Americans Arrogant For Buying Mexican Lettuce

[Dori]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025924527

Lionel Mandrake (3,387 posts)

Hardship on Mexico's farms, a bounty for U.S. tables

By RICHARD MAROSI
Photography & Video by DON BARTLETTI
DEC. 7, 2014

A Times reporter and photographer find that thousands of laborers at Mexico's mega-farms endure harsh conditions and exploitation while supplying produce for American consumers.

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply. Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods. Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It's common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest. Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

The farm laborers are mostly indigenous people from Mexico's poorest regions. Bused hundreds of miles to vast agricultural complexes, they work six days a week for the equivalent of $8 to $12 a day. The squalid camps where they live, sometimes sleeping on scraps of cardboard on concrete floors, are operated by the same agribusinesses that employ advanced growing techniques and sanitary measures in their fields and greenhouses.

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The story also shows the chain of distribution of the produce to WalMart, Olive Garden, Subway, Safeway, etc. (In response to one post in LBN let me just say that this list of stores and restaurants is only meant to be representative, not exhaustive.)

cbayer (138,836 posts)

1. Really important story and the images alone are worth the click.
 
This is the first of four installments and I look forward to more from this team.

US arrogance when it comes to Mexico is staggering.

^What about your arrogance living dirt cheap there?

B2G (4,104 posts)

4. So do we stop buying their produce?
 
What?

And how is this American arrogance? I don't quite get that.

 

cbayer (138,836 posts)

5. Yes, we support fair trade and decent work conditions for
 
countries who are importing their goods to us.

It is arrogant to fill your belly with food that has been reaped on the backs of some of the most vulnerable people. And these people live next door to us.

^coming from the woman living in Mexico. Are you buying your lettuce imported  from America?

B2G (4,104 posts)

7. But if we boycott Mexico's products
 
What will happen to those people?

I only ask because given Mexico's track record, I seriously doubt it would force them to change. And why haven't we already done this? Maybe if they made things better for their people, so many of them wouldn't feel the need to rip themselves from their families and homes in search of a better life.

I have never understood our government's reluctance to apply pressure on the Mexican government in this regard.

Star Member cbayer (138,836 posts)

8. I don't think we boycott Mexico's products, I think we use some
 
discretion in what we buy.

This article is focused on companies owned by gringos. They put the smaller, mexican companies out of business.

If you saw these images and they were labor camps in the US, what would you think?

How can we justify allowing this to happen just because these are brown people?

What is Mexico's track record? A better question is, what is the US's track record?

The US is grossly complicit in the problems in Mexico.

It's easy to just say that the Mexican government should fix their problems. It's harder to see how the US feeds those problems and then take some responsibility for our brothers and sisters to the south.

The US government's reluctance is the same as the US consumer's reluctance. We like things cheap and we don't much care how that happens.

^lettuce doesn't come with a manufacturers' label. I bet you could get Obama to do that, so it costs everyone even more money.  Coming from the woman who lives cheap in Mexico so she can spend her summers in Europe.

wonderwall (11 posts)

14. This makes me cry...I see those stickers from Mexico
 
and I assumed that the conditions were adequate. I can't in good conscious buy from Mexico anymore. 

Isn't this a direct result of NAFTA?

Mosby (4,470 posts)

20. california farmers use more water than anywhere else in the world
 
Most of it comes from the colorado river.

70 percent of the colorado river water is being used for farming and it's not sustainable.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-river-runs-dry-61427169

[Chris_]

Sounds like Mexico's problem, not ours.

[GOBUCKS]

^coming from the woman living in Mexico. Are you buying your lettuce imported  from America?

We can use mexican produce in America as long as we wash it carefully. (It's all been exposed to shitty water in mexico.)

If you were living in mexico, you'd have a problem, since all the water down there is shitty.

I guess the thread slayer washes her mexican lettuce with bottled water, or maybe beer.

[obumazombie]

Mosby (4,470 posts)

20. california farmers use more water than anywhere else in the world
 
Most of it comes from the colorado river.

70 percent of the colorado river water is being used for farming and it's not sustainable.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-river-runs-dry-61427169

Farming using water is not sustainable.
I would change our world from gatherer to all hunter, but our quarry drinks water too.

[thundley4]

cbayer (138,836 posts)

5. Yes, we support fair trade and decent work conditions for
 
countries who are importing their goods to us.

Bill Clinton *cough* NAFTA *cough.

Obama *cough * TPP *cough*.

Liberals love pushing through trade deals that hurt American workers and keep foreign workers impoverished.

[BlueStateSaint]

That thread is crying out, even begging for Nadin.  Where is it?