KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters; Sustainability Segment: Peter O'Driscoll and Guadalupe Gamboa

this is diane warren your host on the sustainability segment of mind over matters of k x p seattle ninety point three of them an online key xv died orgy my guest this morning or peter o'driscoll and again law of oxfam america peter is the project director for the equitable food initiative and their pay is senior program officer and directs the us worker rights program peter address gun that they can bar here today to tell us about the equitable food initiative and how it can contribute to a better life for farm workers as well as safer and more environmentally sustainable food welcome to power and do you think you would you like to begin by telling us about oxfam sure i'd been with oxfam for almost seven years now working on their a decent work program and oxfam is an international federation of thirteen different accents in the world cup started in england after the war to help the moron which people that didn't have enough food and stuff and since then it's expanded to thirteen different countries and that's best known for

humanitarian aid and developmental assistance and i work out of the us are experiments based in boston and there we have what's called the us regional office which covers the us two areas of thomas edison work and gulf coast restoration up to katrina you know we got some in there because there was a lack of effective aid and the equitable food initiative bros from the decent work program of some focuses on the most marginalized workers people in the countries that it works in and generally in most of the countries that we work in an africa latin america and asia and we work a lot with smaller culture producers because they represent like sixty seventy percent of the population live within one very marginalized type of existence is here in this country the small farmer is very small part of the economy now and given our focus on food and livelihoods in the food industry we decided to focus on agricultural workers because in the us now you have ten percent of the growers of our business you know controlling ninety

percent of production and you have really big enterprises and have some that have thousands of workers and these workers have very few rights and they really are of immigrant workers and some of them are undocumented so we worked with these workers tried to improve their livelihood by focusing on giving them bargaining rights say giving them a voice at work so that's who we are and that's what we came to think about the typical food initiative would you say a few words about yourself and how you became interested in food justice issues peter sure i've worked on food issues about twenty five years mostly in special and i work til sagal and eighties and nineties with small farmers who was displaced by the civil war and ever since then i've worked on various aspects of the food system from advocacy to agriculture development programs and my strong feeling is that the food system was the single most important sector of anyone's economy something like half of the world's population works in some ways in food production distribution rick

sayles and yet it's a system that's clearly not working one one seventh of the world's population goes hungry every night so i see an equitable for initiative as part of the solution ways that we can come home i became involved in an airport workers in the food system basically by be in born into a former family so as a child my parents came up from texas i came up in the back of a truck and we ended up working in washington and then for a while we told from washington to oregon and california nevada washington and then eventually settled in washington but i can live through the injustices of you know a former career i come from a large family of nine and the top five and the family had to be pulled out of school to work to help support the family i was lucky because i was second from the bottom percent number eight pointed to graduate from high school and for some college so i sort of you know firsthand the indignities and

injustices workers to work in a lot of my father as a fourteen year old earning minimum wage just like he was and the minimum which a former greece is pretty much a maximum which everyone here inside so that left in me a real desire to do something and when cesar chavez started organizing back in the late sixties early seventies i visited as a young student went up there and volunteered as an organizer for a little bit and then work actually was cesar chavez as an organizer in washington and then on the boycott in canada sold briskly through most of my life i work on a farm worker issues presented as farm worker and then an organizer than i did i went to law school to try to better my skills and better able to work on social justice issues and so i worked also as a lawyer who had a legal services program here in washington state for a while and the former condition and now i'm working with oxfam you know in yemen the same interest in mind of working on the design work program montessori where we started the equitable food initiative when i came onto our from we were supporting campaigns of workers or trying to

organize answer difficult because former prison this country have basically second class citizenship in terms of legal rights for workers are denied cooper left other most other protections under the new deal in the nineteen thirties the most important of which was that we were left out of the right to bargain collectively thought of their regional partner so there's no way that farmers can have a collective voice of the detroit improve their conditions so the usual process has been there won a strike but those aren't respected because business is strong so what they started to do because of that because of the lack of process to be able to organize to jettison the nineteen sixties and seventies start of the boycott you know we went straight to consumers and asked him to support the farm worker cause by not buying the products that came from places where worked it when organized and i proved to be an extremely effective he was able to organize the entire group industry without a collective bargaining law so workers have since then he kept on these campaigns and forcefully as soon as you get a contract the business industry says things are different ways of getting out and as a

consequence a lot of the gains that were made in california in the late seventies and early eighties for lost but people are still trying to organize but what we call on corporate campaigns so we were doing that and are supporting are multiple unions a farm worker unions are trying to organize in the way but after a while we started as yourselves or we'll be rich together and they went through a series of sessions where they really looked at the effectiveness of that approach and thought about that after more than forty years of organizing less and twenty thousand workers are under union contract which is a small segment of the three million farmers in this country we started asking ourselves into what else can we do it what else is happening where the leverage and we reach a conclusion that the real leverage with other major buyers you know that wal mart's a safe ways our schools and that the us would industry there's always a downward pressure down the supply chain in the high quality produce at the cheapest price is and so the pressure it was down to the bottom of who gets queasy at the work for them and they really waited in themselves so wages have remained stagnant and people are not really the right to organize

so we decided that we wanted to reverse that trend and instead of having the leveraging other marketplaces work against us to get to work for us and we did that but looking at what others were doing like unfair trade and i and the environmental movement were there'd been very effective in terms of getting the major buyers to accept standards and force change at the bottom so we decided to try to do the same thing here we want to make a multi stakeholder get all the key players in the food system and ball because former goodwin themselves didn't have enough power and leverage their story got all the major farm worker unions involved and then out we got environmentalists involved and then we got with fifty people involved and then we decided that we also needed to get the growers and wires involved and we formed an advisory committee we've developed standards in the standards and then we bring some money and we hired peter and therefore we are not one that would work for the initiative and diane hein and my guests are peter driscoll an example of oxfam america our topic is the equitable food initiative

and you attended the sustainability segment of mind over matter simply epstein it point we have him on the web add k e x t dido it would you operate on the issues surrounding food that you're trying to address sure i think that he's really think about the food system is that there are workers who are just fruit or vegetables fresh produce and process that they're grows to grow and there are companies that purchase it for processing all for food service so for retail none of course in the eyes of his mother but most important vote for consumers who buy and i think if you break down the system and look at it there are the important aspects of the whale through these bridges particularly fresh fruit produced in this country but simply on working for any of those sectors and jc tell you as only he can what the struggles of the farm workers have been here for a hundred years they've been the most exploded and michael is what is in the system so clearly the way we grow a fresh fruit and vegetables is not working for farmworkers but it's not working for growers either how i think this is the critical point growers as limping began to mention have been really squeezed by downward pressure on

prices and in the context of the compositions that put this initiative together it became really obvious and talking to growers that it's not gonna work of growers and workers are fighting over a very small percentage of the fruit all that actually stays on the farm and when the subtlety but they realize that what has realized that they can demand higher wages but if the crows on earning enough of their produce set up and work so the critical issue is how do you bring the process is the food service companies and the retailers to the table and that's when you realize that the systems are really working for them either there are a couple of very very highly publicized outbreak for example of foodborne illness last year thirty people died from eating the cantaloupe because it was tainted with listeria and that's a huge problem for the retailers that's all that cantaloupe they have tremendous brand risk there are also concerns for example when reports surfaced in the media about slave labor americans are amazed to discover that in fact labor system is so badly broken that this indentured servitude and slavery in the fields or when someone figures that out and calls the retailer and says did

you know that their slaves employed in growing the food that you're selling as a huge embarrassment and a huge liability and brand risk to the retailers so when you bring them to the table as well you recognize that in fact there are things that could be done that would change that and reduce their risk and their liability enable them to sell a better safer more sustainable product and they're interested in that because that's what consumers want there's all kinds of surveys that show that consumers would much rather buy food products in general that they can feel confident have been produced in an ethical and sustainable way what the city calls of equitable food initiatives so the idea really is that we can get a win for each sector in the food chain if we change the way that workers are involved in the system and i think this is the real insight that the best way to make sure that food is safer and it's less tainted with pesticides for example that it's less likely to have been

exposed to pathogens through animal waste or any of the other ways in which food borne illness can comes into our system if farm workers are trained to recognize the risks and are incentivized to take measures to mitigate those risks where they see them so just about everybody recognizes that when the workers who harvest the fruit understands how to make sure to minimize the risk of food safety of pesticide exposure that level then you're going to get a better product safer product all the way through the system the second thing they're really realizes too is that better trained workers and realize improvements in productivity that and build a product if they're not just watching because much as they can because they're paid by the piece rate but if you're paying attention to quality standards and they can improve the margins for the growers and retailers oh so the essence of our project is to say workers whose rights are respected who are trained and produce a better quality product that's better for everybody all the way through to the consumer what are some examples of specific groups that have to line your initiatives at this point so

as the dimension of the dialogues that gave rise and equitable for initiative involved bringing in sectors from across the food chain and the first groups as the convention with a farm worker organization so you have united farm workers for example the farm labor organizing committee we are going to court which is their local farm workers union as well as some farm worker advocacy groups like farmworker justice and the national farmworker ministry but in order to make sure that we had real expertise and understanding of some of the technical issues for example the pesticide use both in terms of how pesticides affect the food that consumers buy but also passed more broadly how pesticides threatened the health and safety of the workers in the fields so we i engage pesticide action network is working closely with the steering committee as well as the consumer federation of america and the center for science in the public interest who have tremendous expertise and issues around food safety of course the major issue two was to make sure the food industry itself was involved and we've been very encouraged to write dialogue with growers as well as some of the

major retailers costco wholesale has joined a steering committee they are committed as a company whose values reflect the importance of treating workers right on producing high quality safe route they joined with us in this initiative as was one of the major suppliers and john williamson grown strawberries watsonville california property management company it's a food service company uncovered investment which is a socially responsible investment firm what is the approach of the equitable trade initiative how are you going about meeting her goals with point and the size of the stage the initiative still very much a development we've put together a set of standards which we think will improve labor rights and the conditions and the fields as well as the management of pesticides on the phone as well as the measures and protocols needed to guarantee food safety so the core of equitable fringe that is the standard we trusted them with the input the technical expertise of all the groups that i've mentioned florida prices now consulting with growers across the country they help us get these really help us make sure that these really are

applicable and practicable in your production facilities give us your input and join with us in making sure that the standards at the second dimension though is this farm worker training and we've created something called the agricultural leadership education and home in greece also had a leader which is the training program designed to do two things festival and was basically trained farmworkers understand the standards both in terms of their own labor rights and protections but also in terms of food safety of pesticides management but the second dimension i think this is really what makes the initiative so exciting is the formation of worker management committees in each production facility in this is really where the magic happens i think when workers and owners get together and recognize that they may not agree on everything but there are certain things that they have in common the work isn't out there to get paid if the organization of the grower dozen floors and once the growers understand the perspective of the workers advice of a sudden we're finding enough testing that some really positive outcomes for both sides converge and ultimately it's these worker management teams that will oversee and monitor compliance with the standards in the fields the

side that this is really quite an innovative way of doing things in a real approach where the mention of people didn't have a voice to go on strike and we're in a lot of places where there was a union that union would come and listen that old adversary relationship and the grower the bottom was the one that was been squeezing was the one that was made to pay and so that the gore would have horrible additions with really been a lot of value or some of the dalai lama not that much the way we change that as a result we got this image in before the major players involved all of the abundant supply chain from the former prison want to retailers and the service twitter is companies at the top and then we did it in a coup robert a fashion instead of the adversarial fashion compostable of this initiative the hope is to get all of that every structure the standards so that when everybody gets body and then in the process you know it also create these management teams and workers and growers see that there's ashley value because of they get these teams were fewer workers are going to be highly

skilled immigrants better quality we told you don't wanna buzz produce other some value added to the product which you did have people like her theory of how this is gonna work this year what will talk about its beginning to bear fruit you are listening to the sustainability segment of mind over matter is empty xt seattle and on the web add k e x p dowd orgy i'm diane warren and my guests are peter o'driscoll and the paper and the lawyer of oxfam america our topic is the equitable food initiative so perhaps you could say a few words about where you currently stand and i understand you have a pilot project as well to develop the standards would you like to tell us about the pilot project sure we've been very fortunate to cover the quran watsonville california and strawberry production and that's allowed us to really put into practice some of the principles that we've been talking about the first element of that pilot was the creation of a worker management team and they have worked very closely it involves workers from every level of farm production from the strawberry pickers through

the quality control teams the sprayers the drivers all the way to the supervisors on the farm manager and that has really been critical because the atmosphere of trust and collaboration that's been established and facilitated through the training has really yet born fruit service and i think there's a strong conviction from the workers in the management to light that the workplace culture of the last few months has really improved dramatically and that's important here we talk to growers about what they want out of this of course they want value they want a better product we want to make sure that their margins and the profits can improve and that's ok but you also talk about the importance of work culture you'll hear increasingly in the news these days there's concern in the growing community about immigration policy for example about the availability of skilled trained workers who can help them to harvest their crops i think listeners will know that in alabama and georgia when restrictive immigration measures into place those major album gration a farm workers from those states and major damage and loss in the

crop industries as a result and ice immigration crackdown continues concerns about documentation the farm workforce continue work as a very very concerned about access to labor and therefore they realize that if they can provide a positive workplace unfair wages they're the ones who are going to be able to attract what seems like scarce labor and some of these artists the second thing though that we've learned from this prototype is really how to refine our standards and this is the critical issue to our standards talk about basic protections for workers you know how their rights to be respected as well as the kinds of medicine protocols that will make sure that toxic pesticides are not harming the workers or find a way into the food system and particularly the kinds of measures the kinds of things that workers can do to make sure that those the listeria tainted cantaloupes for example don't find their way onto the shelf at your supermarket and we've been tremendously encouraged to see not only the trainings effective and raising the understanding of the work but also the level of concern that they have once they'd given up to think through the entire supply chain of weatherford they pick is going

they are much more committed to making sure that these problems approach and so where's this leading it going to publish the standards in lincoln widely available absolutely as it's a week been very rare fortune power and i would put twenty five different growers around the country will run a second prototype somewhere outside of california in a different crop to make sure that this town is that we developed are applicable across the fresh produce and fruit sector we will engage more growers and begin to certify next year once we've received a more formal feedback on the stand the standards will be published on our website probably at the end of this year for public comment will always be very interesting and fifties the shorter range of actors can bring to them i will look to begin to certify compliance with those found in some time next year you will consumers know that they feed their guy has met your standards it'll take a while actually for of consumer facing label to be ready if you think about it there are thousands and thousands of fresh produce supplies across the country are golf course ultimately is to reach all of them to take a while for enough supply to be certified to be recognized on the shelves

but we're discovering though is that even without specifically marketing the fruit to consumers is enough concern and interest in the core retail community that the retailers themselves will be looking for the certification not just because they believe that consumers will demand of course ultimately that's what we want to see but even before those consumer demand that retailers are concerned enough about liabilities are about food safety and so forth that they are expressing strong interest in looking for this concert footage from the very beginning we have envisioned in consumer facing label because that's what's going to distinguish our product from that producers so are in the process of just thinking how are analysts initially really rely on some other retailers to publicize it upon itself and then we just have to figure out how to get about more to the general public what have been some of the key challenge is in developing the program so far their number festival and i'm sure your listeners will be aware of this are a number of certification programs out there already and i think even for the most conscientious and careful consumers it sometimes pretty difficult to figure out what's the difference between all of these

labels and then secondly i think more importantly how i know that just because there's a label on that the values that are imposed by that label are really being applied to think that proliferation of certifications as an issue rise above that there's a lot of movement within this industry to try to harmonize on to rationalize we like to make it easier for consumers to make choices but that's a real issue the second issue is the economics of the market you know we said from the very beginning this thing will work because there has to be real value every segment of the supply chain workers growers to retailers and consumers and i think getting the economics right is something that we're selling aged and figuring out exactly how it is that we can make sure that there's real benefit to workers and growers and retailers without the price getting out of whack so what was interesting aspects of our testing has been figuring out his price point that the anniversary of laughter initially the challenge was just getting a former key unions to organize of the parliament to agree to work together in other ways

working on their own site now are facing a problem of or the challenge of getting the growers to understand that work on a moving beyond the old adversarial model you know because we do have a major former korean and all because we think that it's going to have credibility and how the workers and more so that's been the process and in addition to the challenges that peter mentioned we've been talking about oxfam's work in the united states but would you come in on the link between the work here and to international for sure as i mentioned that the beginning of feminist syria international development and human rights organization initially when i started in this country and what we're actually one of the few oxfam's that has a domestic program england has a domestic around to what others don't you know they work in the third world but when the sun started in this country it was just working in the third world and then people began to have to say i'm a hug when we talk about poverty and inequality and to rule and vietnam but not talk about poverty and inequality here and the lack of the ability of people to earn a

livelihood so you always decided that we needed to replace our own principles in on it were plan a broad into this country enough so we're focusing on agriculture this case the workers were focusing on livelihoods when the meat came in the golf course in government told us on aiding the victims of hurricane we decided to focus their roles of focusing on golf course no in golf course restoration so basically the tide is that we want to be consistent not just working abroad in issues of poverty and inequality and human rights but also addressing the needs that we have in this country could wreak tremendous need in this country of poverty and inequality and lack of human rights mike is that one basic element that what's really effective is when poor people are empowered when they're given an opportunity to understand their own situation and devised their own positions and most effective vulnerable positions of those that respect those rights and focus their energies on empowerment political solutions and giving voice to those who've been excluded and those principles apply just as much as it's a segment of the country and they're

very much the bedrock of this approach and how do you bring folks together and give them the effort to talk about their needs and their own terms and devise solutions that are effective for them to believe that that's very much the spirit as i said going back several years in which this initiative was developed what's the message you'd like to leave our listeners sweat stay tuned you will soon see certification labeling from a global threat initiative and even before you see those labels you can ask the supermarkets in the places where you buy your produce about it speak to the produce manager and ask whether further equitable for the initiative is the supermarket chain where you buy but dissipating are they in dialogue with bestselling considering whether they will join us in sponsoring or supporting this will eventually commit only purchasing us produce from certified growers these are the kinds of things consumers can do now even as the initiative developed sure i think food involves an essential element right will meet who destroyed so american consumers really have a close connection with food and so the message i would like to leave is that

when people go to supermarkets to the inequalities and see all this luscious beautiful looking forward think of the people who produce that that it wasn't just raised in and a quarter of the ritual but he lost some worker picked every barry that you eat some worker pick their restraining the newly some worker picked every head of lettuce serve a little another baby lettuces and think of the conditions and think of what you can do to help improve the situation we've done some studies that have shown that dust a very slight increase in the price paid to workers can really increase their wages it doesn't take that much and there is a strong support wins the consumer knows about the conditions of workers and others there is very strong support for improving the condition so a bizarre it was really a very vital role in this and become morally peterson for it or think of where food comes from and then started acquiring to your supermarket what are the conditions in war you're buying products from places that

treat their workers well will thanks so much for being here and thank you very much you know just listening to peter o'driscoll than a vacant lot of oxfam america speak about the equitable food initiative for more information check on the web at daddy daddy daddy had an equitable fair in baghdad again that's equitable food bath mat the sustainability segment of mind over matters program you've just heard will be on the streaming archives section of k x keys website at k x p dowd orgy for the next fourteen days in addition sustainability sigman interviews are available as podcasts along with kate excuse music podcast dedicated to speed an allergy click on demand and then podcasting i'm diane warren thanks for listening and be sure to tune into the sustainability segment again next week on any point three fm in k e x p dido it