"Child Labor in Mexico Puts Food on US Tables"

The lead story in The Arizona Republic today adds another chapter to the sorry tale of NAFTA's effects on the Mexican people.

"About 300,000 youngsters. . . work illegally in Mexico's fields, the U.N. Children's Fund says, making child labor a major link in the chain that increasingly supplies American dinner tables."

Mexican law prohibits child labor.

"Nevertheless, children under 15 make up 20 percent of Mexico's migrant farmworkers, the Mexican Labor Secretariat says. Less than 10 percent of these children attend school and 42 percent suffer from some form of malnutrition, government studies show.

"They persist in the fields despite harsh criticism from international groups, rules imposed by U.S. distributors and increasingly strident warnings from the Mexican government."

Here's why:

"The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement is partly to blame for the child-labor phenomenon. . . .

"The trade pact has opened up the U.S. market to Mexican farmers, encouraging large-scale packing and exporting operations in Mexico's northern and central states. . . .

"Small-scale farmers, mostly Indians from southern Mexico, have found it hard to compete. Instead, they began migrating north each harvest season to work the big fields.

"The children of these families went from working on the family farm to working for hire.

". . . In most cases, the children do not appear on the farms' payrolls.

". . . But because adult workers earn bonuses for picket more than their daily quota, parents with 'helpers' bring home more money. Farms save money beause they do not have to pay social security for youngsters."

It goes unmentioned that US agribusiness operates large farms as well as "packing and exporting" operations both in Mexico and on this side of the border, in Texas's Rio Grande Valley, for instance, and in Arizona's onion fields. It is not unheard of for the same crews of undocumented workers to work in both operations, as was attested at this week's House Education and Labor Committee hearing on immigrant labor shortfalls. [Hearing on "Do Federal Programs Ensure U.S. Workers Are Recruited First Before Employers Hire From Abroad?" Tuesday, May 6, 2008]

Also not reported in the discussion of parents' recruiting their children as 'helpers' is the corollary that adult workers wouldn't need to impress their children if their own labor provided a living wage.

For them in Mexico, as here, it doesn't.

This puts a whole new inflection on "grow your own."

Bon appétit.

"Monsanto's Harvest of Fear"

If globalization, immigration, AZ agriculture, guest workers/slaves, shock doctrine economics, genetically modified foods, the horrors of "free trade," and the future of what goes into your mouth are among your interests, you'll want to read this.

Regular readers know I rant about Monsanto's role in creating the desperation that drives immigrants over the border. This will help to explain how that works, because genetically modified seeds and Monsanto's corporate goons aren't just homebodies. They get around.

Makes me wonder who the majority stockholders are.

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear

"Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination."

Free Trade, Sex/Slave Trade, and Immigration

Naomi Klein's explosive book about US global economic policy explains everything from the Iraq catastrophe and the Gulf Coast/New Orleans fiasco to Bush's near-wrecking of the national economy. The diabolical practice misleadingly called "free trade" or "globalism" is actually about how, over more than three decades, the wealthy have tested and perfected ways to dispossess the middle classes and the poor. Klein's work is painstakingly documented. There are more than a dozen examples involving Latin American, Asian, Pacific Rim, Middle Eastern, and European countries, as well as a close look at New Orleans. It's all there, and in my opinion, nobody who hopes to understand the main currents of contemporary life can afford not to read it.

The connections are deep and wide. When multinational corporations and their political, academic, and military allies conspire to create or capitalize (literally) on the conditions Klein explains--distracting disasters--the result is that the middle class is destroyed and the poor are abandoned, left to starve or drown.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how this practice--"free trade"--is, then, also fundamentally responsible for creating the conditions that lead to global worker migrations and to the international sex trade.

The former is obvious. If Monsanto introduces genetically altered crops into a country, the natural, organic counterpart is overtaken, erased, as it were, by cross-pollination. In time, crop monopolization occurs, genetically. If aggressive lawsuits then carefully ensure that no one can grow and market Monsanto's trade-marked hybrid without paying royalties to the corporation, small farmers and local growers are forced out of business or driven off their lands to other parts of the country. Then it becomes a race against time.

In the end, wind pollinates, and Monsanto wins. Thus, without their permission, and often over their urgent protest, their fields have been filled with Monsanto's trade-marked corn, maize, rice, soy--whatever--which they are not allowed to grow or sell. Left with few if any alternatives, few skills, and no money, they are forced off their own lands and, ultimately, often out of their own countries.

The connection between "free trade" and the international sex/slave trade is perhaps not so obvious, and I am indebted to a good friend for bringing it to my attention this morning. The dynamics are essentially the same: Extreme poverty with no alternatives forces extreme actions. For instance, what happens to village peasants when post-tsunami developers seize their lands, raze what's left of their villages, and put up luxury tourist spots? Dispossessed of village, family, trade, market, and all means to survive, some of them sell their daughters into the sex/slave trade, not necessarily knowing that it is the sex/slave trade.

These desperate, illiterate people are easy prey to outsiders' promises that their daughters will have a better life, a good education, a fine marriage if only . . . . After all, it doesn't take much to abandon a girl child in a culture where girls are regarded as liabilities due to dowry customs and lower wage prospects (if outside work is permitted at all). All this and pending starvation is a mighty persuader.

The moral depravity of these economic practices is just boggling. Unfortunately, the moral responsibility for ending them extends to us. Pick your cause: Environmental degradation? Sex/slave trade? Immigration? Women's rights? The rights of people of color? Minimum wage? Elder rights? There's virtually nothing that "free trade"--privatization, demolished social safety nets, zero taxes for the wealthy and the corporations, and cuts in wages and benefits--doesn't make worse. So it's imperative to act. Pick your cause, get informed, and get busy. The earth itself is counting on you and me.