Groundbreaking academic investigation into labor conditions on farms certified under the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) and Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) uncovers rampant abuse, wage theft, and retaliation against farmworkers in Mexico.
Anonymous farmworker on EFI: “The representatives of the EFI group are people close to [allegadas] the bosses or the foremen.”
Excerpt from statement by workers at Rancho Nuevo Produce: “Rancho Nuevo, where the Fair Trade and Equitable Food Initiative certifications exist to sell the produce more expensive in the United States without bettering the working conditions and the treatment of the worker.”
Over the past several years, a growing body of academic and journalistic research into the true impact of traditional corporate social responsibility schemes has laid bare the failure of those certification programs -- including such well-known labels as Rainforest Alliance, Fair Trade USA, and the Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) -- to monitor and enforce the standards they claim to uphold on certified farms, leaving workers unprotected and all too often vulnerable to retaliation on the rare occasions when they attempt to complain about abusive conditions.
Now a new, groundbreaking investigation into the working conditions on EFI and FTUSA-certified farms in Mexico released just last month digs still deeper beneath this thin veneer of traditional corporate responsibility and reveals the labor abuses for all to see in a shocking report that deserves to be read in full.
Entitled “Fairwashing and Union Busting: The Privatization of Labor Standards in Mexico’s Agro-export Industry,” the article, by author James Daria, combines interviews with workers and cutting edge academic analysis to conclude that the high-profile certification programs provide customers in the US with a distorted view of the treatment of the farmworkers who harvest their food.
