Posted on 08/02/2007 7:27:45 PM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
It’s 9 a.m. and workers are rolling up the giant doors at Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles. Grocers are ready for business, their stalls colorfully stocked with vegetables and fruit – green beans, squash, tomatoes, lettuces, asparagus, oranges, apples, avocados, nectarines.
This open air market, and scores of groceries and supermarkets throughout Los Angeles, once offered nothing but the bounty of California, the largest agricultural state in the nation. Long the salad bowl for the nation, we became the envy of easterners who face limited selections of vegetables and fruits during winter months. It’s still true that every year California farmers produce more than $20 billion worth of crops, most of them high-value vegetables, fruits, nuts, wines, dairy, and meat products.
Increasingly, however, the produce that adorns Grand Central Market and other grocery stores no longer is grown here. Instead, it arrives from Mexico, Chile, Peru, China, and other far-flung nations. California agriculture is under economic assault from cheap imports, produced in many cases under cut-rate conditions that do not meet U.S. sanitary standards. Pesticides often are overused in some nations, according to Beyond Pesticides. Contamination problems have come to light, as illustrated by the recent case of Chinese wheat gluten. The product was widely used in pet food and other unknown foods sold in the U.S. even though it had been contaminated with chemicals used in plastic, including melamine and cyanuric acid.
As the tide of imported crops rises, U.S. food safety officials have not kept up with inspections and monitoring of the food sold in Los Angeles and U.S. markets. A July 17 House Committee on Energy and Commerce investigation, prompted by the Chinese gluten scare which killed or sickened thousands of pets, revealed the lack of safeguards. It found that the Food and Drug Administration inspects less than 1 percent of imported foods. It then chemically tests only a small percentage of the food it inspects.
“The shoddy state of U.S. inspection procedures has not gone unnoticed,” said Caroline Smith De Waal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, commenting on the report. “The gaps in protection from this system are indeed alarming, particularly as imports in some commodities grow.”
The lack of standards for cheap imported food from abroad even undermines the ability of U.S. farmers to upgrade equipment and sanitation, say some California growers. As the costs increase here, foreign growers are able to cut corners and beat out California farmers in the marketplace, threatening one of the state’s largest industries.
The dilemma is particularly evident when it comes to asparagus, a delicacy farmers have grown for generations in the Imperial Valley and San Francisco Bay Delta regions for markets here and across the nation. California and other U.S. farmers are facing unwelcome shipments of asparagus imported from Mexico and Peru under free trade agreements.
Acreage of asparagus – a high value crop – has plummeted by half in California since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994. It has shrunk from as much as 40,000 acres 15 years ago to around 15,000 acres today, according to Marc Marchini, an officer of the California Asparagus Commission and a grower of the vegetable near Stockton.
Now, farmers like Marchini worry that asparagus may be just the tip of the iceberg, as more large-scale vegetable farming operations – often financed by U.S. interests – spring up in Mexico, Peru, and soon in nations like Costa Rica and Guatemala under the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Even China is sending more food products here – particularly garlic – under trade liberalization with the Asian giant. Gilroy, it seems, remains the garlic capital of the world in name only these days as consumers swoop up Chinese garlic on the cheap.
Indeed, U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics confirm that the U.S. is importing more farm products, so many that this nation long known as an agricultural power house and the seat of the green revolution is ready to become a net food importer. Much of that food is being grown under unsustainable conditions using ill-paid, ill-housed workers. Recent contamination scandals have increased concern that food sanitation is declining with the rise of imports. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 76 million Americans a year suffer from food-borne illness, including 325,000 that wind up in the hospital and 5,000 who die.
Meanwhile, farmers in California are under the onslaught of foreign competition, urbanization, transfers of water to cities, and less interest than ever in farming among young people. A recent American Farmland Trust report showed that the Central Valley – the state’s agricultural heartland – lost 97,000 acres of farm fields during the 1990s, or 151 square miles, and that the area can be expected to lose another 900,000 acres, or 1,406 square miles, by 2040 if present trends continue. That’s an area bigger than Vermont.
“It’s very bad news,” said Steven Blank, a leading agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis, who adds that conditions are getting even tougher for farmers of wheat, and other staple crops in the Midwest. Unless U.S. farmers can innovate to become more competitive, U.S. agriculture may be on the verge of a major shrinkage, following in the footsteps of manufacturing under free trade agreements.
“There’s no foreseeable solution,” said Blank. “All the trends are negative.”
Concerned about the decline of one of California’s mainstay industries, I set out on a series of journeys to get a closer look at what is becoming of farming under the ongoing extension of free trade agreements and globalization.
I envisioned first touring the bucolic farm fields, vineyards, and pastures of California, but instead all roads led me to the nation’s capital. It was here along the banks of the Potomac that people told me I must look to find the rules governing the new agricultural landscape.
It was a late spring day in Washington, sticky and bordering on too hot. I approached the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, a small building across from the White House, and entered its lobby for a meeting with “a senior trade official” who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
“The way we look at trade policy is as a subset of economic policy,” said the official as we sat down at a table in a high-ceilinged office. The vision, which came into focus during the Clinton administration, is to eliminate all tariffs and trade restrictions to create a global free market.
“I’m a big fan of the North American Free Trade Agreement,” said the official, who contends that the 1994 treaty – which lifted trade restrictions and tariffs between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico – has lowered food prices, increased economic efficiency, and rationalized food production. “Certainly we’ve seen some adjustments in the U.S. and Mexico, but it’s all in the direction of more rational farm and economic policies.”
Moreover, the Central American Free Trade Agreement – now being ratified by the nations of the isthmus between North and South America – will create new opportunities for farm exports, as well as cheaper imports of some crops like sugar, the official maintained. Liberalization of trade with China is doing the same, I was told. “I’m very optimistic on the future of agriculture in the U.S.,” the official said, citing superior infrastructure and equipment, agricultural knowledge, and a long history of using the land productively. “The biggest problem is our fixed costs.” These include the costs of labor, land, and meeting health, safety, and environmental regulations. To be successful in the new global market place, the U.S. farm industry will have to figure out how to lower these costs, particularly in California where they are among the highest in the nation, the official said.
I emerged from the office into the humid air thinking about what California farmers had told me about how foreign competition was hampering their efforts to invest in new equipment that could boost sanitary standards. I took the subway across town to hear a counterpoint from the National Farmers Union, which represents family farmers across the nation, including here in California.
Exiting the subway near the nation’s capitol, the sun reflected off its white dome casting a glare in the afternoon heat. I was glad to be inside again in the lobby of the National Farmers Union, where Tom Buis, the organization’s president greeted me. He displayed an easy going demeanor, perhaps stemming from his roots in Indiana.
California, he explained, faces intense import competition because trade agreements the U.S. has entered with Mexico and other nations “have failed to level the playing field” when it comes to costs.
“The impact has been tremendous,” said Buis. Before NAFTA and later trade agreements, the U.S. had a huge agricultural trade surplus.
“You look at this past year it was virtually a tie,” said Buis. “This next year we’re teetering on the brink of being a net importer of food and fiber.”
It’s not just a few crops he said, “but across the board. No segment of U.S. agriculture production has felt that more than the fruits and vegetable industry.”
The flood of imports has cut income for farmers in California and other states, said Buis.
To turn things around, he said, the Farmers Union believes that the trade agreements must be amended to ensure that foreign agricultural operations meet the same environmental and labor standards as in the U.S.
Another problem is that the trade agreements have increased the number of growers competing to sell farm products to a few monopoly-like food marketers. This makes it easy for them to play off one farmer against another to dictate low prices for agriculture products, even though the savings may rarely be passed on to the consumer.
To combat the degrading conditions for growers, he said, the National Farmers Union is trying to develop direct channels to consumers, such as farmers markets and ties to smaller food retailers and restaurants, through which farmers can get better prices for their goods.
Over at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, however, farm economists told me that NAFTA has been a two-way street, increasing imports from Mexico to the U.S., but also opening export opportunities for U.S. farmers to sell into Mexico. Consumers on both sides of the border have been the big beneficiaries, because most of the Mexican crops are imported into the U.S. when they are not in season here, the economists told me.
Yet, USDA data show that the balance of trade in agriculture has narrowed from a $27.3 billion surplus in 1996 after NAFTA and other free trade agreements took effect to just $4.7 billion last year. The problem, according to the USDA, is that imports have been increasing twice as fast as exports.
The trade balance for vegetables already is negative and widening. In 2003, the latest year for which data is available, vegetable exports expanded just one percent to $3.3 billion, while imports increased 13 percent to $5.4 billion.
The narrowing is the result of the growth of farming abroad, often of agricultural operations set up by U.S. agribusiness corporations to grow food for the U.S. market, said Robert Scott, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute.
“As a result, the U.S. is about ready to become a net importer of agricultural commodities,” said Scott, as I spoke to him in his Washington office. “It’s been coming for years.”
Unless trade and agriculture policies are reversed to minimize crop surpluses in order to support farm prices and to provide farmers sales avenues directly to consumers that bypass large agribusiness marketing firms, Scott fears U.S. agriculture will become increasingly dominated by large corporate, mechanized factory farms and imports.
“We’re probably going to stop producing high value fruits and vegetables, which is going to have a real impact on California because it’s cheaper to import that stuff from Mexico and Asia,” concluded Scott.
As I rode the subway away from his office, I read a USDA report detailing the threat to asparagus, a staple of California cuisine and farm culture. Even as U.S. per person consumption has increased, acreage devoted to growing asparagus nationwide has shrunk from 81,150 in 1993, before NAFTA took effect, to 67,000 in 2003. Growers say acreage has continued to decline. The report noted, too, that shipments of melons and other crops from Mexico are increasing. Vegetable imports from China – particularly garlic and mushrooms – are experiencing “double-digit growth.”
I left Washington and returned home to California, reflecting upon a trade policy that seemed dominated by an ideology favoring the narrow interests of international corporations over a practicality that supported the broad interest of the American populace. So I became determined to find out if California’s vegetable growing industry stood at the cusp of a long-term shrinkage with asparagus as the leading edge.
I started with a trip to the sun drenched Imperial Valley. The desert wind whipped the palm trees in the distance as I drove down a long flat road that turned to dirt just where the sign read Brock Asparagus. I pulled into the parking lot of the combined office and packing plant and walked right in.
Don Brock, a tall gray-haired man born and raised in the Imperial Valley community of El Centro, greeted me. He is the third generation in his family to grow asparagus on a 440-acre farm near the Mexican border.
“We’ve scaled down our fresh asparagus acreage,” he told me in a cluttered office where he markets the crop to places like the Los Angeles Wholesale Terminal.
“The buzz word is the global economy,” the farmer said. “Well, I’m not a Rockefeller or a big shot. I just want to make a living at the noble profession of raising food.”
Under the strain of imports from Peru and Mexico, asparagus acreage in the valley – where it is harvested during the winter – has shrunk from 6,500 acres to just 650 acres, said Brock. Now, growers of other crops in the valley – like iceberg and romaine lettuce – are beginning to feel the same weight of imports.
Brock worries that if the trend toward reliance on farm imports continues the U.S. will find itself vulnerable in the event of a war or an energy crisis that impedes the nation’s ability to ship food in from abroad. Food, he said, should be viewed as a strategic resource, like energy. “Most take it for granted,” he said.
I drove east through the desert valley as the sun reached overhead. Baled hay was stacked for pickup along the highway. The fields were a light sandy color. Irrigation canals lined the road, which was deserted except for the occasional pickup truck driving under the brilliant sun.
I pulled down a dirt road to meet Ed McGrew, who began farming east of El Centro in 1960. He lives in a modest looking house on the farm. He is tall, tanned, and knowledgeable, a former member of the California Agriculture Commission.
“My story can be told in one sentence,” I remember McGrew telling me on the phone before we met. “U.S. midwinter asparagus cannot compete with Peru and Mexican cheap labor.”
After greeting me, we settled into his office – adorned with sport fishing pictures and a collection of sheriff’s badges – overlooking the farm where he grew asparagus until he plowed it under four years ago. “I had over 300 acres of asparagus,” he said.
At one time Imperial Valley growers like McGrew supplied the vegetable to the whole United States during the winter. However, lower cost Mexican asparagus increasingly is grown at the same time.
Every day during the harvest McGrew employed 200 people to cut individual asparagus spears when they were long enough off the plants, which live 10 to 12 years. “We were paying almost the same here per hour that they’re paying per day in Mexico.”
Farm workers in the Imperial Valley commute from Mexicali and earn about $7 per hour. On the Mexican side of the border, the pay is about $12 to $14 per day.
Both the farmers agreed that the lack of infrastructure – refrigeration, shipping facilities like ports and airports – is the only thing holding back imports from putting U.S. growers out of business. “But they’re catching up,” observed McGrew, who predicted that soon the valley will lose out to imports when it comes to growing onions.
I wanted to see the new growing areas the U.S. was becoming dependent upon, so I traveled south of Ensenada to a low coastal plane surrounded by barren hills. As I drove along Route 1, the trans-peninsula highway, farms stretched out toward the ocean to the west and the hills to the east. Aside from the dryness, the geography of the area is much like the Salinas Valley, flat, cooled by the ocean, the sun often filtered by the marine clouds that cast a mix of shadow and light.
I turned down a road toward the ocean and saw refrigerator truck trailers lined up in a parking lot. Corrugated metal packing plants dotted the landscape. Irrigation pipe was piled up. Spinach, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, and asparagus grew here in fields lined with tubes that deliver water in this dry coastal valley through drip irrigation.
It is here, and in even drier coastal areas further south in Baja California and on the Mexican mainland in the desert state of Sonora, that U.S. agribusiness companies are directly investing or contracting for produce to import to the shelves of supermarkets.
Typical is Tanimura & Antle, a firm based in Salinas that owns the familiar Ready Pac operation, providing packaged vegetables, fruits, and salads in supermarkets that are pre-washed and cut for serving. The company markets California grown asparagus and vegetables, but also imports them from Mexico and Peru.
T&A, as it is known in the business, imports asparagus from this area along the Baja California coast, explained Frank Goldner, general manager of asparagus for the company. Asparagus from its Baja California farmers is marketed from Christmas through Easter, overlapping the complete growing season in the Imperial Valley and the beginning of the season in the Bay Delta region. However, looking ahead it sees that water is a problem in this arid area, Goldner admits.
“Definitely in Baja, the problem is the wells are going lower every year. They pray for rain. That’s why we’re looking at other regions for expanding,” he said.
Anticipating the day when it no longer will be possible to grow asparagus in this coastal area, he said, T&A already is testing other areas in Mexico, including Tampico and Sinaloa, as possible asparagus growing areas. “They’re all doing trials right now,” he said.
Peru is another area that eventually may have trouble exporting asparagus, primarily due to the growing cost of transportation with high oil prices, said Goldner. The cost of flying the vegetable into Los Angeles International Airport has become so high that growers have taken to sending it in ships instead, but that is difficult because the crop is perishable.
In Mexico, including in this coastal plain, migrant workers pick the crops – mostly indigenous people from the south of Mexico. They work for $25 a day and live in housing near the fields provided by farmers, according to Goldner. When they finish here, they move to other fields in Mexico as the crops ripen.
As I drove through the farming areas, I saw small dilapidated houses and mobile homes. There were no apparent sanitary facilities for the workers, though the fields are subject to third party health and safety audits at T&A’s expense to make sure the crops meet U.S. standards, according to Goldner.
Ironically, just as farmers north of the border are suffering under NAFTA, the large pool of indigenous laborers that pick crops in Northern Mexico for export have been uprooted by subsidized corn and beans from the U.S. that have inundated the country under the free trade deal. Most used to farm in Oaxaca and other southern states in Mexico until the crops flooded in.
“People in the south are leaving a collapsing rural economy,” said Ted Lewis, founder of Global Exchange’s Mexico Program. Initially, the estimated 1 million who have been uprooted under NAFTA went to Mexico City, but that has become too difficult, he said.
“People bypass that and the next best thing is the north” where there are maquiladora jobs or the prospect of crossing the border into the U.S., he explained. “In the meantime, they’re doing the melons or asparagus.”
I took one final journey in an attempt to further understand the new dynamics of agriculture in the world economy and what it will mean for California. This time, I cruised across the islands of the San Francisco Bay Delta under an early morning sun. The land was lush and green. Water flowed abundantly.
I made a right off the highway and drove up to the Ferguson Ranch where Marchini and Bob Ferguson greeted me. The two come from a long lineage of farming in the delta region. Both wore jeans and well-worn shoes. They led me into a comfortable office stacked with documents.
The delta, explained Marchini, is the premier asparagus growing area because of its climate, rich peat soil, and abundant water. Traditionally, he explained, it has been a profitable crop, but lately the Mexican growing season has encroached on the first part of the season in the delta causing prices paid there to “drop like a rock.”
It costs $60 to produce a crate of asparagus on the delta, explained Ferguson, compared to $30 in Mexico and $15 in Peru, where it can be grown almost year-round because of the vast range of elevations.
As a result, marketing companies have paid farmers as much as $10 to $15 below the actual cost of producing a crate of the tender spears, said Ferguson.
The growth of the Mexican vegetable export industry has been “devastating” on the delta, said Marchini. “Our acreage is almost cut in half.”
What irks both the farmers is that U.S. agribusiness has subsidized and helped farmers in Mexico and Peru obtain the latest equipment for packing and shipping asparagus, superior even to U.S. growers. In Peru, said Marchini, the federal government subsidized asparagus farmers to provide them with an alternative to growing coca, which is refined into cocaine.
Meanwhile, the farmers said the low price for asparagus is making it difficult for them to install equipment that would enhance sanitation. This includes new stainless steel washing equipment to replace rusting steel models and electronic devices that can be used to pinpoint and label exactly where crops are grown in fields as they are boxed. This, Marchini said, would allow investigators to quickly trace contamination – such as the e-coli that last year tainted spinach in Salinas Valley – to its source and more quickly solve resulting health problems. The industry believes that the federal government should help finance such upgrades in the face of dirt cheap foreign competition.
The farmers face problems too, including pressure to transfer more water from the delta to urban areas and to sell land to developers, even though the land is on a flood plain.
“We’ve been farming out here for 100 years,” said Ferguson reflecting on those pressures. “Will I be the last generation to farm? None of my children want to do it.”
I left the Ferguson ranch and headed east on the delta to pick up Interstate 5 for the trip back to Los Angeles. Cranes and other big birds swam in the marshes and leafy crops gently fluttered in the fields with the breeze. On the horizon, housing tracts and malls encroached on the gentle landscape.
I entered the rush of the freeway and drove south through the vast Central Valley pondering all that I had heard and seen on these journeys. As I drove, the words of the famous writer Wendell Barry echoed in my mind: “A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.”
On all my journeys, I had seen little but depletion.
I realized that it will be up to the people to counter this depletion occurring under the international free market consensus in Washington, which has torn agriculture from its community roots. Only the people can support farmers by buying domestic products, shopping at farmers markets, and frequenting local stores. It will be up to them to pressure their elected representatives to support local agriculture by preserving farmland and supporting farm programs. Unless they do it, agriculture will become little more than another multinational enterprise that after depleting one area and community of people, moves on to deplete the next until nothing is left.
try breading the male zuchinin flower( the one that just has a stem no fruit) in egg and flour with some basil.
quick fry it in olive oil.
That was a treat from when I was a kid.
I got to do it for myself last year.
Again to prove I could do it.
It was heaven and the very taste of my ancestry.
Go for it.
The bees are dying from a natural pathogen, or an even tinier critter than itself. It's happened before, and likely will happen again.
What a great article.
Globalism will kill off America.
I can’t wait to move back South so I can have a garden again. MA soil is so rocky, and the growing season is so short, it’s just a pain to dig a garden out in the back yard. We do have some local farms, though, so it’s good to be able to buy locally grown produce.
Did you read the article? This is affecting every farmer in America.
You can thank the elite globalist.
It's all for the greedy rich. They don't give a damn who they put out of business. They don't give a damn if American can't even produce it's own food. They don't give damn.
They only care about profits regardless of consequences.
Read the entire article. It's well written and the warning should be taken very seriously.
And like agriculture, globalism is now affecting many of our industries, and with one giant common problem...We can't compete against early 1900s wages.
These trade policies will eventually choke this country off, and will only benefit the wealthy elite.
Oh boy! Thanks for that link. I bookmarked it. Summer’s almost over and I’ve been mulling over the fall planting. I might try that-looks great!
Would anyone be surprised?
The problem with all of you today is that you think all the food you eat just magically appears in the supermarket.
Your welcome. It’s been a real rewarding experience.
Economics is the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses...Water is a scarce resource.
In a really free market, those resources are used in the most efficient manner, determined by the market, ie those who actually use those resources.. When Govt steps in and “centrally plans” the allocation of resources, they create shortages that would otherwise not exist. Hence California having an abnormal amount of water, inland of course. They don’t grow a lot of food in the Redwoods.
And I doubt you’ve been around much longer than me. I know where food comes from. I was only making a point about free markets to those who sneer at them. The problem is not free markets, it’s that we don’t really have them.
I think the birds spread the cherry tomatoes.
I found my *volunteers* growing in a patch of pink thistle that the birds love. The thistle did not originally grow in that spot, either. I was amazed, though, as I had never had that happen before!
We grow more each year, buy at farmers’ market, get more and more meat from locally-owned producers and simply eat less and less out of season produce. The imported stuff is fairly tasteless, so it isn’t a sacrifice.
I freeze and dry the excess.
Nah, the lands around Gilroy and in the Salinas Valley are still largely agricultural. Probably doesn't look much different today than when you drove it. There are new (and very expensive) developments around Gilroy, but they've hardly wiped out the farmlands.
Maybe you're not as dumb as you look, afterall.
Not only is that safer but tomatoes actually taste like tomatoes and plums taste like plums.
LOLOLOL! Water covers 3/4 of the planet!
Try drinking or irrigating your crops with salt water. Doofus.
Additionally, water is not a scarce resource. The planet is nearly 70% water. The problem is that it isn't always in places where it is wanted or needed.
Our ancestors, in their infinite wisdom, had the foresight to provide water where it was wanted and needed so that future generations could benefit greatly.
Since then we have been led by a bunch of brain-deads with no foresight so we have been living off the aforementioned legacy and have not improved upon the infrastructure that they constructed.
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