The Growth of Domestic Fair Trade

The organic farm offers a community-supported agri­cul­ture (CSA) box, offers their pro­duce at eight dif­fer­ent farm­ers mar­kets around Oregon, and they are known, says Mahoney, as a farm that treats its work­ers well. Brewer and Eveland have long prided them­selves on respect­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion with all their employ­ees; they also make extra pro­duce avail­able to take home — no small deal con­sid­er­ing the fact that farm­work­ers can, iron­i­cally, rarely afford healthy food.

All this said, the farm’s own­ers hadn’t put too much thought into whether their cus­tomers thought about labor — after all, they fig­ured, who wor­ries about worker rights when buy­ing from small, organic farms?

Then last year Gathering Together was approached by its dis­trib­u­tor, Organically Grown Company, and encour­aged to apply for the Food Justice Certification. The label, which is still nearly unknown in the mar­ket­place, is a prod­uct of the larger “domes­tic fair trade” move­ment, and is sim­i­lar to the Fair Trade label for inter­na­tional food pro­duc­tion. Because cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is expen­sive, and farms like Growing Together run on a tight mar­gin, it helped that the dis­trib­u­tor offered to pay for the certification.

Now, a year later, Growing Together and a sec­ond Oregon oper­a­tion, Spring Hill Farm, have joined the small ranks of Food Justice Certified farms. How small is small? Well, accord­ing to Elizabeth Henderson of the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) — the coali­tion of four NGOs behind the label — there are now 70 farms cer­ti­fied in Canada and eight in the U.S.

Based on a rig­or­ous set of stan­dards devel­oped over four years, and a lengthy process that includes con­fi­den­tial inter­views with each farm’s work­ers, the Food Justice Certification label, says Henderson, is an effort to “reward the peo­ple who have the best practices.”

Why would it mat­ter that small hand­ful of farms pro­duc­ing a very small per­cent­age of the nation’s over­all food sup­ply would carry the Food Justice Certified label?

Well, for starters, it cre­ates a point of com­par­i­son for the rest of the food sys­tem. We live in a time when con­sumers don’t have to dig too hard to find exam­ples of really ter­ri­ble farm labor prac­tices. From doc­u­mented cases of slav­ery and other human rights abuses in Florida’s tomato fields, to work­ers dying from heat exhaus­tion on California farms, and new data about the plight of women on farms and peo­ple of color in the food sys­tem at large, the national pic­ture is pretty grim.

And while the assump­tion that organic farms are gen­er­ally bet­ter to their work­ers might be borne out anec­do­tally, actual organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion includes one word about the way farm­work­ers are treated. And to be fair, food pro­duc­tion in this coun­try has relied on a cheap (often undoc­u­mented) labor force to keep food prices low for so long that even farm­ers who want to pay their work­ers well are rarely in a posi­tion to do so.

It might sound obvi­ous, but the peo­ple you see sell­ing pro­duce at the farm­ers mar­kets are not — in the vast major­ity of cases — the same ones who plant, har­vest, weed, irri­gate, and pack that food into boxes. In other words, even most farm­work­ers who are treated well are still invis­i­ble to eaters. So any small, per­haps symbolic-seeming steps towards engag­ing eaters in the larger dis­cus­sion about their rights has to be worthwhile.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.