Author Archives: Thomas

Fair Trade & Free Trade, Praxis & Protest

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The Community Alliance for Global Justice (CAGJ) is a fitting organization to pair with our course because they do an amalgamation of work, spanning all sorts of different topics and issues with the central goal of spreading sustainability, democracy, fair agricultural practice, and social justice. They don’t do one thing, the same way this class isn’t about one subject. It’s more about a set of values and goals that guide you from topic to topic, issue to issue.

(CAGJ Facebook Page)

Our fundraising work and Fair Trade project did little to further my understanding of systems thinking. I’m coming away from the project with a vastly deeper understanding of the Fair Trade model and its benefits but I don’t feel like the work helped me to better understand the way world trade works all that much. I don’t mean this in a bad way though because it was work. Moreover, it was a service. It was unpaid and somewhat thankless intern work, not done for our own personal growth but for a greater cause. Cold-calling local businesses weakened by the global pandemic and asking for small donations for a fundraising event that they may not even be able to attend did little to further my formal education, but it taught me a valuable lesson about how the topics of our class can look in the real world, not to mention during a crisis. Nonprofit work isn’t always glamorous and that’s a valuable lesson when seeking a degree in the social sciences.

Front page of the Seattle Times from December 1, 1999. (Mark Harrison / The Seattle Times)

The obvious parallel between our project and course material is the Fair Trade research we did for CAGJ’s website. Our research was mostly surface-level, just getting a solid overview of the Fair Trade model and listing different products and brands, however our knowledge of the deeply rooted problems of the free trade model came in handy. “The Real Reasons for Hunger” by Vandana Shiva and “Agricultural Trade Liberalization” by Jennifer Clapp helped me understand the need for such a model brought on by the unjust trade policies by the WTO. Early in the quarter, not knowing what would take place a month later, our CAGJ supervisors had us watch a documentary about Seattle’s 1999 WTO protests, which, after telling us how bad Seattle police are at handling demonstrations, showed how effective protest can be. The 1999 protests prevented the WTO from holding negotiations and forced the world to examine the costs of globalization. Now shockingly similar photos have come out of the last two weeks, and already major police reforms have been promised.

Downtown Seattle, May 30, 2020 (Matt M. McKnight/Crosscut)

So much of our class was focused on the macro – the big picture of the global food system and the endless moving parts that make it tick. Our project focused on the micro. One Seattle nonprofit with a staff small enough you could count them on your hands, doing what they can to stay afloat while educating their community on a better way to exchange goods. You can’t solve a problem without understanding the system it’s a part of, and you can’t understand the system without getting to know the individual actors working within it.

For Essential Food Processing Workers, “Thank You” Won’t Be Enough

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When your health and possibly your life are on the line, a mere “thank you” from your employer won’t cut it. In an excellent blog post, Gregory Stine (gstine9) cites an article from The Fern reporting that as of May 1st, there have been 6,832 confirmed cases of coronavirus and at least 25 deaths among meatpacking and food processing workers across the country. This leaves me to wonder, is thousands of workers getting sick a business expense? Or did their employers make the age-old mistake of valuing profits over people, deciding that the costs of worker protections were simply too high. The question now – will they learn their lesson?

Gregory did a great job tying in what Michael Maniates’ piece, “Individualization”, taught us about the way in which large employers deflect responsibility for their own mistakes back onto the workers who suffer those mistakes’ consequences. This phenomenon has been especially evident during the pandemic. The New York Times reported how in a Tyson Foods pork plant that had over 1,000 confirmed cases, Tyson named “worker absenteeism” as a reason for having to temporarily shut down production, failing to recognize how their own practices had made going to work too dangerous for many of their workers.

A Tyson Foods factory in Waterloo, Iowa

A Tyson Foods factory in Waterloo, Iowa (Daniel Acker for The New York Times)

In Raj Patel’s “The Color of Food”, it was reported that food processing and meatpacking facilities across the country employ people of color at a disproportionate rate to the national population, as does every other sector of the food industry. Per the Food Workers Alliance, as well as being some of the most dangerous, 5 of the 8 lowest paying jobs in America are in the food system.

workers at a Tyson poultry plant in Georgia

workers at a Tyson poultry plant in Georgia (Tyson/AP)

Gregory’s post emphasizes the pressing need for structural change that the pandemic has only helped illuminate. When the dust settles, will employers continue to disregard health concerns in the name of profits or will this mark the start of a new age of food worker safety and empowerment.

Beyond Meditating

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It’s become kind of a cliche for people to talk about the benefits of meditating. The contemplative practices are a good way to practice meditating on a subject, rather than meditating with the sole purpose of relaxation, which have the potential to leave you wondering the whole time if it’s working. The practices are a different approach to learning about a subject that give you space to ruminate, rather than tackling the subject head on. It’s like the daytime equivalent of “sleeping on it”.

I got the most out of the practice where we contemplated hunger, which I had been putting off for several days because every time I got hungry I just didn’t feel like waiting another 20 minutes to eat. Normally I get a little frustrated by the amount of thoughts that come into my head but with this practice I found that my thoughts were focused almost only on hunger. A physical need dictating where my mind went made it easier for me to focus on the practice.

The most compelling section of this practice was when we stopped breathing for ten seconds. It’s an awful feeling, which is probably the point of the exercise because with my hunger I feel like I can wait to eat and I’ll be fine, whereas by depriving myself of air I can feel that want turn into need very quickly. It was similar to the practice where we watched videos about cocoa farmers, talked about commodity chains, then ate pieces of chocolate. Adding a physical component makes learning about anything a more memorable, more impactful experience.

Below is a link to Miriam Jordan’s article that I referenced in my last post about farmworkers during the pandemic. If you take the time to read it, I recommend eating a piece of fruit afterward and considering who helped it get to you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-undocumented-immigrant-farmworkers-agriculture.html?searchResultPosition=1

Immigrant Farmworkers Deemed Essential, But For How Long?

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Miriam Jordan of the New York Times gives an update on how undocumented immigrant farmworkers are being affected by COVID-19 and points out the inconsistency in how they’ve been deemed essential during the crisis but still face the threat of deportation. Many agricultural workers have been sent letters from their employers that they can show to authorities if they’re questioned, like an extremely informal pass that may get them out of trouble, if need be.A letter provided to farmworkers in case they are stopped for violating California's shelter-in-place order.(Jordan, 2020)

The food system is struggling to figure out how to handle the far-reaching changes that COVID-19 has brought on. Owners of farms and orchards are having to figure out how to create work environments that don’t put their workers at risk for contracting the disease, while workers themselves have to decide between going to work and risking getting sick, or staying home knowing that without papers they’ll be ineligible for unemployment benefits.

This is a good example of how complex the food supply chain is. It cannot handle the harsh changes in demand that we’re seeing under the pandemic. Restaurant shutdowns and school closures have thrown a huge wrench into the system, causing major changes in the ways consumers get their food, which then causes the people responsible for packing food for schools and restaurants to get laid off, as Jordan notes.

The letters from employers state the obvious: agricultural workers are essential to the food supply chain, essential enough that the Department of Homeland Security recognizes their importance and implores them to keep coming to work. For their treatment, working conditions, or wage to stay the same or get worse after the pandemic is over would make hypocrites out of everyone alongside them in the supply chain – including consumers. It’s unclear if when this is over immigrant workers will be deported or if they’ll finally be recognized as necessary workers and treated accordingly.

-Thomas Star