9:00pm – Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009
Free admission
University of Miami
Learning Center room 192
Chiapas Media Tour
FAIR FOOD ACROSS BORDERS SPRING TOUR 2009
The Chiapas Media Project/Promedios announces our new bi-national advocacy campaign: Fair Food Across Borders. Fair Food Across Borders (FFAB) reveals the human rights abuses faced by migrant farm workers in Mexico who harvest many of the fruits and vegetables we eat here in the US.
The Fair Food Across Borders Campaign seeks university, cultural and community-based sponsors to host presentations for Spring 2009. The centerpiece of the FFAB campaign is the new CMP/Promedios video, Paying the Price: Migrant Workers in the Toxic Fields of Sinaloa. Paying the Price examines the impoverished lives of migrant farmworkers from the town of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. We follow them from their community to their lives as migrant workers in a large Sinaloa agribusiness camp, Buen Año, where they pick exotic Chinese vegetables for export to the US and Canada. We see the hardships faced by these workers in their community of origin, largely abandoned by the local and state governments to the inhumane and slave-like working conditions they encounter in Buen Año. Paying the Price presents the polarized reality of how migrant workers are seen in Mexico: through the eyes of agribusiness representatives these working families are portrayed as merely an annoying, culturally backward necessity to be dealt with in order to reap their multi-million dollar profits.
Melody Gonzalez, FFAB National Coordinator (from the Student/Farmworker Alliance, ally organization of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers), will present Paying the Price. Presentations last between one-and-half to two hours, and include video screening and discussion about the role of agribusiness and internal migration in Mexico, NAFTA, and corporate and consumer responsibility in the US.
Fair Food Across Borders asks for an honorarium based on the means of the host organization to help continue the work of the FFAB Campaign.
For further information, please e-mail us at info@fairfoodab.org
Background
It is estimated that there are over one million migrant farmworkers in Mexico. The majority of these farmworkers come from the southern states of Mexico like Oaxaca and Guerrero. These families are forced to leave their communities, among the poorest in Mexico, because they have no other way to survive. They leave their communities from four to six months a year to work in the fields of northern Mexican states like Sinaloa, where they encounter deplorable and over-crowded housing, exposure to toxic pesticides, child labor, and sub-poverty wages. What makes their situation more severe is that when they return back to their they have barely saved enough money to survive until they have to return to work in Northern Mexico six months later.
In northern states like Sinaloa, Sonora and Baja California there are thousands of transnational agribusiness companies producing a wide variety of products from tomatoes to watermelons. The majority of the fruits and vegetables from these northern states are for export to the U.S. and Canada. These companies make great profits from these migrant farmworkers, and the companies who buy from them, like Wal-Mart, reap even greater profits from this “cheap” labor across the border. The lack of regulation and enforcement of human rights in trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) facilitate and perpetuate this exploitation.
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