Yum! Brands, Inc., one of the world's largest restaurant companies with 34,000 establishments, recently agreed to pay a penny a pound more for the tomatoes four more of its chains buy from Florida growers. The increase nearly doubles the amount workers can earn for each 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick and sell to Yum! The going price now is between 40 and 45 cents a bucket. This new agreement will hike that by 32 cents.

Yum! Brands' decision comes two years after one of its chains, Taco Bell, agreed to a similar hike in the face of intense national pressure. Others that will now be included in the deal are Pizza Hut, Long John Silver's, A&W All-American Food Restaurant, and KFC. In April, mega-chain McDonald's also announced an agreement to boost the pay of Florida pickers by a penny a pound.

"If two of the largest restaurant chains are doing this, it's only a matter of time 'til others follow," said Julia Perkins, of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or CIW , which has spearheaded the drive for better pay and working conditions for tomato pickers. CIW is one of the local partners with which Oxfam America works.

"This is an important precedent that's being set," said Guadalupe Gamboa, a program officer in Oxfam America's US regional office. "And it also furthers CIW's strategy to go after other major buyers of tomatoes and eventually get them all to pay a higher price that will be translated into higher wages for a lot more farm workers."

During the winter months, about 90 percent of the fresh tomatoes consumed in the United States come from Florida, said Perkins. According to the Florida Tomato Committee, the state shipped more than 1.2 billion pounds of tomatoes in interstate commerce during the 2005-2006 growing season. During the peak season, Florida growers hire about 33,000 people.

CIW has been working with many of them since 1993 when it first began organizing in a borrowed room at a church. In 2001, it launched a national boycott of Taco Bell, which had long denied responsibility for the bad working conditions and below-poverty-level wages at the farms that supplied it with tomatoes. Students, religious groups, and labor organizations all got behind the boycott, galvanizing support for CIW's cause.

"It's a good model for other organizations to follow that are trying to improve wages and conditions for workers," said Gamboa. "It shows you can get concrete and positive results for the poorest workers in the country."

And there is no good reason for companies not to embrace the campaign.

"It's doable from a financial perspective, an administrative perspective, and it's good for your company's marketing," said Perkins, who has high hopes that other corporations will follow the lead set by Yum! and McDonald's. Burger King is on her list.

"Consumers have really gotten behind this," said Perkins. "Burger King has promised consumers you get to have it your way. It's just a matter of time before they have to make good on that promise."

"This represents economic relief for farm workers and gives them real participation and a voice," said the coalition's Lucas Benitez.

"The significant thing is that McDonald's is the largest restaurant chain in the world and the second largest employer of workers in the United States," added Guadalupe Gamboa, a program officer in Oxfam's US regional office. "And so, for a little group like CIW to take them on and beat them is pretty significant. It shows the power of consumer pressure."

Starting in the 2007 growing season, McDonald's will pay an extra penny per pound for Florida tomatoes offered through its produce suppliers to its US restaurants. The farm workers will receive the increase directly for the tomatoes McDonald's buys. The agreement also lays out a plan for CIW and McDonald's to develop a new code of conduct for Florida tomato growers and calls for the creation of a third-party mechanism to monitor conditions in the fields and investigate workers complaints about abuses.

Typically, Florida field workers earn between 40 and 45 cents for each 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick—a wage that has not gone up significantly since 1978, according to CIW. At that rate, working a 12-hour day, laborers would have to pick nearly two and a half tons of tomatoes to earn the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. With the penny-per-pound increase, workers can earn 32 cents a bucket more.

An Oxfam America report released in 2004, Like Machines in the Fields: Workers Without Rights in American Agriculture, documented the harsh conditions farmworkers endure and how big buyers, like institutional food services and fast food companies, are buying increasing volumes of produce at increasingly cheaper prices.

"Like machines, nearly two million workers in America's fields labor without rights, earn sub-living wages, and exist in dehumanizing conditions," said the report. "Already, farmworkers are among the poorest—if not the poorest—laborers in the United States."

Added Gamboa, "In the past 20 to 30 years, farm workers' wages have been stagnant. It may not sound like much, but for poor farmworkers in southwest Florida, McDonald's decision to increase by a penny a pound the amount it pays for tomatoes could translate into nearly a doubling of wages.

They have lost value in real dollars. But the profits earned by the retail industry have gone up tremendously, and it has been profiting from the sweat and labor of the workers."

And that has translated into profound hardship for field workers, whose average annual salary in 2005 was between $10,000 and $12,499, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey. The federal government considers an individual earning less than $10,210 to be living in poverty. The income guideline for a family of four is $20,650 a year—more than the average farm worker household earns. That figure ranges from $15,000 to $17,499, according to the agricultural survey.

Since 1993, when CIW first began organizing with a small group of workers in a borrowed room at a church, the coalition has worked hard to address the injustices farm laborers face. The message is now getting heard—at the highest levels of corporate America.

"CIW has publicized the terrible conditions of farm workers," said Gamboa. "People who pick the food don't have enough to eat. They endure terrible living conditions with between 10 and 15 people in a single trailer. And in real terms, their wages have gone down in the last 20 years."

That was the reality CIW set out to change when, in 2001, it launched a national boycott of Taco Bell, another fast-food giant that purchases great volumes of tomatoes. The company had long denied responsibility for the bad working conditions and below-poverty-level wages at the farms that supplied it tomatoes. Students, religious groups, and labor organizations all got behind the boycott, galvanizing support for CIW's cause and putting intense national pressure on the company.

Two years ago—in March 2005--CIW and Taco Bell announced an historic agreement guaranteeing Immokalee tomato pickers a penny a pound extra for the produce supplied to the chain.

"We are laying the groundwork for real change," Benitez said at the time, "both in the concrete conditions of farmworkers' everyday lives and in the market itself."

On Monday, with the McDonald's agreement in hand, those farmworkers have marked a another victory in their long, slow struggle toward equity and justice.

"Today, with McDonald's, we have taken another major step toward a world where workers can enjoy a fair wage and humane working conditions in exchange for the hard and essential work we do every day," said Benitez. "We are not there yet, but we are getting there, and today's agreement should send a strong message to the rest of the restaurant and supermarket industry that it is now time to stand behind the food they sell from the field to the table."

Overall, the proposal would spend an estimated US$10 billion less over the next 10 years than projected spending for the 2002 Farm Bill, which is set to expire in September 2007. Much of the anticipated savings are from expected high prices for many commodities in future years. However, the Johanns proposal actually would spend US$5 billion more from 2008 – 2012 than simply extending the existing provisions in the 2002 Farm Bill.

Download the attached file to read the full text of this report by Oxfam America employee Emily Alpert. (From Bridges No. 1, February-March 2007, published by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development.)

While the Farm Bill does little to help poor farmers in the US, it actually harms rural communities around the world. After receiving massive subsidies, US cotton farms produce more than they otherwise would, and sell their surplus at less than the cost of production. These subsidies hurt African cotton farmers by reducing the world price of cotton and shrinking their share of the market. This situation is not only unfair; it violates international rules set by the World Trade Organization.

Other students held events on their college campuses. Creative ideas included a "CAFTA Carnival" that featured rigged games to illustrate unfair trade. In one, participants were challenged to shoot a basketball at a net—the distance was determined by whether they were representing a US- or Central American-based business. Students and other activists also held more formal debates and discussions with experts on trade policy. Activists held more than 250 events during the Week of Action, a significant proportion of which were focused on DR-CAFTA.

At the end of July, the day before the last debate in the House on CAFTA, a small group even staged mock tug of war before the votes on Capitol Hill to show the uneven trade benefits DR-CAFTA provides.

In the end, watching the DR-CAFTA floor vote during the last week of July was "gut wrenching," said Sophia Lafontant, Student Trade Campaign Organizer at Oxfam America. But she was comforted by the many memories of activists around the country showing such passion in their grassroots efforts to defeat the agreement.

"I have to admit that I took this loss hard. It is difficult to pour all of your energy and passion into one issue and have the outcome end up not as you hoped, especially when the impacts of DR-CAFTA are so real," Lafontant said. "However, I am consoled by the fact that DR-CAFTA passed by such a slim margin. Let that be a reminder to us that we are doing our job and that we are being effective. The impact that trade has on development was a theme in the debate."

Groups like the National Family Farm Coalition, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, and Rural Coalition, carried out direct advocacy of their own, telling their elected officials that trade agreements should protect food sovereignty, not threaten it. Just as the Central Americans wanted to avoid the US flooding their surplus commodities into their market, small-scale American farmers wanted their government to pursue policies that supported them, not the huge agriculture corporations that would benefit from DR-CAFTA.

"This agreement is absolutely horrible for us livestock producers," said Rhonda Perry, a farmer and head of Oxfam partner, Missouri Rural Crisis Center. "It's also not beneficial for farmers in the DR-CAFTA countries. All these promises about export markets, clearly, that's not what happens. There are a few multinational corporations that have no allegiance that make out like bandits. The rest of us are stuck picking up the pieces."

Oxfam America created opportunities for Central and North American farmers to meet, learn from each other, and work together to oppose unfair trade. The National Family Farm Coalition worked with members of Iniciativa CID in Washington, DC to help them bring their concerns directly to members of Congress and share perspectives, farmer to farmer.

"This was really a united front even though people were coming at it from different angles. It was a chance to develop shared understanding about CAFTA's negative impacts on farmer livelihoods in both the US and Central America," said Jaeda Harmon, a US Regional Office Program Officer at Oxfam America