SACRAMENTO BEE October 30, 2006
Agroterrorism training hits immigration roadblock
SACRAMENTO - The eyes and ears on the front lines of defending America's food supply are not always American. They're often Mexican. That's why it makes sense to ensure that immigrant workers are trained to help detect and respond to food sabotage, or "agroterrorism," according to a University of California food safety institute with a leading national role in such preparedness training. A wrinkle in the plan, though, the institute's director says, is a U.S. Department of Homeland Security policy that noncitizens be excluded from such training if it's paid for with department funds. "In every sector of the food industry, immigrant laborers prevail. It would seem very foolish not to incorporate them into food safety," said Jerry Gillespie, the director of UC Davis' Western Institute for Food Safety and Security. In 2004, Homeland Security awarded $4.7 million -- the largest grant of its kind -- to the institute to train food industry representatives, as well as emergency and health workers, on how to react in a coordinated fashion to food sabotage. So far, the two-year grant has paid for training 3,000 emergency workers in 16 states. The institute had to go elsewhere, though, to finance a small pilot project last year to train those who milk cows and harvest and process U.S. food. Fifty-seven dairy workers participated. The institute estimates that out of 1.6 million U.S. agricultural workers, as many as half are not just immigrants but also undocumented. To underscore the importance of training workers, Jeremy Empol, an institute projects supervisor said: "Imagine if there were symptoms that the E. coli (in spinach recently) could give off, and the workers couldn't recognize them?" The institute is currently looking for funding to expand and diversify the food-worker training Gillespie says he thinks should be done for national security reasons. The options are limited if federal funding is off the table and local or state money has to be tapped. The institute will try to persuade food and farm industries to help pay, but, as Gillespie put it, businesses tend to think "this is a national problem and the government should be paying for it." Homeland Security has "compelling reasons" to share some information only with citizens, Gillespie said. However, he said, "I think that the whole (noncitizen exclusion) policy has to be reviewed very carefully. I don't think we are doing our nation any good by being too rigid." Last year, the institute selected dairies as a logical starting point for worker training because dairies are considered especially vulnerable. A $150,000 grant from the California Department of Health Services helped develop Spanish- and English-language material. One of the tools is a comic book illustrated by Sacramento artist Javier Juarez. The comic book spins a tale of workers being asked to stay late -- they joke about being forced to work overtime -- in preparation for a formal meeting the next day about food sabotage. Sharon Avery, the farmworker project supervisor, said the information given to farmworkers was more "common sense," and didn't include sensitive information that might be discussed in the emergency-worker courses. In the comic book, the fictional dairy workers learn the signs of foot-and-mouth disease, and how a 2001 outbreak in Great Britain led to the destruction of millions of animals. The workers also learn that a religious cult in Oregon poisoned 751 people in 1984 by introducing bacteria into salads, and that in 1996, 4,000 dairy farms in Wisconsin destroyed thousands of tons of feed because it was deliberately poisoned with pesticides. The characters end up talking about how to make sure their dairy is safe. Homeland Security recently rejected another grant application from the institute for $8 million for additional food-disaster training that would include port-of-entry workers, military personnel, American Indian tribes -- and farmworkers. Homeland Security spokeswoman Erin Streeter said a review panel decided the proposal was "too broad, too large in scope," and unclear on how training would be carried out. She said a presidential directive restricts the type of training the institute has been doing to local, state and tribal emergency workers, but that the possibility exists for some exceptions -- she wasn't sure about citizenship -- if a local jurisdiction makes a request to Homeland Security. Gillespie said that if the institute had been awarded the second grant, it wouldn't have incorporated farmworkers unless Homeland Security changed its policy. "It would be a very important use of their money if we could use it that way," Gillespie said. "The more I look at this, I think we can't succeed without farmworkers." Last year's pilot project focusing on California's $4 billion annual dairy industry included 57 dairy workers at five California dairies. The institute paid for the workers' time off the job. California's more than 2,000 dairies generate more than 60,000 jobs, about 17,000 on ranches and the rest in processing and distribution. The state's dairies supply 20 percent of the U.S. milk supply. Dairies are "high on the hit list for agroterrorism," Avery said. "You can milk a cow in California and in 24 hours that milk can be in any state in the country." Avery said the dairy workers had "great ideas about security" and proved to be very aware of recent terrorist incidents around the world. Gillespie said the institute learned, too, that workers often don't feel comfortable alerting supervisors about something suspicious for fear of being blamed. Encouraging more trust is key, Gillespie said. The aftermath of a disaster would be "hugely complicated," he said, if workers were to run away at the sight of uniformed authorities because they fear being jailed or deported. Mike Griffith, milk processor Clover Stornetta Farms' liaison with 21 dairies, said his company volunteered for the pilot project because it likes to "stay ahead" of issues affecting the industry. "The workers' first reaction to being asked to go to the training was: 'I have to go to a meeting? What did I do wrong?'" Griffith said. "But then they relaxed." Dairy workers are hard to find and keep, Griffith added, and dairies can jealously guard good employees. Word out on farms, he said, is that it's even harder now to find workers because it's more difficult for undocumented workers to get across the U.S.-Mexico border. Dairies have acknowledged their reliance on immigrant labor, including the undocumented, by joining a farm industry push for earned legalization of unauthorized workers and a new guest worker program to admit future workers. "To me, this ties into the whole immigration issue, and who is going to do the work," Griffith said. "I can see politically why they might have done what they did," Griffith said of Homeland Security officials' policy to exclude noncitizens from agroterrorism training. "But I'm not sure it's that effective."
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