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Showing Original Post only (View all)Hardship on Mexico's farms, a bounty for U.S. tables [View all]
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.
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.
Read more: http://graphics.latimes.com/product-of-mexico-camps/
This thread is being reposted from Latest Breaking News, where it was locked as off-topic.
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.)
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The problem is it's hard to use discretion when you don't know where the products come from
Major Nikon
Dec 2014
#36
That is what has always been true regardless of the border. Bananas are a good example. They used
jwirr
Dec 2014
#2
Obviously the companies won't move to change things. They are getting what they want now.
Judi Lynn
Dec 2014
#29