ASSOCIATED PRESS

December 19, 2007

Farms fear shortage of foreign workers

By William Kates - ASSOCIATED PRESS

ITHACA, NY — The failure of Congress to ensure that there are enough migrant workers in the nation’s labor force could eventually cost New York agriculture hundreds of millions of dollars in lost crops and hundreds of thousands of acres in lost farmland, according to experts Tuesday at an agribusiness conference.

The federal government’s failure to deal with immigration reform — particularly ensuring there are enough legal migrant farm workers for agricultural states like New York — “constitutes nothing short of a national emergency,” Craig Regelbrugge, a vice president of the American Nursery and Landscape Association and co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, told about 200 listeners at Cornell University.

Nationwide, there are about 1.6 million full-time farm workers, said Regelbrugge. About 80 percent of those workers are foreign born — and nearly seven out of ten are working illegally, he said.

Despite repeated attempts, Congress and the Bush administration have been unable to come up with a long-term strategy on immigration reform and a current temporary worker program is “hobbled by bureaucracy, excessive and burdensome paperwork and restrictive wages,” Regelbrugge said.

In New York state, data collected by the Farm Credit Association of New York estimated that failing to develop a functional immigration worker program could cripple operations on over 800 New York farms and put sales of approximately $700 million of agricultural products at risk, said Regelbrugge.

Without enough workers, as much as 750,000 acres of farmland could be converted to less labor-intensive — and less profitable — crops, while as many as 16,000 jobs that depend on the farm sector could be lost, he said. In 2006, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported there were approximately 35,000 farms in New York, down about 600 from 2005. Those farms produced roughly $3.7 billion in products on about 7.5 million acres of farmland.

Reports from around the state indicated that labor supplies were sufficient this year, said Thomas Maloney, a senior extension associate in applied economics at Cornell who studies the agriculture-immigration issues in New York.

But he said surveys showed the lack of reform has led to anxiety among growers, who worry that in the future they will not have enough workers at harvest time.

“As a result of immigration enforcement activities, New York’s farm managers are beginning to make choices they would not otherwise make,” Maloney said, including holding off expansion plans, exploring alternative labor pools, and switching to less labor-intensive crops.

Maloney said Cornell researchers are trying to come up with an exact number of number of unauthorized immigrant farm workers in New York. In a survey last year of 105 Hispanic dairy farm workers, Maloney found nearly two-thirds were in the U.S. illegally.

If the federal government cannot resolve the larger issue of immigration reform, it should at least come up with a separate worker program for agriculture, Maloney and Regelbrugge said.