CIW's Fair Food Program.
Organized under the banner of the India Sugar Industry Workers Association (ISWA) and in close consultation with the CIW, this effort has rapidly gained steam. Across the sugar-producing regions of India from Maharashtra and Karnataka to Uttar Pradesh, sugarcane workers have been hosting community meetings to analyze the myriad human rights abuses they face, and discuss the path forward for launching a WSR program of their own in order to safeguard their dignity while providing much of the world's sugar. In small conference rooms, schools, community centers, and even in the sugarcane fields themselves, workers have been preparing for the harvest season by coming together to build a base of support for WSR.
These community gatherings have become a mainstay on the road to WSR. From the earliest days of the CIW, when farmworkers in the isolated agricultural community of Immokalee met in a back room at a local church to discuss what can be done to end the abuses they faced every day, these meetings have proven to be foundational pillars that enable workers to come together to discuss the challenges they face, analyze their shared reality, and forge a better future for themselves.
And in India's sugarcane industry, the current reality for farmworkers is intolerable.
Tens of thousands of women farmworkers have been subjected to forced hysterectomies — with the sole purpose of increasing their productivity — while yet more are trapped in debt bondage arrangements that, in some cases, stretch across generations. Conditions have grown so dire that the Mumbai High Court ruled the government must address these abuses -- a ruling that lacks enforcement power alone, but provides much-needed momentum for ISWA's efforts to adopt the Fair Food Program in India.
Reflecting on these gatherings, Ganga Sekar, a coordinator of ISWA, has this to share:
"Worker meetings in Beed [a city and district in Maharashtra] are a crucial first step in this transformation. By coming together, sugar workers break the silence around long-standing abuses and begin to build the trust, confidence, and collective voice needed to support a rights-based program like the Fair Food Program. In a place where isolation and fear have long kept people quiet, simply meeting together becomes an act of resistance and the foundation for enforceable protections led by workers themselves."
We want to share a few photos showing these community meetings in action, and promise to keep you up to date in the months ahead on both the FFP's own expansion, and the (now many!) replication efforts it has inspired.
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