“We are making history,” said Angel Garcia, Human Resources Manager at Pacific Tomato Growers/Sunripe Certified Brands.  “Now we have people coming from other parts of the globe to absorb that history.”

“When I first heard about the Fair Food Program it was like – this blew my mind,” said Arlette Martinez of the Chilean Ministry of Labor and Social Provisions. “And we believe that better working conditions don’t just change a person’s life at work day-to-day, it makes a better world for [all of] us.”

Tailwinds continue to grow behind the international expansion of the Fair Food Program, carrying the ground-breaking human rights model all the way to the end of the world last week with a 5-day visit to Immokalee by a delegation of Chilean growers, human rights activists, and government officials excited at the prospect of growing the FFP’s footprint in Chile, South America’s largest exporter of produce (and the country affectionately known as “the end of the world” for its claim to being the southernmost point of the South American continent).

The Chilean delegation traveled to Southwest Florida to meet with a wide range of representatives from the Fair Food Program.  The CIW hosted the week-long gathering, which included meetings with representatives from FFP Participating Buyers Whole Foods Market and Compass Group, Participating Growers Sunripe Certified Brands and Bloomia, and officials from the US Departments of State, Labor and Agriculture, as well as the farmworkers whose tireless efforts over three decades gave birth to the pioneering program.

The delegation’s prime objective was to learn more about the Fair Food Program — in-person and from every angle — to help fuel the expansion of the FFP in Chile’s agricultural industry, and in so doing extend its best-in-class human rights protections to workers and certify ethical producers there.  In December of last year, cut-flower industry leader Bloomia became the first Chilean agricultural producer to be certified by the Fair Food Standards Council, the independent third-party monitor of the Fair Food Program.  The US Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) awarded a $2.5 million grant to the Fair Food Standards Council in February of this year to accelerate the expansion of the program and “promote grassroots, worker-driven social responsibility in agricultural supply chains.”

The delegation was, by all measures, a great success. Their visit began with a pre-dawn wake-up call ahead of a day-long visit to an FFP Participating Grower — Pacific Tomato Growers, in Parrish, FL — where delegation members (on left, below) watched as CIW staff members Cruz Salucio and Lupe Gonzalo led a worker-to-worker education session on farmworkers’ rights under the Program:

From there they traveled with the crews to the field, where the delegation observed  Fair Food Standards Council auditors as they interviewed workers harvesting grape tomatoes:

After a full day of field visits and spirited conversations with Pacific Tomato Growers’ management, the delegation then headed south to the offices of the CIW in Immokalee and Ft. Myers, where they spent the rest of their visit in exchanges with FFP Participating buyers, representatives of the US Departments of Labor and State, and CIW staff and members of the Immokalee farmworker community.  While in the town, the delegation also fit in several local field trips, including a tour of the CIW’s Modern Slavery Museum:

The visit generated press coverage by local TV stations and NPR member station WGCU, which sent a small team of journalists to document the multi-day delegation.  Below you can read WGCU’s story — which did a great job of capturing the optimistic spirt of the exchange — in full, but be sure to head to the WGCU website to see the multimedia report in its entirety, including a complete photo gallery and an excellent video summary of the visit. 

Chilean delegation travels to Southwest Florida to learn how to eradicate modern-day slavery

By Eileen Kelley, April 30, 2023

They boarded the old white-and-green school bus and headed towards the tomato fields. It’s a rickety ride along the rutted, dusty roads in Parrish, a small agricultural town outside of Tampa.

In all directions, the land is blanketed in lush green. Speckles of bright pink from the tomato stakes dot this soothing landscape.

Their journey to this tomato farm is historic for many reasons.

On board is a delegation of agricultural producers, human rights activists and government representatives from Chile. They are in Southwest Florida to meet with representatives of the Fair Food Program, a worker-driven, social responsibility program that ensures various agricultural products are ethically sourced.

The Fair Food Program is the signature creation of Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

As the bus gets closer to the Pacific Tomato Growers’ fields, the migrant farmworkers, perhaps 100 of them mostly dwarfed by these enormous tomato plants, come into better view.

These farmworkers are essential to Southwest Florida’s economy and needs. They are here on special visas allowing them to work in the fields doing the jobs that Americans for decades have had no interest in doing.

Chile, the largest exporter of agricultural products in South America, also must use migrant labor because it too has difficulties recruiting Chileans to do the backbreaking agricultural work.

A representative from the Coalition of Immokalee Worker directs those on the bus to not walk into the fields, but rather observe from outside the rows of tomatoes.

Steeping from the bus one sees the farmworkers reaching through the plants in search of the ripe tomatoes that they will then place into buckets tethered to their waists.

The pace at which the farmworkers work is quick — it must be because they get paid by bucket.

These sweet cherry tomatoes will soon be bound for restaurants and stores. The pickers will be back the next morning and the morning after that to get those just ripening, until sometime next month when the tomato fields are picked clean.

But this day’s field trip wasn’t a mere lesson on how and where this country’s food is grown.

It’s much bigger than that.

“We are making history,” said Angel Garcia. Garcia works in human resources for the Pacific Tomato Growers. “Now we have people coming from other parts of the globe coming to absorb history.

Garcia is a bit soft spoken but clearly proud of the work and the relationship he has with the farmworkers in the field.

It wasn’t always this way. Migrant workers for decades have been victims of or threatened with violence. They have been robbed of promised wages. Woman have been raped.

Water, food and bathroom breaks were never guaranteed – until the Coalition of Immokalee Workers stepped in.

“It’s a new chapter,” said Garcia.

The Chilean observers traveled some 4,200 miles away to learn about the coalition’s Fair Food Program.

The program is essentially a partnership between workers, growers and companies that purchase the food.

The companies agree to pay a small premium to the growers in exchange for a commitment from growers that they will abide by a code of conduct -– conduct that includes providing water and shade breaks.

The premium is then given to the workers in the form of bonuses which can often double a worker’s wages.

Tomato harvesters working under the Fair Food Program earn roughly 60 cents per 30 pound bucket of tomatoes they harvest — that’s before the bonus.

The participating companies must agree to drop suppliers who violate these standards.

Pacific Tomato Growers was the first growing operation to sign on to the Fair Food Program. In doing so, it agreed to allow a third party to come in and speak freely with its workers to make sure the code of conduct is being followed. It also agreed to allow this third party to review the books to ensure the workers are getting the promised bonuses.

“At the end of the day we are talking about obeying the law, right?” said Jon Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers. “So the things we do under the Fair Food Program are all about keeping us in compliance with the law, human trafficking, wage theft, sexual harassment, child labor -– these are things that are against the law. So our partnership with the Fair Food Program is really tailored towards seeking solutions to agricultural problems.”

The Fair Food Program has been credited with eradicating modern-day slavery from most of Florida’s tomato fields.

Forced labor upon the worlds’ poor is not just a Florida problem. It tends to be systematic when people escape poverty and come to other countries in search of work.

But it doesn’t have to be, as far as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Chilean delegation are concerned.

“When I first heard about the Fair Food Program it was like –- this blew my mind,” said Arlette Martinez the Chilean Ministry of Labor and Social Provisions.

Through a translator she said she appreciates how the program changes work relations between workers and management as well as the work conditions.

“And we believe that better working conditions don’t just change a person’s life at work day-to-day, it makes a better world for us.”

The U.S. Department of Labor awarded a $2.5 million grant to accelerate the international expansion of the Fair Food Program because forced labor is globally on the rise.