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State of the Program report: “Now, fourteen years since its inception, the FFP has entered into a phase of truly dramatic expansion: During 2024 and 2025, the Program’s protections will reach thousands more farmworkers, at over 30 additional farms in 13 new states.”
“…the FFP’s domestic expansion in the U.S. is increasingly urgent in light of heightened risks to farmworkers from both rising temperatures associated with climate change and serious abuses associated with the growth of the H-2A program, including the growing risk of forced labor and human trafficking.”
As the Fair Food Program continues to ramp up its national expansion — while simultaneously growing its international footprint, as well — the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC) has released its latest report on the FFP. This State of the Program report offers both a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the FFP’s progress and the transformational change it has brought to the agricultural industry. The report dives deep into the various mechanisms of the FFP to show, in full transparency, how the Program operates and leverages its unique market-based power to guarantee best-in-class protections to tens of thousands of farmworkers.
In the words of one farmworker who was interviewed by a human rights investigator for the FFSC:
“There is a huge difference now since we have started [participating in the FFP] this season, the conditions here are really improving. For example, the supervisors used to get angry, and now they behave respectfully towards us [the workers]. Now we can make a complaint without fear of retaliation, and they [the supervisors] treat us well and as if we are all equals, without preference for one over the other. Now I feel happy to harvest here.”
We are excited to share the latest report, in full, today, but over the next few weeks we are also planning a multi-part series of posts highlighting excerpts of the report that capture various specific aspects of the unique partnership among farmworkers, growers, buyers, and consumers at the heart of the FFP.
Today, we are sharing an excerpt of the report’s Executive Summary as an introduction to this series. If you would like to download the report to read it in its entirety, click here [[link removed]] ! And stay tuned for more highlights from the report in the weeks ahead.
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Executive Summary
Fourteen years ago, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) saw two key branches of their strategic efforts come together to give rise to the Fair Food Program. On the one hand, through the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food, launched in 2001, farmworkers from Immokalee, Florida, mobilized consumers across the country to call on corporations atop the US food industry to help guarantee farmworkers’ fundamental human rights in the fields where their produce was grown and harvested. On the other hand, through the CIW’s Anti-Slavery Campaign, launched in the early 1990s, those same farmworkers worked, often at great personal risk, to uncover and investigate modern-day slavery rings operating in Florida and throughout the eastern United States.
By 2010, the CIW’s anti-trafficking efforts had helped federal prosecutors put over a dozen farm employers and supervisors behind bars for exploiting their workers through the threat and use of violence, prompting federal prosecutors to dub the Florida agricultural industry “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Also by 2010, the CIW had secured legally-binding “Fair Food Agreements” with nearly a dozen of the country’s largest buyers of produce, committing those companies to leverage their purchasing power to protect workers in their suppliers’ operations, though dogged resistance to reform on the part of Florida’s tomato growers, had, to that point, kept those agreements from being implemented on Florida farms.
In late 2010 however, this potent combination of 1) an organized farmworker community, 2) an emerging human rights crisis in the agricultural industry, and 3) a growing measure of purchasing power committed to protecting farmworkers’ rights, finally overcame decades of grower resistance and resulted in the launch of the CIW’s Fair Food Program.
Just three seasons later, the Florida tomato industry was described by one human rights observer as “the best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times. That remarkable transformation would not be contained to Florida’s tomato fields alone, however. Within a few years, the Program began to expand, first to tomato farms along the east coast and soon after that into new crops in new states across the US...
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Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States
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