Park Slope Food Coop: “As our Mission Statement says, ‘We seek to avoid products that depend on the exploitation of others.’ Ethical production and sourcing are among our core values, and our membership has voted overwhelmingly to support the FFP – a first in the nation for a local retailer.
The Fair Food Program embodies those values, ensuring that the food we buy each day to feed our families is harvested with dignity and respect for the women and men laboring in the fields.”
What: The launch of a new partnership for farmworker human rights by Park Slope Food Coop and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
When: November 8th, 4:30 PM
Where: Park Slope Food Coop, 782 Union St, Brooklyn, NY, 2nd floor meeting room (next to Member Office)
Background: For generations, the vast majority of agricultural production in this country has taken place in a context of the rampant and unchecked violation of farmworkers’ fundamental human rights. From forced labor to sexual violence, wage theft, discrimination, humiliation, and extreme poverty, farmworkers have faced the very worst working conditions this country has to offer with little or no power to remedy those conditions.
That all started to change in the fields of Florida in 2011, when the Fair Food Program (FFP) broke ground in the state’s industrial-scale tomato industry, in a region dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” by federal prosecutors for the many successful slavery prosecutions that emerged from the fields in the years leading up to the Fair Food Program’s launch. The FFP was a pioneering new model for the monitoring and enforcement of farmworkers’ human rights that harnessed the purchasing power of some of the country’s largest, most powerful retail food buyers to demand fundamental, verifiable reforms in farm labor conditions. The program has resulted in the elimination of forced labor and sexual assault and an unprecedented reduction in other more common forms of exploitation and has been called “one of the great human rights success stories of our day” in the pages of The Washington Post.
But in the eight years since the launch of the FFP, despite the expressed interest of smaller, local food retailers to do their part and engage with the Program, these buyers had no avenue to support the change underway on Fair Food farms. That was because the very engine that drove the program’s unprecedented success — the market consequences for violations of the FFP’s standards established in the CIW’s agreements with some of the world’s largest purchasers of produce — relied on the participating buyers’ overwhelming purchasing power to provide the necessary incentive for growers to remain in compliance with the Fair Food Program Code of Conduct. So for eight years, small, local grocers could not participate in a model founded on the market power of multi-billion dollar retail food corporations.
But today, Friday, November 8th, 2019, that is all about to change, as New York City’s fabled Park Slope Food Coop – one of the country’s largest, longest-running consumer coops – is launching a new partnership with the CIW in support of the Fair Food Program. The partnership will combine financial support for the monitoring and enforcement body of the Fair Food Program (the Fair Food Standards Council) through the contribution of a portion of the proceeds from the sale of FFP produce with a commitment to educate coop members about the importance of human rights protections for farmworkers though in-store promotions and educational events. And, perhaps most importantly, this exciting new partnership will open a vital new avenue for countless other similarly situated consumer coops, local retailers, restaurants and small restaurant chains to participate in the Presidential-medal winning human rights program.
The launch of the new initiative will be announced at an event this afternoon at the Park Slope Food Coop, and the CIW will be there, together with New York City-based allies...
