How Environmental Destruction Fosters Epidemics and the World Over by Dennis Sanders

This is one of the best big-picture views I've come across in awhile on how not just "human activity," a euphemism, but capitalism, our economic system, is destroying the natural habitats from which viruses emerge. This has involved the mass destruction of forests in order to raise farm animals as well as for the harvesting of palm oil production, fracking, including the "out-of-control extraction of oil shale from Canadian tar sands," and so on, all at an alarming pace. 

The unending search for precious metals and minerals together with the wild animal global trade means that humans are entering spaces where deadly pathogens live, facilitating their transfer from animals to humans.  Along with an international re-commitment to the The Paris Agreement, supporting a Green New Deal that seeks to wean us from fossil fuels, and a global reforestation project, it makes great sense as this piece posits, to tax industries like mining, agriculture, oil and gas to fund the restoration of the planet.

I am encouraged by Presidential candidate Joe Biden's plan to get our country to a 100% clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. From everything I have learned about climate change after having taught a college course on it, that timetable itself is late, even if it's realistic.  However, it's infinitely better than no leadership at all as we are witnessing from a president whose rollbacks on environmental policies favor more pollution and a loss of protection for endangered species.

To all of this, I would add that we as the late Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire admonished, we need to put all student learning at the service of social justice. Can you imagine how powerful it would be if every kindergartner in the world were responsible for planting a small tree and watching it grow? This will guarantee that tree's survival, but also all of humanity's, as well. It's noteworthy that for many if not most, COVID is impacting their respiratory system. To me, this sounds like Mother Earth telling us that Her respiratory system is suffering, as well. 

She can’t breathe. And if she can’t breathe, we’re doomed as a human species. 

Forewarned is forearmed. None of us want either for ourselves or our children and grandchildren an Earth that is uninhabitable. Please do read David Wallace-Wells' book, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” to grasp where we are headed that strangely, the COVID virus—that has arrested our customary comings and goings—is signaling to all of humanity, regardless of whether your state, city, county, or country got it under control.

It's clear that our country and world are desperate for leadership that not only believes, but also fully embraces the science of climate change, lest millions more perish from epic diseases and illnesses like COVID together with devastating environmental effects of our Earth mother convulsing with equally epic wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, hail storms, earthquakes, pestilence, and tornadoes. 

Our Earth is out of balance and this COVID moment that we virtually all experiencing in some form or fashion as a planet should heighten our resolve for bold, new leadership with courage to address the spinning of a world that is out of control—even as this is an artifact of our own creation.

-Angela Valenzuela

How Environmental Destruction Fosters Epidemics and the World Over

by Dennis Sanders | Freedom Socialist (Aug.-Sept. 2020)

The outbreak of Covid-19 has turned the world on its head. It has shut down entire economies and destroyed the equivalent of 305 million full-time jobs globally just in the second quarter of 2020, according to the International Labor Organization. In the U.S. and many countries, it has exposed the racial and gender inequalities that have always existed, as well as the starvation of public health systems and preparedness for emerging diseases.

For many in the Americas and Europe, it seems as if the virus came out of nowhere. Others in Asia and Africa (from which many of the new diseases have emerged) have seen this before.

In fact, scientists specializing in virology, biology and the climate have been studying human encroachment into wild habitats and destruction of species and ecosystems for decades. They have increasingly concluded that there is a causal relationship between environmental degradation and the creation of deadly human diseases. A recent study found that new infectious disease outbreaks have more than tripled every decade since the 1980s.

The balance of nature altered. The profit-based system we live under has drastically eroded biodiversity and fragmented ecosystems. With the expansion of large urban centers, ongoing extraction of materials from the earth, deforestation, and land development for large-scale industry and factory farming, increasing numbers of natural ecosystems are being destroyed or fragmented. Human proximity to animals that they previously would rarely come in contact with increases, putting everyone at greater risk.

Scientists consider viruses, as part of nature’s diversity, to be in a “gray area” between living and non-living. They cannot self-replicate, but they can multiply in a host. They can cause disease in that species, or others that they “jump” to. In intact ecosystems, human beings are seldom impacted.

But in our fractured environment, the risk is breathtaking. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that 60 percent of known infectious diseases in people are “zoonotic,” meaning they are passed from other animals to humans.

Three of every four diseases that have emerged among humans in the last 30 years are of this type. Zika, HIV, Hendra, Avian Flu (H5N1), Nipah, Swine Flu of 2009, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and Covid-19 are all zoonotic diseases. A study by public agencies in Kenya, Great Britain and Vietnam estimates that these diseases kill over 2 million people annually and infect over one billion.

Market domination of the planet and its resources is depleting all species and the places they live at an alarming rate.

Important, if disgusting, article on how nonprofit and for-profit charter schools—more than 1,300—double-dipped, securing between $925 million and $2.2 billion from both the emergency stimulus monies that traditional public schools took from and federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) monies of the Small Business Administration program. 

California charter schools alone received a disproportionate amount of PPP funding, reaching half-a-billion dollars.  This number included well-funded charter schools that didn't need the money at all. For example, it's sad to read about how one Los Angeles area charter school, Palisades Charter High School, which $4.6 million dollars that they admitted they didn't need, turned around and fired five member of their staff while reducing the hours of 18 others. A home-schooling network, Inspire Schools, that had been "expelled last fall from the California Charter Schools Association," took at least 29.7 million.

As per the investigation of these monies by Carol Burris and members of the Network for Public Education, even though charter school funding had not been cut, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools encouraged charter schools to apply. according to public minutes in one meeting one person mentioned below expressed concerns about being investigated by the federal government and how this might be bad for public relations. 

All of this was happening as businesses and nonprofits were shutting down, particularly impacting African American and Latina/o small-business owners with only 12 percent receiving loans for which they had applied.

Taking money you don't need is highly unethical and disturbing—and doing so during a pandemic is unscrupulous, if not criminal. Charter schools need to stop defrauding the public and they need be held accountable.

-Angela Valenzuela

#CoronavirusCapitalism

Charter schools and their management companies won at least $925 million in federal coronavirus funding, data shows

 

By Valerie Strauss | July 27, 2020 | Answer Sheet

 

The Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, is a $660 billion business loan program established as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus legislation that Congress passed in the spring. PPP was aimed at helping certain small businesses, nonprofit organizations, sole proprietors and others stay in business during the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S. Small Business Administration administered the program, and recently the SBA and the Treasury Department released some data on what organizations won loans from the program and how much they received. (Some loans can be forgiven if the PPP money is spent on keeping employees on the payroll.)

The release of funding details sparked some controversy about whether some of the organizations that received funds should have gotten them, including public charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — and some elite private schools. (A Washington Post database shows the data.)

 

Charter schools received emergency stimulus money from Congress from the same fund that traditional public schools did — but some charter schools decided to apply for PPP loans as well, saying that they are underfunded through regular funding formulas and had a right to seek more aid. Other charter schools chose not to apply for loans, saying it would be double-dipping in federal aid funds.

Among those charters that did were some that knew they didn’t actually need the money to maintain financial stability. For example, 2KUTV in Salt Lake City did an investigation into Utah charter schools taking PPP funding and found that they took a total of $7.9 million. It reported on a discussion at the June 25 meeting of the governing board of the Utah Military Academy, a charter with two campuses, in which an unidentified board member explained how the $1.15 million in PPP funding that the school was expecting would be spent.

The conversation, heard on audio tapes, went like this, according to the CBS affiliate:

“So we take this money to pay the salaries, and the money we were going to pay salaries is going to go into our accounts to help flush up our funds,” said the board member.

“Can I ask a question?” a female voice said. “My understanding was that this money is for businesses who, because of the drop in business, were having trouble keeping all their employees. How do we qualify for that? Because our funding wasn’t cut at all.”

She also notes that no employees have been laid off by the school because of the covid-19 pandemic. Two more voices interject, “We’re a business,” and, “We’re a nonprofit.” A third voice is heard saying, “It’s some of that good free government money!”

With that, here is the post about just how much charter schools did get in PPP money, written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education. Burris, a former award-winning principal in New York, has been chronicling the charter school movement and the standardized-test-based accountability movement on this blog for years.

"It Cost Me Everything": In Texas, COVID-19 Takes a Devastating Toll on Hispanic Residents by Perla Trevizo

The stories are terribly sad. Our family has been impacted; no one has died, thankfully, but it seems to get closer every day.  According to this piece by Perla Trevizo with ProPublica, many factors are responsible including "Nearly a third of adults under 65 in Texas lack health insurance, the worst uninsured rate in the country, and more than 60% of those without health insurance in the state are Hispanic."  

Moreover, "Hispanic Texans make up about 40% of the state’s population but 48% of the state’s 6,190 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, according to Department of State Health Services data." In addition to all of this, and as we're seeing here in Austin, Texas, we neither have much of a public health infrastructure. I hope that when all of this is said and done, that we will have one that additionally consists of all residents being insured. 

We should be learning from this virus that even if it is disproportionately impacting one community, it doesn't limit itself to one particular population but that it exploits the weakest link and there are many weak links as a consequence of poor leadership and misguided policies like opening up our state too early. 

To aspire for "herd immunity," as U.S. Representative Chip Roy has done, equates to neo-Darwinist, "survival of the fittest" thinking, a convenient, self-serving ideology that's willing to sacrifice others, particularly people of color, to keep what's left of capitalism going, however hurtful or anti-democratic.

-Angela Valenzuela

Not only are Hispanics catching coronavirus at higher rates in Texas’ largest county, they also suffer some of the worst outcomes.

by Perla Trevizo, ProPublica, and Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News

 July 30, 5 a.m. CDT

(Brandon Thibodeaux for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica/NBC News)

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. It was also produced in partnership with NBC News.

CONTINUE READING HERE.

This is Slavery. How Trump is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic by Jane Mayer

This is outrageous and upsetting.  Give this a close read to learn about American slavery, as an African American woman interviewed for this story exclaimed. It's shocking and disgusting to read about how during a pandemic, Trump is loosening every regulation imaginable right now—from poultry and meat packing plants, to trucking companies and oil and gas pipelines. The New Yorker's focus here is on poultry companies who are hyper-exploiting their workers right now. 

This is happening as their greedy corporate bosses are delivering between 2 and 3 million dollars to the Trump campaign. Get this. They are his biggest campaign contributors,

This is Coronoavirus, disaster capitalism, my friends, that is literally sacrificing, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans to highly dangerous, toxic, prison-like, freezing working conditions in plants where production rates of Birds Per Minute—while standing next to COVID-infected employees in COVID-infected plants—reach ever-higher, plateaus. 

It's terrifying to read that these companies have stopped generating official data for the public which, of course means, that the general public is also sacrificed and at risk.

Untold numbers are dying. This is inhumane. We need an abolitionist movement for what is happening in these industries hidden away from public view, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's famous 1906 novel, The Jungle [free download available].

"The book so shocked Americans that President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an immediate investigation of slaughterhouses. The result was landmark consumer-protection legislation that formed the foundation of today’s Food and Drug Administration."

We need an FDR. We need consumer and worker protections all over again in this country. Here is one small, meaningful action we can all take today.  Please sign this petition—Poultry Companies: Give workers essential benefits and safe conditions during COVID19 where you can also make a contribution. National LULAC is also taking this on under the brilliant leadership of Domingo Garcia and Sindy Benavides.

This whole system needs to be upended. We need a national campaign to boycott any plant that treats its workers so horrifically. 

Just the thought of chicken produced under these conditions makes my stomach churn anyway.

Aside from the general principle of the matter, it's for the good of everybody's health and welfare. You may want to go straight to the NY website, as I just did, to listen to the audio version of this story.  The narrator, presumably the author, Jane Mayer, does an excellent job. Hearing her tell the story made it even more impactful for me.  So impactful that I had to blog about this right away.

-Angela Valenzuela

#BlackLivesMatter
#BrownLivesMatter
#AsianLivesMatter
#CoronavirusCapitalism
#AbolishSlavery
#AbolishSlaveryInAmerica

A Reporter at Large

July 20, 2020 Issue

How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic

The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.

By Jane Mayer

July 13, 2020

 Ronald Cameron, the head of Mountaire, which critics call a “brutal” employer, is one of Trump’s top donors.Illustration by Cleon Peterson

On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd, which included top Democratic officials from the state, among them Senator Chris Coons. The union, part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus. The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted covid-19, and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died.

For the previous forty-two years, a thousand or so laborers at the local processing plant, in Selbyville, had been represented by Local 27. Just two years earlier, the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract. But, Hill told the crowd, in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, the plant’s owner, Mountaire Corporation—one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken—conspired, along with Donald Trump, to “kick us out.”

Hill, who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula—a scrubby stretch of farmland that includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—was used to the area’s heat and humidity. But, as he spoke to the crowd, behind dark glasses, his face glistened with anger. “It’s greed, that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s a damn shame.”

The jobs at Mountaire rank as among the most dangerous and worst paid in America. Government statistics indicate that poultry and meat-processing companies report more severe injuries than other industries commonly assumed to be more hazardous, including coal mining and sawmilling. Between 2015 and 2018, on average, a slaughterhouse worker lost a body part, or went to the hospital for in-patient treatment, about every other day. Unlike meatpackers, two-thirds of whom belong to unions, only about a third of poultry workers are represented by organized labor—and those who are unionized face mounting pressure. The industry, which is dominated by large multinational corporations such as Mountaire, has grown increasingly concentrated, expanding its political influence while replacing unionized employees with contract hires, often immigrants or refugees. These vulnerable workers are technically hired by temp agencies, relieving poultry plants of accountability if documentation is lacking. Trump has weakened federal oversight of the industry while accepting millions of dollars in political donations from some of its most powerful figures, including Ronald Cameron, Mountaire’s reclusive owner. In 2016, Cameron gave nearly three million dollars to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy.

Founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, but incorporated in Delaware, Mountaire has operations in five states. It reportedly generated more than $2.3 billion in revenue last year. Because it is owned almost entirely by Cameron—and because it supplies poultry to other companies that put their own labels on the meat—the company’s public profile is virtually nonexistent. Cameron himself has received almost no media attention. “I’ve tried mightily over the years to bump into him, but he lays low,” Max Brantley, a longtime editor at the Arkansas Times, told me. According to trade journals, however, Mountaire has been spectacularly successful. Arkansas Business reported that the company’s sales in 2019 were a billion dollars higher than they were in 2010, nearly doubling the size of the business. Information on profits isn’t available, but as Mountaire’s revenues have risen wages for poultry workers have fallen even further behind. In 2002, workers were paid twenty-four per cent less than the national average for manufacturing jobs; today, they are paid forty-four per cent less. On average, poultry workers now earn less than fourteen dollars an hour.

By long-standing custom, labor contracts are binding for at least three years, giving a union time to prove its value to members. But in April a laborer at the Selbyville plant, Oscar Cruz Sosa, raised a legal objection to the contract, arguing that he’d been forced to join the union and pay dues against his will. He wanted a vote on whether to decertify the union. Mountaire maintains that it played no role in Cruz Sosa’s actions, and that the move to decertify the union was “entirely employee-driven.” But Cruz Sosa has had some outside help. His case was supported by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the foremost anti-union advocacy group, which is funded by undisclosed tax-deductible donations. Meanwhile, a mysterious group calling itself the Oscar Cruz Committee for Employee Rights sent out mailings, in English, supporting Cruz Sosa’s complaint. (Cruz Sosa speaks only Spanish.) The return address was the Rehoboth Beach branch of MailBiz, which rents post-office boxes.

Jonathan Williams, a spokesperson for the union, suspects that Cruz Sosa was a stalking horse. “It’s not hard to find one individual, who may get special privileges from management, and who maybe is offered a future position,” he told me. “It’s very, very rare, though, when an employee does the research, contacts the Department of Labor, and goes through all this effort. Usually, someone is being coached.” (Cruz Sosa didn’t respond to interview requests.)

When the union reached out to Cruz Sosa, his lawyers filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming harassment. The specific legal dispute is abstruse. Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, has called the contract’s language “illegal,” claiming that it didn’t make sufficiently clear that—as stipulated by law—new employees had thirty days to decide whether to join the union. The union argues that applications presented to new employees are unambiguous about the time frame, and says that the current contract has virtually the same boilerplate used in every contract with Mountaire since 1982.

After Cruz Sosa got thirty per cent of his co-workers to sign a petition, the National Labor Relations Board ordered an election at the Selbyville plant. When the union protested that this would violate the customary bar on overturning contracts before three years, the N.L.R.B. decided to broaden the case, reëxamining the entire concept of barring challenges to settled union contracts. The move has shocked labor-law experts. By statute, the N.L.R.B. has five members and is bipartisan, but the Trump Administration has filled only three seats, all with Republicans.

Given the pandemic, the union argued that there was no way an in-person election could be safely and fairly held in Sussex County, where Selbyville is situated. Delaware’s governor had declared a state of emergency on March 23rd, because of the surge in covid-19 cases, almost half of them in Sussex County, which has many poultry plants. The union asked for a stay, but on June 24th the N.L.R.B. moved to proceed with the election, by mail. The ballots that were sent out must be received by July 14th. Meanwhile, the board will weigh the larger question of whether such elections are legal, potentially overturning a precedent that dates back to the New Deal.

“We’re really being let down by the federal agencies,” Williams, the union spokesperson, said. He also lamented a shift at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the division of the Labor Department that enforces workplace safety. Since osha’s inception, in 1970, the agency has enforced federal law that makes it illegal to subject employees to “recognized hazards.” But during the pandemic the Times editorial board has been prompted to ask, “Why is osha awol?” Democrats pushed for the agency to issue an emergency rule forcing businesses to comply with the Centers for Disease Control’s health guidelines for covid-19, but the Labor Department refused.

Instead, on April 28th, forty-eight hours after Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat company, ran a full-page ad in several newspapers warning that “the food supply chain is breaking,” Trump issued an executive order defining slaughterhouse workers as essential. The White House had appointed Cameron to an advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact. The executive order commanded meat-processing facilities to “continue operations uninterrupted to the extent possible.” The Labor Department released an accompanying statement that all but indemnified companies for exposing workers to covid-19. It assured employers in essential industries that the agency wouldn’t hold them responsible if they failed to follow the C.D.C.’s health guidelines, as long as they made a “good faith” effort.

Meat and poultry workers had to keep working and risk infection—or lose their jobs. By July 7th, osha had received more than six thousand coronavirus-related workplace complaints but had issued only one citation, to a nursing home in Georgia. David Michaels, a professor of public health at George Washington University, who headed osha during the Obama Administration, told me that the agency was “saying that the Labor Department would side with the employers if workers sued,” and added, “That would be unthinkable in any other Administration. osha’s job isn’t to protect corporations—it’s to protect workers!”

The prospect of food shortages understandably caused concern in the White House. Yet reports show that in April, as Tyson and other producers were warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from American stores if they had to shut down, exports of pork to China broke records—and Mountaire’s chicken exports were 3.4 per cent higher than they were a year earlier. The next month, the company’s exports were 10.9 per cent lower than in 2019, but its exports to China and Hong Kong grew by 23.1 per cent in April and by fourteen per cent in May, according to statistics provided by Christopher Rogers, an analyst with Panjiva, which tracks the food-supply chain. Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a progressive nonprofit advocacy group, said, “They were crying about shortages, and yet we’re still exporting meat. The shortage was phony.”

Meanwhile, coronavirus cases exploded in the meat-and-poultry industry. Initially, Mountaire released statistics about employee infections. At the end of March, the company told the union that there had been forty-one cases in Selbyville. However, Hill’s shop steward, Manuel Rosales, told him not to trust this number. “Half the plant isn’t there,” he explained, either because the workers were sick or because they feared becoming so. A month later, a television station in North Carolina reported that a Mountaire plant, in Siler City, which employs some sixteen hundred workers, had at least seventy-four positive cases among workers and their families. After that, the company stopped sharing its covid-19 numbers. Mountaire became so secretive, Hill said, that workers “were seeing people disappear, and they didn’t know what the hell was going on.” In many cases, a “co-worker had tested positive, but the company wouldn’t tell anyone.” Rosales, who works in the deboning department at the Selbyville plant, told me, “People are coughing and they don’t look well, but they just want to keep the chicken coming. It’s all hush-hush.”

Cathy Bassett, the communications director for Mountaire Farms of Delaware, confirmed, “We’re not releasing any numbers,” adding, “I don’t even know those numbers. We’ve told our workers that if you’ve been exposed we’ll notify you.” According to Hill, the company argued to the union that it was protecting employee privacy. “They were hiding behind it,” Hill told me. “We weren’t asking for private health information—we were just trying to report the numbers.”

Scathing Critique by Houston Chronicle Editors of Gov. Abbott's Pandering to the Base of the Texas Republican Party

It's a pretty big deal when the editors of one of the largest newspapers in the state of Texas and in the country, the Houston Chronicle, issue a scathing critique of our sitting governor.

As cited herein, with Texas reporting "its deadliest day from the coronavirus on Tuesday, with 75 deaths and a record-shattering 10,400 new infections statewide, according to data analysis and reporting by Hearst Newspapers," Abbott cannot justifiably praise his own error-riddled response while casting blame on local leaders for the virus' resurgence when the fact of the matter is that he overruled their authority to mandate masks and delay re-opening their cities and the state.

This editorial by the editors of the Houston Chronicle is point-blank: 

"Does Abbott want to be the leader for 3 million Republican primary voters or the governor of 29 million Texans? He must decide. In this moment, he can’t be both."

This is the de facto party of death. It is with great urgency that we vote this governor and his party out of office. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Editorial: Gov. Abbott didn’t listen to coronavirus warnings and Texans died

The Editorial Board July 10, 2020 Updated: July 10, 2020 6:50 a.m.

In this June 16, 2020, file photo, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott adjusts his mask after speaking in Austin, Texas. Abbott on Thursday, July 2, ordered that face coverings must be worn in public across most of the state as numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases and hospitalizations spiked.

One moment in Texas’ battle against this ravenous pandemic signaled whether Gov. Greg Abbott would lead as the state’s top executive or a top political boss. Back in May, Abbott made the fateful decision to side with Dallas hair salon owner Shelley Luther instead of local leaders in major cities across the state such as Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo.

That choice, to embrace partisan politics and a fringe populist backlash over common sense and sound medical advice from his own advisers, condemned the Lone Star State to the circumstances we face today: Hospitals near the breaking point. Nearly 3,000 Texans dead — and counting.

When Luther reopened her Salon a la Mode in Dallas in violation of Abbott’s own order and publicly tore up a court order before TV cameras and an adoring crowd, the governor not only rushed to her defense but also accelerated his efforts to allow all hair salons to reopen ahead of gathering data about health impacts.

Hidalgo and other county and city leaders across the state were meanwhile getting steamrolled by Abbott’s superseding orders even as they begged for the authority to mandate masks and reopen more cautiously, moves that Abbott is now being forced to implement.

Abbott’s backpedaling and his acquiescence to the social distancing rebels hollering tyranny propelled him down a path to a reckless reopening of the state while downplaying the COVID-19 threat and suggesting crucial guidance on things such as wearing a mask, social-distancing and avoiding large crowds could be ignored on grounds of “personal liberty” or political fealty.

This is more than a case of a politician just doing what politicians do. This isn’t the same as impeding local leaders who want to ban plastic bags or clownishly calling the Texas State Guard to monitor a federal military exercise because some right-wing conspiracy theorists on the internet were convinced Jade Helm 15 sounded like a government plot to take their guns.

Abbott’s actions this time led to widespread sickness and hundreds of deaths.

The state’s top executive, elected to represent all Texans, chose to pander to the Republican base and curry favor with President Trump, who lauded the “fantastic job” he was doing getting Texas back up and running so quickly.

One sad irony is that if Abbott had been true to following the “doctors and the data” he kept citing, the state would be much closer to getting back to business instead of becoming a major coronavirus hot spot and cautionary tale.

Hospitalizations from lab-confirmed COVID-19 have more than doubled in Texas in the past two weeks, a 400 percent increase since Memorial Day, when Abbott began to signal the all-clear. Texas reported its deadliest day from the coronavirus on Tuesday, with 75 deaths and a record-shattering 10,400 new infections statewide, according to data analysis and reporting by Hearst Newspapers.

The blame rests with the governor, who waited until after the surge to finally issue a statewide mask order and to roll back some phases of reopening. He did nothing, however, to publicly discourage the state Republican Party from trying to hold a 6,000-person convention in Houston.

Speaking Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week,” Hidalgo forcefully laid out the case against Abbott’s record of mixed messages and political maneuvering.

“What we’re seeing is that wishful thinking is neither good economic policy nor good public health policy,” she said. “We had initially this increase back in March. I had the authority to issue a stay home order, and I did quickly, early. We avoided the fate of most other communities our size. But since then the state reopened — now we know, too early, too much. It took away my authority to enforce these orders.”

Hidalgo, whose leadership in her first term has shone through against the dithering and scheming of some of her more experienced elected colleagues, is still pushing for a stay-at-home order to save Houston and Harris County from a looming medical disaster.

“We need to give ourselves the time to bring those numbers down and to learn from the communities that have done things successfully,” she said. “We have to be proactive with this virus. We need to be real about what’s happening.”

Abbott told a San Antonio TV station this week that the problem is county judges and mayors trying to “shut things down completely back into lockdown mode that would really force Texans into poverty.”

“If local officials enforce the mask order, it will slow the spread of the coronavirus,” he said. “They just now need to step up and begin to enforce the orders that are already in place.”

Never mind that he celebrated Shelley Luther’s defiance of such orders and pushed ahead on reopening in spite of troubling data. He’s now touting his delayed response while blaming local leaders for the surge that came because he superseded their orders to satisfy the unmasked mob.

Does Abbott want to be the leader for 3 million Republican primary voters or the governor of 29 million Texans? He must decide. In this moment, he can’t be both.

The Editorial Board

The Editorial Board is made up of opinion journalists with wide-ranging expertise whose consensus opinions and endorsements represent the voice of the institution – defined as the board members, their editor and the publisher. The board is separate from the newsroom and other sections of the paper.

FAMILY FARMERS AND FARM WORKERS FACE THE VIRUS: How food sovereignty activists see the crisis as a pivotal moment for change

This piece by photojournalist David Bacon makes me realize how little I know about food production and distribution at the same time that I am learning that significant reforms are long overdue. Even as this COVID crisis lays bare the dysfunctions, I imagine that most of us have taken this for granted. "Food apartheid" mentioned here means a systemic lack of access to healthy produce for low-income people of color.  I like the idea of re-purposing city lands to reimagine food production and distribution. "Food sovereignty" is another important concept. 

"It includes making people of color in the food system central to demands, ensuring a fair livelihood for everyone in it, strengthening local systems, protecting small and medium size farmers and fishing operations from predatory banks and corporations, and ensuring a dignified way to obtain nutritious food for every person in the country."

The nexus of political and agricultural education is another important area for all of us to develop further, if not formally in our public school system.

"Agroecology" together with the politics and priorities of food production is another very good concept as follows:

"Patti Naylor, a board member of Family Farm Defenders in Iowa, writes, "Farmers support agroecology because it recognizes the interdependencies between rural communities, local ecosystems, and healthy competitive economies. Agroecology offers an inspiring alternative to the industrial agriculture model that is failing rural communities. However it cannot thrive without the political support that agribusiness currently receives. U.S. agriculture policy needs to prioritize agroecology and ensure farmers' rights to seeds, safe water, and pricing structures that ensure farm viability."

Relatedly and best of all, these shifts that put the onus of food production on local growers which will allow us as societies to "transcend the consumer slavery relations that caused our problems to begin with."  I would like all of this to find its way into K-12 curriculum everywhere.

Way to go David Bacon.  You never cease to impress.

-Angela Valenzuela

#farmers #farmworkers #seedsovereignty #foodsovereignty #freeseeds #seedsharing #seedbanking @UFWupdates #blacklivesmatter #ATX

FAMILY FARMERS AND FARM WORKERS FACE THE VIRUS: How food sovereignty activists see the crisis as a pivotal moment for change

By David Bacon
Food First Backgrounder, 6/11/20





At the Graton Day Labor Center in Sonoma County, in California's wine country, immigrant day laborers look for work. At the center workers have a garden, and grow and distribute food to those who are hungry.
The COVID crisis and urban communities

Malik Yakini speaks for many people in the movements for food sovereignty and sustainability as they face the crisis of the novel coronavirus.  He sees it from the perspective of the urban farms of Detroit, as the executive director of the Black Community Food Security Network.  "The problems people see now, from the difficulty they're experiencing getting to markets to the absence of food on the shelves when they get there, really highlight the need for a new food system," he says.  

The city's urban farmers have had to make immediate changes, just to keep functioning.  In Michigan the planting season is just starting, and farmers have yet to figure out how they'll sell what they intend to grow.  "We've got collards that we're just transitioning into the ground now, with green onions, leeks, onions, kale, and soon romaine," he explains.  "To keep everyone safe, we've limited the number of people in our farm who can be at work to four at a time, with no volunteers.  That's a big change from the past, when we'd have 15-20 people on a weekend."

To Yakini, the coronavirus has thrown into high relief the questions that have historically faced the growth of the urban farm system.  "Detroit has 139 square miles of land, and a third of it is vacant - more land potentially available than any other city.  So one question is how the city will dispose of that part of it that they own, which is managed by the Detroit Land Bank Authority.  But it's really more than just allowing residents to gain ownership.  Successful farms have to develop the soil, which is a multi-year project.  We need skilled people, and an infrastructure that includes cooling facilities, so that farmers don't have to sell immediately after harvesting.  And the city has to loosen its policies on water use.  The need for long-term planning has become much sharper as a result of the crisis we're experiencing."

Like Yakini, Karen Washington in New York City sees the crisis as a moment to question the way the food system has failed, especially low-income families and people of color.  "We have to acknowledge that we can't go back, not to business as usual," she says.  "The emphasis has to be on people and planning, not profit.  Now we know how valuable food is.  What is all your jewelry worth when you have to wait in line to feed your family?  But if you can grow food, you can survive.  Food and water are more precious than gold."

Already community activism has changed the way food is being distributed in the Bronx, where Washington lives.  In her neighborhood, volunteers from Mothers on the Move and the Mary Mitchell Center deliver bags to older people, who would be vulnerable to infection if they tried to shop for themselves.  "Every week I get a delivery of three bags, and then I distribute that food to the seniors I know on my block," she says.  Washington goes across the street to the Garden of Happiness, her community garden, to clean out the chicken coop.  She gets a dozen eggs a day that she also gives to elderly people she know are going hungry.  "I've been on my block for 32 years and I know who's hungry.  That's what having a community garden means - that we know each other and take care of each other."

The Bronx has about 150 community gardens in its food chain, and many have been talking in virtual meetings since the crisis started.  "We're asking, what can we grow for our community?  In the past we've grown for ourselves, and for the farmers markets.  Now we're asking, how we can set aside a growing box specifically for people in the community, and then aggregate the food grown in those boxes together?"

Will the community markets, however, like the one she organized 19 years ago, be able to open when the gardens begin to harvest?  "Normally it starts in July, which I hope it will this year.  We have a mix of urban and rural farmers who come, but the banks now are putting up barriers to quickly reimbursing them for coupons from SNAP and SMNP nutrition programs.  The farmers need money right away and can't wait for reimbursements.  I don't know if they'll come to our market this year.  We need our elected officials to take action to protect, not just our market, but all the community markets, because together with our gardens, we are a system serving low income people of color."

In California, Black Earth Farm has developed a system for directly connecting community residents with food.  "We used to go to events to distribute our produce, but they all got cancelled when the crisis started," says jabril kyser, and earth worker at the farm.  "But because we met people at those events, they became part of our cultural network and we know who they are."  Black Earth Farm now has a system for online ordering and delivery for some community members.  For others, who don't live in traditional housing, the farm's members deliver food to them.

"Our community was affected by food apartheid long before the virus arrived," kyser explains.  "So we've developed systems in which it can have access to healthy produce outside of the market-based one, which has never met their needs.  What's holding us back now is capacity."  The farm just acquired new acreage in a small city not far from its base in Oakland and Berkeley, and now is planting watermelon and other melons, tomatoes, strawberries, and collards and other leafy vegetables.

"Our work is way more important now," kyser says, "because we are providing political and agricultural education to our community at a time when the crisis has shown the shortcomings and failures of the industrial food system.  Once the crisis has abated, people will still want to grow their own food if we get organized and teach our community how to do it.  We can transcend the consumer slavery relations that caused our problems to begin with."




Dozens of dairies in California's Central Valley, in Tulare and Kern Counties, produce milk in industrial conditions.   Wages are low and workers complain of injuries caused by pressure to work fast, and mistreatment. Young dairy cows live in cramped stalls in rundown sheds that are so narrow they can hardly turn around.

Dumping Milk, Then and Now

Up the Hudson from the Bronx, the coronavirus is having an enormous impact on rural farmers, especially dairies.  One of the enduring images of the Great Depression was that of farmers pouring milk into ditches.  Today milk dumping, like the facemask, is likely to become a visual icon for the pandemic, particularly in states like New York and Wisconsin where small farmers still depend heavily on milk production.

The dumping of the Depression was often an act of protest, especially during Wisconsin's milk strike of 1933.  Then farmers sought to withhold it from the market to force big distributors to pay a price that might keep banks from foreclosing on farms.

The milk dumping of this past March and April is more an act of desperation.  "Some farmers tell me they see the streams running white," says John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders in Madison.  "The price of milk was already down to $12 [per hundredweight], when it takes $20, and $30 for organic, to actually pay what farmers need to survive.  We don't have a fair price in agriculture.  Monopolies dictate the price, and farmers have to take it or leave it.  Now with the virus, many farmers can't sell their milk at all."

 Milk dumping is one heart-rending symbol of the pandemic's impact.  Another is the empty refrigerator case in the supermarket, with no milk or eggs on the shelves.  "One of the biggest effects of this crisis is that it has torn away the veil on the dysfunction of our food system, and shown how fragile it really is," explains Jim Goodman, president of the National Family Farm Coalition.

Small farmers were all too familiar with this dysfunction long before the virus began its spread.  According to retired New York farmer Liz Henderson, board member of the Agricultural Justice Project, "We've had five years of prices that don't cover costs.  Wisconsin alone lost 800 farms last year.  This crisis could result in more concentration, with smaller producers bought out by big bigger ones who can stand a few months with reduced or no income.  That's happened to family-run dairies already."  

However, the virus has made vulnerable those farmers who concentrated on direct sales as a way to beat corporate domination of the market.  Henderson explains: "We've had a big effort over 50 years to campaign for buying locally.  If farmers can sell directly, they cut out the middleman.  In some New England markets direct sales make up 10% of farm sales, enough for corporations to worry about us.  Now, though, if you're selling to a co-op that bottles and sells to stores, you might be ok.  If you sell directly to restaurants or schools, you probably have to dump your milk."

Could those farmers throwing away their milk instead bring it into the cities to feed hungry people?  Karen Washington says yes.  "I got a phone call from a farmer last week, asking me how food could be brought into the Bronx.  I started asking the city for permission, and got delays and no answers.  If we go through the government and the red tape, the food will be wasted.  So I said, bring it down, we're not waiting on red tape.  They can put me in jail if they want, but I won't see people hungry.  If the farmers are willing, what are they going to say?  Why can't we use community gardens as drop off centers, to get it out?  We'd have to package it, in a way that protects people from COVID, and then the community could distribute it to the people who need it the most."  "

Yakini sees barriers, however, some inherent in the distribution system.  "The first challenge would be getting the food into the city, which costs money for farmers who don't have it.  Then, would they be willing to give food away and take a loss?  In the past there have been differences in our worldviews here in Michigan, with Detroit versus the rest of the state.  In terms of agriculture, large rural farms have not taken urban farms seriously.  But we've attempted to develop relations with rural farms in the past, and this is a moment when things could change."

"It hurts people see the milk getting dumped, especially when they can't feed their children," Washington responds.  "Yet no one said, come to our farm and get it.  Why do the farms have to throw it away?  Why can't they open fields to gleaning.  If they did, an army of people would get in their vans and go up there.  And there are poor people in rural communities who need the food too.  Families in rural America are starving.  How can they even get to the food if they don't even have money to put gas in their car?  This is all shining a light on the fact our food system has to be changed.  What exists is good for a market-based economy, but it's not good for people."




Sandra and Samantha Tello, Mexican farm workers, receive bags of food in the Migrant Labor Camp, a housing project for migrant farm workers in Hollister, California.  The food is brought to the camp in a truck from the San Benito County Community Food Bank.  Although the families work in the fields picking crops, their income is so low they sometimes don't have enough food themselves.  

Small Farmers Get Shafted in the Bailout

Through the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act (HR 6074) and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act (HR 748) farmers in trouble were supposed to be able to qualify for small business loans to keep above water.  The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (HR 6210) was supposed to help with tax credits.  

For small farmers, however, the bills were a bust.  "The bailouts aren't dealing with them," says Jim Goodman.  "Some tried to qualify for the small business loans, but the fund was exhausted by businesses that should never have had access to it, long before farmers could even get their applications processed.  Milk prices were already low, and now they're even lower."

One example hit the national news when the NY Times revealed that the Ruth's Chris Steak House chain of high-end restaurants got a $20 million loan and the Potbelly chain $10 million.  Shake Shack was so embarrassed by the publicity that it gave back its $10 million, acknowledging that it had access to other capital through an "equity transaction."  

Family farmers with no similar access were pushed out of the line.  To Peck "we're always the last boat on the gravy train.  You can talk about the 'politics of resentment' but people are angry when they see the fat cats getting all the money."

Hidden in one bill was a rule (supported by both Republicans and Democrats) that giant chains could qualify for small business loans so long as they had no more than 500 employees per location.  The carve-out was the result of a push by the National Restaurant Association, and the chains had their lobbyists at the ready to ensure their applications were first in line as soon as the doors were open.  Meanwhile, banks were still trying to figure out how to file applications for farmers, and in some cases, even declined to do so.  As a result, 45 percent of the $349 billion in small-business relief went to loans over $1 million, and nearly 70 percent to loans over $350,000.

Beyond the bailout, small farmers, including milk producers, have advocated long-term measures to support higher prices.  "Corporations are proposing limited supply management similar to Canada's," Peck says.  "But we need a better one.  For farmers the most important things are guaranteeing a fair price, restricting imports, prohibiting dumping, and labeling products with their place of origin.  The distributors don't want any of that."

Large producers organizations, like the National Milk Producers Federation and the National Farm Bureau, also want a $16 cap on prices to farmers.  "That won't cut it for most family dairies," Goodman says.  "To help farmers we have to make them whole, long term.  Instead I'm afraid the next plan will have nothing for us.  The Progressive Caucus and people like Tammy Baldwin and Ro Khanna are willing to promote bailouts to help farmers, and at the same time get good food to urban people. But the number of people who listen to us is small."

In the meantime, small farmers and rural communities are faced with surviving the virus itself.  Wisconsin already has it in every county.  According to Peck, "the average age of farmers is pretty old, which makes us a vulnerable population.  Some farmers now just send their kids to the farmers' markets.  We're already sheltering in place a lot during normal times, but now our cultural fabric is being disrupted.  We have no church, and people in isolated communities depend on personal connection. That isn't easy when the opportunities are gone."

Farmers are scared, he says.  "In lots of rural areas we have no healthcare.  Some places have even put up signs saying,  'Snowbirds - don't come back this year.  You will overwhelm our little clinic.'"  That fear, however, also makes many farmers advocates of universal healthcare.  The biggest cause of farm bankruptcies are health crises.  

Another reason for fear is the lack of easy communication that urban areas take for granted.  Governments close schools to avoid spreading infection, but then tell families to have students continue their studies online.  "But we live in a broadband desert," Peck explains.  "20-30% of rural Wisconsin has no internet at all.  Parents have to drive 20 miles, and sit in their car with their kids in the parking lot of the public library so they can connect to their teacher.  This crisis is really revealing the impact of the digital divide.  You can see that broadband should be a public utility, since everyone needs it."




Hungry families gather in Orange Grove, California, to hear state officials explain how food would be distributed.  Mexican farmworker families had no work because a freeze caused the loss of the orange crop.  Workers had no unemployment benefits or relief because most have no legal immigration status.

A Moment of Opportunity

Disaster brings change, however.  Many grassroots organizations and movements are trying to seize the moment to propose alternatives, and in some cases, to begin implementing them.  Some are breathing new life into proposals made before the COVID-19 crisis began.

In her writing prior to the pandemic, Dr. Katia Aviles Vasquez pointed to the impact of earlier economic and physical disasters in opening doors to change in Puerto Rico.  "After the earthquakes of 2020," she noted, "while small scale farms have continued to produce and even served as shelter to affected families, large agri-businesses are losing crops due to lack of local labor as a result of migration and displacement.  In the midst of all this devastation and suffering, a new PR is rising. The hurricanes laid bare the vulnerability of the islands to climate change and the inability of the government to respond. The hurricanes also laid bare the communal culture that US colonialism could not eliminate. People organized mutual support centers in their communities to generate endogenous alternatives for self-sufficiency."

Aviles Vasquez pointed to the importance of reconnecting communities to elements of culture that help people survive.  "Our culture and traditions have been our means of resistance to colonialism," she wrote.  "Root crops and legumes, Puerto Rican diet staples before industrialization, were critical in post-Maria [hurricane] survival and are regaining popularity as new recipes combine traditional cuisine with innovative flavors. A new cadre of young agroecological farmers, educators, chefs and entrepreneurs are working toward a more just and regenerative food system."

Aviles vision is becoming a reality, as the community-based food system of Puerto Rico responds successfully to the COVID-19 crisis, while the corporate system flounders and fails.  According to Magha Garcia, a farmer and president of the Organizacion Boricua, "the small agroecological farms on the island, and the corner and cooperative markets, already had a close relationship with the consumers of what they grow.  They knew each other.  That was the key."

The first two weeks after Puerto Rico's governor issued an executive order, closing non-essential businesses and ordering people to shelter in place, was nevertheless very difficult for the farmers.  The order didn't have an explicit exception that allowed farmers to travel with their products, and the police intervened to stop them on the roads.  "Many organizations, including the Cooperativa Madre Tierra and the Organizacion Boricua, wrote a letter, declaring that small farmers had a right to function," Garcia recalls.  "And there was some acknowledgement of the fact that farmers needed to distribute and sell the food, and the people needed it.  But we had to find a new system that didn't expose anyone to the virus."

Travel has continued to be difficult.  Police stopped the vehicles of timoneros, who bring oxen from farm to farm to plough the land for planting.  "We had to defend the right of rural people to be on the road," Garcia says.  Other problems had to be overcome as well.  Because of Puerto Rico's colonial economy, all the protective equipment on the island - gloves, masks, gel - comes from the U.S., and the U.S. government halted shipments.  "Sometimes we're part of the U.S., when it's convenient for them, and sometimes we're not," Garcia laughs bitterly.  "But we got on the internet and found venders, and people made their own masks."

With the help of students, the Organizacion Boricua put together an infogram and educational materials for farmers that explained the importance of washing hands, and how to clean shoes and maintain physical distance.  While the majority of farmers have internet access, there are remote parts of the island where the damage from Hurricane Maria and the following earthquake have keep communities isolated, without power.  Those areas, however, have developed mutual support centers whose members then knocked on doors to explain things to residents in person.

A system developed quickly, based on direct communication between small agroecological farmers, cooperatives like Madre Tierra, and consumers themselves.  The system established in Puerto Rico resembles in some ways the one being developed in Oakland by Black Earth Farms.  "On the internet, consumers now can order a box of food, which the farmers will put together," Garcia explains.  "Then the consumers will go to a pre-arranged spot to pick up the box.  They can pay on the internet, or if they only have cash, they have to put it into a sealed envelope, which is the wiped with sanitizing gel.  After we presented evidence of the need, and that this would protect people, the police had to accept it."

People called the boxes "surprise boxes" because they didn't know exactly what they would get.  And there was another surprise as well.  "Small agroecological farmers didn't suffer a reduction in their market.  Once they were allowed to function and the government order was clarified, their market grew," she says.  "People who hadn't come to the corner markets or to the Cooperativa Madre Tierra and other coops before began using this system too.  Going to supermarkets is really a problem for most people.  You spend a whole day because the lines are so long.  Using this alternative system is easier.  

"When we get past this crisis, our next problem will be how to keep these new people.  But there are a lot of folks in Puerto Rico with health problems - diabetes, cancer and a compromised immune system.  Getting the box is a safe alternative for them that minimizes risk, and it's healthier food."

It has been a chance for this alternative system to prove its value.  "Conventional farmers lost their crop because they lost their market when restaurants closed and the distribution chains broke down," Garcia explains.  "Puerto Rico still gets most of its food from outside, so the supply problems meant the supermarkets didn't have food on the shelves.  Prices went up for what they did have.  Plus, who knows who's been touching that product or where it comes from.  People are wary of it.  

"The small agroecological farmers had new costs, but they could function when the other system couldn't.  Now even conventional farmers are starting to copy this new system.  In the middle of this crisis we've seen an answer we didn't expect.  We thought we would be losing a crop, and instead we grew."




Farm workers and their supporters march to protest the death of Honesto Silva, on the anniversary of his death a year earlier.  Honesto Silva was a guestworker recruited to work at Sarbanand Farms, who died because of excessive heat and pressure by the company to keep working.  The march was organized by Community2Community and the new union for Washington farm workers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia.

Farm workers in the COVID crisis

Other community-based alternatives revolve around fighting for the welfare of workers in the food supply chain.  For many years Community2Community and Washington state's new union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, have warned that growers are increasing the recruitment of guest workers in the H-2A visa program, endangering both guest workers themselves and local farmworkers.  

As the COVID-19 crisis began, earlier in Washington than other states, C2C called on the state's governor to enact emergency orders with funding to ensure that all protective measures were taken.  For H-2A workers the dangers start with a total lack of testing for the virus as they enter the country, as well as during the period of their contract employment.  Many are not aware of the health crisis that has engulfed their destination communities.  And since they must return to Mexico or other countries at the end of their work contract, COVID-19 contracted in the U.S. can then spread there.

"In addition to informing workers about the terms and conditions of employment when they are being hired," C2C said, "people recruiting for agricultural employment in Washington must provide detailed information about the risks of COVID-19, including how employers will protect their safety while transporting and housing them, and in the workplace ... There must be designated sanitized quarantine living facilities with access to medical personnel."

Farmworkers are forced to work in close proximity and share close living and eating quarters, as well as when they're taken to and from work in vans and buses, in large groups.  "The current protocols are not enforceable and have huge gaps, giving individual corporate farms loopholes," C2C charged.  "This has potentially deadly consequences for farmworkers and rural communities that are already underserved."

When the state did not take the measures advocates were seeking, C2C then joined Washington's two farm labor unions, Familias Unidas por la Justicia and the United Farm Workers, along with Columbian Legal Services, and filed suit.  They seek to force Washington's Department of Health and Labor & Industries to come up with mandatory measures growers must take to protect workers, in place of voluntary "guidelines."  

The need for stricter oversight of the H-2A program became even clearer when the Trump administration announced that, although it was closing off all channels for legal immigration to the U.S., it was making an exception for H-2A guest workers.  Trump told growers  "I know you have to have them."  The program has expanded from 50,000 grower applications to 250,000 since 2014, and Congressional and administration proposals would undermine its weak labor protections even further.  Battles over the expansion of the program, regulations to cut workers wages, and bills in Congress to make it even more grower-friendly, will outlast the virus crisis.

"The increase in growers' use of the H-2A guest worker program," says C2C director Rosalinda Guillen, "has had a huge impact on working conditions in the fields. We've had to feed guest workers who come to us hungry, fight to get them paid their wages, and help them deal with extreme work requirements. At the same time, our local workers find they're not being hired for jobs they've done for many seasons.

"In the capitalist system we are disposable and easily replaceable, and the guest worker program is a good example.  You bring people in and ship em out and make money off of them. It's time to end that. We're human beings and we're part of the community.  We have to be the first ones to speak out because we're the first ones to die. The average lifespan of a farmworker was 49 years even before the virus, just two years up from what it was in year 2000."  




Hungry people wait for food at a food pantry run by volunteers from Project Help in the parking lot of a laundromat in East Oakland, California.

The Political Opening

Henderson points out, however, that the rules of political conflict are being changed by political openings the pandemic has created.  "The discombobulation of the supply chain is being revealed, which makes direct sales so important, whether to consumers or to farmers themselves.  We need to take the things we're learning, and instead of trying to put things back the way they were, we should move forward, strengthening family-scale farms, farmworkers and food coops."  

Peck agrees:  "The COVID-19 crisis has clearly shown the inherent weaknesses and fundamental injustices of our corporatized, globalized, industrialized food/farm system.  But it has also revealed the path we need to take towards a more equitable and sustainable one.  We need to rediscover and reinvigorate the mutual aid ties and solidarity relationships that are already found within our diverse communities.

" Second Harvest in Wisconsin, for instance, allocated a million dollars to buy milk to help farmers, and because they've had a 60% increase in food bank visits.  That's something the government should be doing.  Why don't they earmark $300 million to buy products being thrown away, give them to hungry people and give the bill to the corporations?"

Can the system afford it?  "There's lots of money in the food system," Henderson believes.  "If we could take the billions of the Waltons and Jeff Bezos and redistribute them more fairly, we could pay workers a decent wage."

All these activists agree:  lack of access has never been about a lack of food.  "It's a problem of distribution," says the National Family Farm Coalition, "with people of color and tribal nations across all sectors impacted disproportionately. As the pandemic threatens to strip even more families of their income, more will be unable to afford healthy, safe and nutritious food in the near future."

To meet this threat, the Coalition and other food sovereignty advocates have given a set of demands to Congress for any future stimulus package.  It includes making people of color in the food system central to demands, ensuring a fair livelihood for everyone in it, strengthening local systems, protecting small and medium size farmers and fishing operations from predatory banks and corporations, and ensuring a dignified way to obtain nutritious food for every person in the country.

Patti Naylor, a board member of Family Farm Defenders in Iowa, writes, "Farmers support agroecology because it recognizes the interdependencies between rural communities, local ecosystems, and healthy competitive economies. Agroecology offers an inspiring alternative to the industrial agriculture model that is failing rural communities. However it cannot thrive without the political support that agribusiness currently receives. U.S. agriculture policy needs to prioritize agroecology and ensure farmers' rights to seeds, safe water, and pricing structures that ensure farm viability."

The NFFC's Goodman concludes:  "We are seeing how fragile our food system is, with the globalization and concentration of production, and a few huge processing plants.  We have to go back to regional and local food systems.  The pandemic can be a driver to change this.  In times of crisis people are more willing to look to the government for help.  What has to happen is that the government must step in.  What happens to farmers and farmworkers has to have the same level of importance as fair wages or climate change. With the pandemic, we have to think about changing the policies for when we come out on the other side."




Willie Mills drives a truck from community to community, setting up the food distributions to impoverished families living near the border fence between the U.S. and Mexico, in the desert in Eastern San Diego County.