The fields will be wet with morning dew, and, for the next few hours, said Raúl Jiménez, an organizer for FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee) and a former farm worker, “you’re soaking wet, drenched in all these chemicals.”
Not just the chemicals on “the most pesticide-treated plants in the nation,” as Jiménez put it in an interview last month, but also the nicotine in the plants themselves. “You’re always exposed to it, you breathe it in, you touch it,” he said. The odds are good that at some point you’ll come down with Green Tobacco Sickness, which is caused by a high level of nicotine absorption through the skin. (Short term effects include dizziness, nausea, and dehydration – “so bad you think you’re gonna die.”)
You could wear gloves, but that would impede your ability to pluck the leaves from the bottom of the plants. You’re out there nurturing the plants by hand, rather than machine, in order to produce the highest-quality harvest, which brings a higher price for the grower. You bend over all day long, breaking off the leaves on the bottom, stashing them under your arm, leaving the top leaves to flourish.
“Your hands get black from the tar,” says Jiménez. Although regulations require wash stations (and bathrooms and drinking water) they are rare. “You have to be real careful not to touch anything.”
Tobacco plants flourish in the heat and humidity in North Carolina, which means that you are out there, too, in temperatures often above 100 degrees. Over the years several workers have died of heat stroke.
At the end of this day, you’ll go back to the “labor camp,” where toilets are lined up without partitions next to each other in a big room with sinks on the other side; where windows are few and small and have no glass; where you may have a mattress in a room with several other men – or you may sleep on the floor.
But the worst thing in all this long day is that, much of the time, you’re afraid – of deportation, of unemployment, of the crew leader, of letting down your family back in Mexico, or Guatemala – and you have no idea of your rights or your recourses.
In 2011, Oxfam America partnered with FLOC to research and publish the State of Fear report on human rights abuses in the North Carolina tobacco industry. This report has played a crucial role in recent efforts to raise the voices of farmworkers, and to get Reynolds Tobacco to engage in conversation with FLOC.
Following Oxfam’s request to supporters—in which more than 14,000 people called on Reynolds to meet with farmworkers—the company held its first face-to-face meeting with FLOC in 2012.
This was a huge step, but it’s just the beginning of the march toward real change and real justice in the fields. FLOC and partners want to keep up the pressure on Reynolds, and on some of the major chains that carry their products.
To honor International Human Rights Day, December 10, hundreds joined actions at Kangaroo stores in various cities in North Carolina to urge them to reach out to Reynolds about conditions in the fields. Kangaroo, the largest convenience store chain in the Southeast, could make a difference in the lives of thousands of tobacco farm workers.
]]>“There has never been a greater need, nor a greater opportunity to develop a regional plan such as this legislation to help build more resilient coastal communities across America’s Gulf Coast, creating tens of thousands of new livelihood opportunities in the process,” said Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and campaigns for Oxfam America.
“In addition to historic investments in restoring ecosystems, this legislation will help those most impacted by the oil spill, from low-income communities and industries like commercial fishing, to gain the skills they need to find good-paying work restoring critical natural resources. This legislation ensures local communities benefit not just ecologically but economically by promoting the hiring of local workers and use of local companies in projects to restore our coastline,” O’Brien said. “By investing in science and technology innovation, this bill can help the Gulf Coast to develop new industries to tackle water management and coastal protection challenges of the future across the globe.”
Currently, the Gulf Coast is home to over 80 percent of the United States’ annual coastal erosion, and almost half of annual wetlands loss, degrading billions of dollars worth of natural flood protection for coastal communities. The region’s fishery supports over $23B in economic activity, all of which remains threatened by the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon spill and decades of environmental degradation.
Nearly 500 miles – almost half – of the coastline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida that was contaminated by the Gulf oil disaster remains oiled one year later, according to the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration.
]]>As Ag Demba described coaxing crops from the drought-prone soil, dozens of Iowa farmers watched from hay bales scattered around the barn.
That October Saturday marked just one stop on a nationwide speaking tour by Ag Demba and three of his fellow small-holder farmers—Le Ngoc Thach, from Vietnam; Jacqueline Morette, from Haiti; and Duddeda Sugunavva, from India. Brought together by Oxfam America, Africare, and WWF-International, the farmers spoke at venues from the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines to the World Bank offices in Washington, DC. They told their stories to agricultural scientists, US Senators’ staffers, Florida churchgoers, Oxfam volunteers, and ordinary people all over the country. All four spoke about the obstacles they faced in their efforts to feed their families, and the gains they’d made when they used innovative methods to improve their harvests.
“The people who feed the world are facing enormous challenges—from climate change to economic hardship. And that leads to widespread hunger,” said Jim French, Oxfam America regional advocacy lead and a farmer from Kansas. “But the answers are simple: We need to invest in small-holder farmers, and give them the tools that can help them become more resilient.”
It was early that same morning—October 16, World Food Day—when the four international farmers arrived at Neher Acres, a family-owned 500-acre corn and soybean farm in Grundy Center, Iowa. Thach strode out into the cornfield first, his slight, dark-suited figure nearly vanishing among the tall stalks. Morette followed; plucking a ripe ear of corn, she skimmed it clean with her thumb, cupping her palm to catch the golden kernels.
Soon the farmers, their translators, and various staffers crowded around Lyle Neher as he explained the workings of his family’s farm.
“How do you plant the fields?” asked Sugunavva, her flame-bright sari ruffling in the wind.
“How many acres per bag of seed?” asked Thach. A few minutes later, Neher’s son went into the farmhouse and returned with a printout he’d made for the visitors that converted the farm’s measurements into the metric system.
Though harvest time was over, the Nehers had left a patch of corn still standing for their guests. One by one, the four farmers clambered up into the cab of a red combine harvester, taking turns driving the bulky, roaring machine through the rows.
“It’s exciting for me to see these methods, but sad, too,” said Morette, leader of the Oxfam partner organization the United Women’s Association of Pouille. “I wish we had access to this kind of equipment.” She demonstrated corn harvesting methods at home: one person walking through the rows to pluck the ripe ears while another strips the kernels by hand. She said it would be hard to imagine a field this size in Haiti, where the average farmer’s plot measures about 3.7 acres.
The scale felt more familiar at the farmers’ next stop. At Marshalltown, Iowa, Community College, an agricultural extension program teaches new and immigrant farmers to cultivate small plots of land using sustainable methods. As students demonstrated a composting worm box and a moveable pen called a “chicken tractor,” Morette sketched careful diagrams on a yellow notepad. “These are techniques I can adapt to use at home,” she said.
At High Hopes Gardens, an organic farm in Logan Township, Iowa, the visitors sat down for a lunch of locally-grown food, from crisp vegetables to a sweet raspberry cobbler. Bees hummed in the air as about 70 Iowa farmers and their families joined them at picnic tables in the shadow of the red barn.
Later, everyone crowded inside to hear the visiting farmers’ stories. Morette spoke first, describing how she helps women farmers convert crops into more long-lasting and profitable products, like jams and peanut butter. Ag Demba, Thach, and Suganavva talked about their successes using the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), an innovative technique that yields more rice using less water and fertilizer. “Now, thanks to SRI, we can eat three meals a day instead of two,” said Ag Demba, who explained that his village used the surplus funds from the rice harvest to build its first school.
Many of the Iowa farmers asked questions, comparing the guests’ farming techniques to their own methods here in the US.
“I grew up on a farm, in a small town, with an open mind,” said Ellen Walsh-Rosmann, who runs a 200-acre Iowa organic farm with her husband and his family. “A lot of Iowa farmers claim that we feed the world. If we truly do, then we should think about poverty and hunger, and our relationships with farmers worldwide.”
It was just one day in what French described as a successful effort to bring the farmers’ stories to life for Americans. “Our role at Oxfam is not to speak for these farmers, but to bring them together with those who can support their efforts,” he said.
And in Iowa, he added, their audience may have understood the message best of all.
“No matter where we farm, we all share a common bond with the land,” said French. “We all want the same things: clean water, a decent living, food on the table. If we can understand that, we can come to solutions together.”
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For natural disasters, this assessment of risk is based on detailed modeling and analysis of historical data on the frequency and severity of all manner of disasters. In this report, we examine how homeland security policy could be revised to accommodate climate change impacts on socially vulnerable populations in the Mississippi Delta region and the Gulf Coast, building on the 2009 Oxfam America report, "Exposed: Social vulnerability and climate change in the US Southeast."
]]>For four days, participants exchanged their experiences using "Getting It Right," a dynamic tool developed by Canada-based Rights & Democracy. Designed especially for communities and their support organizations, the tool enables teams to conduct HRIAs of private investment projects, such as infrastructure projects, agro-industry, dams, extractive industries, and other initiatives.
This report summarizes key lessons learned and recommendations from participants, based on their pilot experiences in Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, the Philippines, and the United States.
]]>“See, with a storm, (there’s) damage and you come back, you know,” Duncan said recently while mending a hole in one of his fishing nets in Venice, LA. “This here is different than a storm .First time we ever had something like this. (With a storm) if people lost their job and didn’t have their job, they come and fish. This here is the life of the people here, fishing. This is their lifeline here. A lot of people make their living and survive with their fishing.”
Duncan has spent the past five years trying to rebuild his life since Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana. And although the storm was severe, he suffered the most damage afterwards when a private company from New York, hired by the Coast Guard, came through Venice and began delivering on their mandate to lift swamped boats like Duncan’s from the water. Instead of cloth ties, the company used metal cables for the task, destroying the fiberglass hull on Duncan’s boat and dozens of others—before the Coast Guard could stop it.
Now the fishermen on the Gulf Coast are getting hit again. Duncan has barely been able to get out to fish the areas he’s out on almost daily during this time of year. In a normal year he’d plan on fishing four months out of the year – and earning a year’s income in that time. Since the spill however, he’s already lost one month and expects to lose at least two more. With authorities opening and closing fishing areas on a case by case basis, he goes out when he can. Meanwhile, the bills pile up and he says, plainly, that he doesn’t know where he’s going to get the money to pay off the note on his boat. He hopes assistance will come from BP but hasn’t talked to any company representatives in the nearly two months since the spill. No one from the government has been by to offer their help either.
Much of the physical and financial help that arrived after Katrina never reached its intended targets. Many worry the same will happen again, with assistance going to those best prepared to navigate the complex levels of bureaucracy that come with a multi-billion dollar effort like the Road Home recovery program in Louisiana or now, the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund. In many cases, the most vulnerable people have the hardest time getting help.
“People in the Gulf Coast are famously resilient, but they are running out of options. The response is way too slow for people who depend on the gulf for their livelihoods,” said Minor Sinclair, director of Oxfam’s United States Regional Office. “It was true with Katrina and it’s true now---communities need to be part of the solution and part of making sure it never happens again.”
Oxfam is working to ensure the voices from those communities are heard, convening meetings with community members and state and federal officials along the coast, working to have Oxfam partners represented in the media coverage of this disaster, and bringing coastal residents to Washington, DC to testify before congress and meet with elected officials. While BP’s establishment of the $20-billion escrow account for those affected by the spill will help, there is for those affected by the spill, there is much work to be done to ensure that those funds actually make it to their intended recipients, unlike with previous recovery efforts, and that community voices are continually heard in the recovery process.
And while there is serious concern among those most directly affected by the disaster, there is still significant resolve to continue living their lives and come back from this as they have come back from so many disasters before.
“I think it’s serious what’s happening here,” said Duncan. “We don’t know the effect of this, nobody don’t know how long the effect is going to be. (But) whatever we got to do, we got to do.”
]]>“Come into the sun, everyone. Stand in the sun with me,” Velazquez said, swooping his arms together the direction of the field in front of him.
Grudgingly, some of the hundreds of marchers who had gathered in Winston-Salem in support of farmworkers, eased out of the shadows into the field.
“This is what farmworkers are dealing with right now, right here in North Carolina,” said Velazquez, President and Founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) referring to the heat, which at 88 degrees was 16 degrees above average for the day. “(The) workers are stooped over in the fields making the life of leisure for the people in (RJ Reynolds’) executive offices. It’s not only an injustice, it’s a moral disgrace.”
The endlessly energetic Velazquez, and hundreds of farmworker and FLOC supporters, were in Winston-Salem for RJ Reynolds’ annual shareholders’ meeting to introduce a shareholders’ resolution that would require the company to adopt a strict human rights policy. In addition to the resolution, FLOC is seeking a formal meeting with RJ Reynolds CEO Susan Ivey to discuss ways to improve the working conditions in tobacco fields.
Despite having little chance of being adopted, the shareholders’ resolution is an opportunity to bring the issue of farmworker justice directly to RJ Reynolds officials. This year, Oxfam America Campaign and Advocacy Advisor Irit Tamir asked Ivey and others to support a stronger human rights policy. Oxfam and its allies believe that the weak human rights policy adopted by RJ Reynolds’ in February does little to ensure that the workers who pick the company’s tobacco – merely encouraging the company’s contractors to improve tobacco picker conditions, not demanding it.
And those conditions are brutal. Tobacco workers face some of the toughest conditions in the industry, including racism, long hours of stooped labor, exposure to dangerous chemicals and annual incomes of less than $8,000. Though RJ Reynolds claims an ‘independent’ survey of tobacco workers by a company it hired reveals that tobacco pickers are satisfied with their working conditions, it’s doubtful the workers at the May 7 rally would agree.
In its effort to rectify these conditions, FLOC has repeatedly sought a meeting with Ivey, only to have those overtures ignored. FLOC is also making its case publicly at shareholder meetings and through the media.
RJ Reynolds adopted its existing human rights policy partly in response to that work. While simultaneously distancing itself from the workers who pick its tobacco, claiming that because they work for a Reynolds contractor, they aren’t Reynolds employees. While technically true, FLOC and Oxfam believe that Reynolds has the responsibility and the power to demand higher standards from its contractors, and only purchase tobacco from contractors that ensure safe and healthy working conditions for its workers.
Though the shareholders’ resolution was defeated, the FLOC campaign against RJ Reynolds still maintains its goal of meeting with Ivey, and the ultimate adoption of a human rights policy that truly enforces human rights.
What you can do:
Sharon Hanshaw, executive director of the Oxfam America partner organization Coastal Women for Change (CWC), has been working to help Biloxi residents prepare for hurricane season. Now, she says, many locals fear that they will no longer be able to earn a living from the Gulf waters—and in a city already battling poverty and the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, this could be one uncertainty too many.
“People are in panic mode,” says Hanshaw. “They’re worrying: ‘I might lose my job, I might lose my job.’ What does that do to you and your family?”
The oil spill threatens a region already hit hard by poverty and unemployment. The Oxfam-funded 2008 report Measure of America ranked Mississippi and other Gulf Coast states as the lowest in the country on educational attainment, life expectancy, and level of income.
Hanshaw estimates that at least 20 percent of people in her native East Biloxi rely on fishing and shrimping to support their families. Many more work in related industries, including restaurants, shipbuilding, and the city’s 11 seafood processing plants. “Fish and shrimp: that’s how we live,” she says.
With the oil spill approaching the Gulf Coast, “fishermen fear this could be the end of their career,” says Hanshaw. “They’re asking questions like, what kind of compensation can I receive? Can I still fish and be okay? How long, if the spill reaches land, will I be out of work?”
Though community members have attended three meetings with BP officials, Hanshaw notes that straight answers are in short supply. “We get emails from the Environmental Protection Agency, BP, local organizations, national organizations—all with different information. There’s not one email with the same stuff,” she says. “There’s a lot of unanswered [questions], uneasiness.”
Cultural and language barriers also add to a sense of exclusion and misinformation. “The Vietnamese-American community is the majority of fishermen here. It’s their livelihood,” says Hanshaw. But, she adds, many Vietnamese fishermen don’t have computers or internet access—and key resources, like the BP insurance claims phone line, don’t provide Vietnamese translators.
“In East Biloxi, the Vietnamese community was left out during the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina,” adds Hanshaw. “Many are afraid it will happen again.”
Memories of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are still fresh in Biloxi, where 52 people died and more than 5,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. With the start of hurricane season approaching on June 1, Hanshaw says many residents are worried about the next big storm.
Many in the low- and middle-income neighborhood of East Biloxi are still fighting what they see as an inequitable recovery process. Right now, Hanshaw’s group is protesting the closing of three local schools, including the historically African-American Nichols Elementary. School superintendent Dr. Paul Tisdale attributed the closings to budget cuts and poor enrollment, but Hanshaw sees post-Katrina displacement as the root of the issue.
“Instead of building back affordable houses as soon as they could, the municipality had developers from other cities build condos and casinos,” explains Hanshaw. As a result, many families were forced to move out of the area, while others displaced by the storm still haven’t returned.
“If they take the schools… the community as we know it is over. It’s gone,” says Hanshaw. “A lot of teachers’ jobs will be gone. And that’s very devastating for people.”
With all of this happening at once, it’s no wonder locals are feeling overwhelmed, she says. “Can you imagine the mental state of people—thinking about schools, BP oil, and hurricane season, all in a couple of weeks?”
This month, CWC is partnering with another local group, Gulf Coast Restoration, to distribute a fact sheet about the oil spill in English and Vietnamese. “The fact sheet will tell you what you really need to know, how to prepare yourself. If you have an [insurance] claim, this is the number that you need,” says Hanshaw.
CWC volunteers plan to hand-distribute the fact sheets to peoples’ homes. “Not everyone has a computer, so [we make] phone calls and knock on doors,” she says. “You have to talk to people face to face, get them on the same page. Don’t assume everybody got the memo.”
Hanshaw is inviting her neighbors to attend a training session on advocacy, where they’ll learn how to make their voices heard both locally and in Washington, DC. Her group will also continue their core work on hurricane preparedness through a series of workshops, where locals learn how to assemble preparedness kits and create evacuation plans.
“Now we have to address the spill too, because that’s a form of preparedness also,” she says. “We want to help people understand that this is big. We have to get ready. And we don’t know what’s going to happen. We just don’t know.”
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