Tomatoland (20 page)

Although it has not officially been declared, a tomato war has raged for the past two decades between Florida and Mexico. Florida is losing. When it started,
Mexican imports accounted for about one-fifth
of the U.S. tomato consumption. That figure has since risen to one-third. The
North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into force in 1994, certainly helped Mexico. Almost immediately after the treaty was enacted, American growers claimed that Mexico was dumping tomatoes on the market at prices below what they cost to produce. Rather than risk tariffs or other sanctions,
Mexico agreed to a settlement
that established a minimum value at which it would offer tomatoes for sale to this country. But Mexico still had several key advantages over Florida, among them better weather, better soils, and lower wages. But the Mexicans’ far-sighted business strategies also played a role. In the early 1990s, Mexican growers pioneered new
production techniques. Instead of producing “gassed green” tomatoes, they opted to plant newly developed “extended shelf life” varieties bred by Israeli horticulturists that could be allowed to ripen
on the vine and still survive shipment to distant markets, depriving Florida growers of their geographical advantage. The Mexicans also adopted greenhouse culture, which has helped increase their share of the fresh tomato market. The profits reaped during the 2010 freeze left Mexican farmers flush with capital to invest in expansion at a time when Florida growers were just hoping to hang on long enough to plant another season’s crops. “They made enough during that freeze to keep their foot on our neck for a decade,” Brown said.

While it is true that Florida’s tomato production is dominated by large agribusinesses, they are mostly family held, private companies that lack the financial leverage of most corporations. They are tiny compared with their fast food, supermarket, and institutional food-service customers. They are also dwarfed by their suppliers, who are multinational corporations such as
Monsanto,
DuPont, and
Bayer CropScience. Almost everything a tomato farmer buys to raise a crop is petroleum based—chemical fertilizers, pesticides, plastic row covers, plastic bins, and fuel for tractors and trucks—and prices rise in lockstep with a barrel of oil. Little wonder that bankers are none too eager to lend money against a future harvest. Owners have to dig into their own bank accounts to get through lean years. And an increasing number are no longer willing or able to do that. Twenty years ago, there were about three hundred commercial tomato farms in the state. Currently there are fewer than seventy-five, and the number continues to shrink. “If Americans want imported food, they’ll be dependent on imported food before they know it, because we’ll be broke and gone,” said Brown.

Florida tomatoes also face pressure from greenhouse and hydroponic producers located in
Canada and the United States as well as Mexico. “The greenhouse market has just exploded in the last decade. There have been fascinating volume shifts,” said Brown, who holds their products in the same disdain that foodies reserve for Florida’s mature greens. “Our tomatoes are not a manufactured product, as opposed to what is grown in the greenhouse industry. They have a
standard set of plant genetics, a standard set of environmental conditions, and they squirt them out like widgets. That’s why the entire retail shelf is totally dominated by greenhouse tomatoes. The consumer perceives them to be of great value because they are beautiful and on the vine and they smell like tomatoes, but that’s just a gimmick. If all a tomato has is water, what’s it going to taste like? Maybe we should get scratch-and-sniff stickers for our field-grown tomatoes.”

Regardless of what they do to burnish their image, Florida tomato growers just can’t get no respect, in Brown’s view. “It’s frustrating,” he said. “The Coalition of Immokalee Workers needs a bogeyman. We’re it. And once an accusation is hurled in the media, it never goes away and rarely gets fact-checked. It just gets repeated, over and over again. When people are convinced that we’re the monsters that we’ve been painted to be, you don’t change their minds. Doing good things and being good citizens and business people does not make the papers. We’ve tried to tell our story, but reporters are not interested. Yelling Fire! sells.”

Brown said that Florida farmers got almost no press coverage when they endowed the
Farmworker Community Support Foundation, which in 2010 donated $160,000 for improved health care and early childhood
education programs in South Florida. Growers have been longtime supporters of the
Redlands Christian Migrant Association, which operates daycare centers, preschools, and charter schools throughout rural Florida. They funded an
AIDs education program for male migrant workers. They backed a campaign to provide dental care for pregnant farmworker mothers. Tomato money provides scholarships for Immokalee high school graduates to continue their education. Exchange members have underwritten a scholarship at the
University of South Florida’s College of Education. In the 2008–2009 crop year, the Tomato Committee donated nearly $300,000 to fund university research projects.

The industry was also a pioneer in
food safety, Brown said. “When we voluntarily started down that road, all my friends in the
produce association business said that we were nuts. ‘Just stonewall the regulators,’ they said. We said that the right thing to do was figure out how we could do things better to try to lessen the chances of disease outbreaks caused by tomatoes. We worked with the Food and Drug Administration, and we came to the party long before the leafy-greens people came. We wanted to do whatever we could to prevent a major foodborne-illness crisis.”

To uncover labor abuses in the fields, the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association established a group called
Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE) in 2005. Reggie Brown is on the board of directors and is listed as the organization’s contact person. The nonprofit organization was established to provide independent auditing to make sure that certified farms used fair and legal employment practices and to make sure the fields were “free from hazard and violence.” These were some of the steps the coalition’s Campaign for Fair Food was demanding farmers take, but from the outset there were complaints that SAFE was a case of the industry fox guarding the henhouse if there ever was one. No one representing Florida migrant workers sat on the SAFE board, although three of the five members headed organizations that had received generous financial support from tomato growers and other farmers.
The skeptics’ position was vindicated
in 2007, when the SAFE auditor declared that the fields of Immokalee were slavery free only days before the high-profile Navarrete case came to light, and further vindicated a year later when court proceedings revealed that Navarrete slaves had worked on farms controlled by two SAFE-certified companies.

Brown insisted that Florida tomato farmers abhorred slavery as much as anybody. “But there’s slavery in other places, too, in the United States. You go to any city where you have nail parlors or Chinese restaurants, and you’re going to be able to find human trafficking.” As for the
housing conditions in Immokalee, he agreed they were an embarrassment to the industry but pointed out that the farmers did not own the decrepit Immokalee trailers. In other
areas where they did provide housing for their workers, he noted, the accommodations were government regulated and inspected by the health department.

Tomato growers, he claimed, complied with the same labor laws as other employers. “We pay the same wage that McDonald’s and Burger King pay in their shops to the people that work the counter. It’s
minimum wage. That’s the law of the land. But because we have a seasonal business, our employees may not work for us twelve months a year, but in the period they are working for us, they’re making minimum wage.” People who accuse the tomato growers of not paying the workers enough to live off of, he said, are only looking at one slice of a migrant’s income stream. “That worker might be employed by eight or ten different companies during the course of twelve months. He could be in North Carolina in the summer picking tomatoes and New York State picking apples in the fall before he comes back here.”

The proof that growers pay competitive wages, Brown contended, is that there is no labor shortage in the tomato industry. Their rates, he maintained, match those paid by other employers for jobs requiring similar skills and abilities. “Otherwise, they’d work for someone else. And some of these folks have been working for us for five or ten years. It’s hard work, but it’s good work.”

Brown was given an opportunity
to present his industry’s side of the story to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions during an April 2008 hearing on improving working conditions for tomato workers. “It was the worst day in my entire career up to that point, and the toughest,” he said. “You can imagine yourself trying to make an honest presentation of how we saw the issues, when the rest of the table knew for sure that I was the devil incarnate, including the senators, all Democrats. There was not a friend in that hearing room. It was no good to be falsely accused and so defamed as an industry for something that we weren’t doing. But Senate hearings are an art—almost like bull baiting.”

Senator
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) presided over the hearing. Senators
Edward Kennedy (D-MA),
Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) were also present. All of them had reputations for being vehemently prolabor. In their opening statements, the senators focused on wages, honing in on two claims that the Tomato Exchange had made. The first, which appeared on its Web site and was later repeated by Reggie Brown at the hearing, was that the wages paid to tomato pickers averaged over twelve dollars an hour. Senator Durbin asked that the committee join him in doing the math. At the going rate in 2008 of forty to sixty cents per thirty-two-pound bucket, a harvester would have to pick about three thousand tomatoes each hour—nearly one per second. He would have to fill a bushel-size bucket, run over to the truck, dump it, and run back to his assigned row every two minutes. “Is that physically possible?” asked Durbin. “I don’t think it is.”

In his testimony, Lucas Benitez of the coalition called Brown’s bluff. He said that he could refute the claim that pickers could get twelve dollars an hour by citing reports from the U.S. Labor Department and respected sources within the produce industry. “I want to make this issue as clear as possible. If Mr. Brown can guarantee that $12.46 an hour, backed up by a verifiable system of hours with time clocks in the fields and thereby eliminate the antiquated system of work by the piece, then we will take it. However, unfortunately, I don’t think that I have to be a fortune teller to know what the response will be.”

The hearing moved on to the exchange’s refusal to pass the penny-per-pound rate increase along to the workers. Brown said that in theory the penny-per-pound idea seemed like a good one. “For the record, we do not object to the fast food chains paying extra to the workers who pick the tomatoes they buy. Our members simply do not want to be part of that arrangement.”

One of the difficulties, he said, was that it would be impossible to determine which pickers harvested the tomatoes destined for the chains who had agreed to the
Campaign for Fair Food’s requests.
“During harvest, tomatoes that the workers pick are not individually identified or labeled by worker or by customer. At the time of harvest, a tomato picked by a worker could ultimately be purchased by any number of the producer’s direct customers,” he said. And those customers would in turn buy tomatoes from several producers and intermingle them. Brown said that growers feared they would be open to lawsuits from workers who were treated unfairly. “Workers also could allege that there is/was a scheme to defraud them and each check issued [allegedly in an incorrect amount] could be a separate bank or wire fraud. This is by definition a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] case. What’s more, RICO allows plaintiffs to bring additional grounds to allege fraud-based activities on whatever size enterprise they seek to attack.” The exchange’s members, said Brown, were also concerned that the extra-penny-per-pound program constituted an attempt to restrain trade.

Sanders asked Brown if the legal opinions were his idea, or whether he had gotten opinions from attorneys.

Brown replied, “We purchased legal opinions from legal firms in this country to affirm those opinions, yes.”

Sanders countered that the fast food companies who entered into the penny-per-pound agreement had also sought legal advice. “
Yum! Brands—and this is, as you know, not a small company. This is a huge corporation that, I gather, has the money to hire expert legal advice,” said Sanders, pointing out that the committee had received a letter from the fast food giant’s senior vice president saying, “Yum! Brands’s attorneys are fully confident that the agreement is legal.” Sanders also reported that the committee had received a letter signed by twenty-six law professors from around the country stating, “The ostensible legal concerns of the growers exchange are utterly without merit. Growers who comply with the agreements will not violate antitrust, labor, or racketeering laws. The unfounded assertions of the growers exchange should not deter any grower from adhering to the agreements, nor should those assertions deter any fast-food company
or other buyer from entering into similar future agreements. The only real …” Here Sanders paused for effect and said, “I would like you to listen to this. This is according to twenty-six law professors around the country.” He resumed, “The only real antitrust concern would arise if several growers agree among themselves to not participate in the monitoring program.” Sanders also pointed out that lawyers representing McDonald’s had issued opinions similar to that of the law professors. “I gather McDonald’s has the resources to hire some pretty good lawyers,” he said. Finally, he told Brown that the Senate committee itself had engaged two nationally recognized law firms to look at the Campaign for Fair Food agreement and that they had concluded that any claims that the terms of the agreement violated the Sherman antitrust law appeared meritless.