Before we begin today’s post on the extraordinary new article by Vera Chang published last week in the online magazine Civil Eats, we wanted to share a few thoughts on the situation we are all struggling with today, the COVID-19 pandemic. 

These are trying times, there is no getting around it. We are heading into uncharted waters, and the uncertainty is frightening. Life in the time of this pandemic will be vastly different from what we have ever known, and exactly how, or how long that will be the case, no one knows. 

We here in Immokalee are confronting a particularly vexing paradox. For nearly three decades, we have faced – and beaten – some very long odds against some very longstanding social ills, from forced labor to sexual assault in the fields. And we have done so by coming together, by bringing the community together here in Immokalee – first in a back room borrowed from the local Catholic church, then in our own community center – to study those problems and seek new solutions; then by building bridges between the farmworker community and consumers across the country, leaving Immokalee to travel in buses and vans across the country, from Los Angeles to New York, to harness the power necessary to implement those solutions; and finally by joining forces with others across the vast food industry to build a program on farms that today spans the East Coast and touches tens of thousands of workers to address – and end – the abuses that have plagued the fields for generations.

But the very logic of our life as an organization – the logic that tells us that, when we come together, when we bring the farmworker community together, bring farmworkers and consumers together, bring the industry together, there is no problem so big that we can’t overcome it – is turned on its head today by this virus. Public health experts tell us that the solution to slowing, and eventually defeating, this pandemic is social distancing, breaking the bonds between people along which the virus travels and thrives. And so, the very key to our strength and success as an organization, building and nourishing bonds between people to build a new future, is now, in some way, the very thing we must turn away from to make it through these uncertain times. For once we can’t just call a meeting, break this problem down, and build our solution – and that idea goes against our every instinct.

And yet…

Despite this apparent paradox, on a still deeper level, the pandemic serves as a reminder that we do not, we can not, live alone in this world if we hope to survive. No country comes “first” when all are threatened by a virus that knows no borders. In this moment when our world is facing an unprecedented public health crisis, we are more aware than ever of our connection to one another and our dependence upon one another. To borrow Dr. King’s metaphor, we live in a “world house” and if we are to protect that house, we must protect it together. That means making difficult decisions, and it means marshaling our collective resources, creativity, and intelligence to turn the tide of this pandemic. In Immokalee, that means coordinating with local public health officials and emergency services personnel to lend our resources to the concerted efforts now underway here, efforts informed by the experiences of other communities around the globe that have already faced this terrible threat. To survive these trying times, we must learn from one another, and we must share the lessons we learn in fighting this awful virus if we are to defeat it, from Wuhan, China, to Milan, Italy, from Washington State to Immokalee, Florida. 

And so – though we may have to adapt our methods, and do so from a distance – it turns out that the approach that the CIW has taken for three decades still holds. When all actors in the supply chain work for the human rights of farmworkers – farmworkers, growers, buyers, consumers, and investors – we have been able to stop and prevent sexual harassment and assault, forced labor and other horrendous abuses that infect US agriculture outside the program. And when all of us work together – even if it means staying physically apart in the interim – we will be able to stop this virus and return to the lives we knew before.

So please read today’s post as a reminder of the incredible power of what we can do when we come together, no matter how badly the odds may seem to be stacked against us…

Those are the words of Gloria Olivo, a tomato harvester at Lipman Family Farms. Lipman, the largest tomato grower in the country, is a key partner in the Fair Food Program, and it is to Lipman’s farms on the sea islands off South Carolina’s coast that Vera Chang traveled last summer with the CIW Education Team and a team of auditors from the Fair Food Standards Council to report on the Fair Food Program and its unique success in fighting sexual harassment and assault in agriculture. 

The result is a simultaneously wide-ranging and penetrating report that is the best look yet into the thinking, mechanisms, and people behind the most effective human rights program in US agriculture today. And as if that weren’t enough, the photos accompanying the article are stunning...