Release: “UM awards the Wallenberg Medal to those who, through their actions and personal commitment, perpetuate Wallenberg’s extraordinary accomplishments and human values, and demonstrate the capacity of the human spirit to stand up for the helpless, to defend the integrity of the powerless, and to speak out on behalf of the voiceless.”
“Notable medal recipients over the past 30 years include Archbishop Desmond Tutu… John Lewis [and] Elie Wiesel.”
For his lifelong dedication to the human rights of farmworkers, and his historic achievements in helping to liberate thousands of farmworkers from modern-day slavery, CIW co-founder Lucas Benitez will be awarded the University of Michigan’s Wallenberg Medal, an annual award given to human rights leaders from across the globe.
Benitez, who came to the US as a farmworker at the age of 17, has been on the frontline of the fight for human rights since 1993, when he helped bring farmworkers together in the impoverished agricultural community of Immokalee, Florida, behind demands for a more modern, more humane agricultural industry. Rallying to the call for “Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage,” farmworkers from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti overcame generations of fear and silence, as well as deep ethnic and linguistic divisions, to organize work stoppages, hunger strikes, and multi-day marches stretching hundreds of miles to press their demands.
Those early protests laid the groundwork for a new analysis of the roots of longstanding farmworker poverty and abuse, one that drew the connections between the consolidation of market power at the top of the food industry and the leveraging of that unprecedented purchasing power by retail food giants to drive prices — and therefore wages and working conditions — down at the farm level. With Benitez’s leadership, that new analysis gave rise to the Campaign for Fair Food in 2001, leading farmworkers from Immokalee to break out of their isolation and make common cause with consumers from New York to California for a new kind of food — Fair Food, based on respect for fundamental human rights, not the exploitation of human beings — with a national campaign of consumer education and mobilization.
After a decade of tireless organizing and a series of historic victories in the form of Fair Food agreements with some of the world’s largest food companies, the CIW launched the groundbreaking Fair Food Program in the Florida tomato industry in 2011, which he has helped expand across the US and internationally to Chile and South Africa in the 12 years since its inception. In the process, Benitez has inspired workers across the globe to take up the model pioneered in the Fair Food Program — the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model — and adapt it to their own industries. Today the WSR model is active of five continents and is widely considered the new paradigm for human rights protection in global supply chains, with recognition and support from human rights experts and law enforcement agencies alike.
And he has done all this from a base built from the ground up in a forgotten crossroads town atop the Everglades, a community of immigrant farmworkers, one of the poorest, least powerful communities in the US.
We hope you join us in congratulating Lucas for this prestigious recognition. We are all truly humbled.
We also hope you consider donating to the CIW in recognition of this wonderful news. The pioneering achievements of the CIW and its leaders would not have been possible without the financial support of our allies — even $10 can go a long way toward the myriad expenses of expanding the Presidential medal-winning Fair Food Program and running the national Campaign for Fair Food. Click here to donate!
And, finally, we hope you can take just a few more minutes to read the University of Michigan’s release announcing Lucas Benitez as the 2023 recipient of the Wallenberg Medal!
