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“We are making history,” said Angel Garcia, Human Resources Manager at Pacific Tomato Growers/Sunripe Certified Brands. “Now we have people coming from other parts of the globe to absorb that history.”
“When I first heard about the Fair Food Program it was like – this blew my mind,” said Arlette Martinez of the Chilean Ministry of Labor and Social Provisions. “And we believe that better working conditions don’t just change a person’s life at work day-to-day, it makes a better world for [all of] us.”
Tailwinds continue to grow behind the international expansion of the Fair Food Program, carrying the ground-breaking human rights model all the way to the end of the world last week with a 5-day visit to Immokalee by a delegation of Chilean growers, human rights activists, and government officials excited at the prospect of growing the FFP’s footprint in Chile, South America’s largest exporter of produce (and the country affectionately known as “the end of the world” [[link removed]] for its claim to being the southernmost point of the South American continent).
The Chilean delegation traveled to Southwest Florida to meet with a wide range of representatives from the Fair Food Program. The CIW hosted the week-long gathering, which included meetings with representatives from FFP Participating Buyers Whole Foods Market and Compass Group, Participating Growers Sunripe Certified Brands and Bloomia, and officials from the US Departments of State, Labor and Agriculture, as well as the farmworkers whose tireless efforts over three decades gave birth to the pioneering program.
The delegation’s prime objective was to learn more about the Fair Food Program — in-person and from every angle — to help fuel the expansion of the FFP in Chile’s agricultural industry, and in so doing extend its best-in-class human rights protections to workers and certify ethical producers there. In December of last year, cut-flower industry leader Bloomia became the first Chilean agricultural producer to be certified [[link removed]] by the Fair Food Standards Council, the independent third-party monitor of the Fair Food Program. The US Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) awarded a $2.5 million grant [[link removed]] to the Fair Food Standards Council in February of this year to accelerate the expansion of the program and “promote grassroots, worker-driven social responsibility in agricultural supply chains.”
The delegation was, by all measures, a great success. Their visit began with a pre-dawn wake-up call ahead of a day-long visit to an FFP Participating Grower — Pacific Tomato Growers, in Parrish, FL — where delegation members (on left, below) watched as CIW staff members Cruz Salucio and Lupe Gonzalo led a worker-to-worker education session on farmworkers’ rights under the Program:
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From there they traveled with the crews to the field, where the delegation observed Fair Food Standards Council auditors as they interviewed workers harvesting grape tomatoes:
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After a full day of field visits and spirited conversations with Pacific Tomato Growers’ management, the delegation then headed south to the offices of the CIW in Immokalee and Ft. Myers, where they spent the rest of their visit in exchanges with FFP Participating buyers, representatives of the US Departments of Labor and State, and CIW staff and members of the Immokalee farmworker community. While in the town, the delegation also fit in several local field trips, including a tour of the CIW’s Modern Slavery Museum:
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The visit generated press coverage [[link removed]] by local TV stations [[link removed]] and NPR member station WGCU, which sent a small team of journalists to document the multi-day delegation. To read the full WGCU article, click the "read more" button below!
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Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States
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