FRESNO BEE

October 31, 2007

Ag leaders look south for workers

Farm groups join with Central America leaders to solve labor shortage.

By Dennis Pollock and Jeff St. John / The Fresno Bee

Saying they can no longer depend on an undocumented and illegal work force, agricultural industry leaders in the central San Joaquin Valley this week turned to Central American governments -- starting with Honduras -- for help.

By working directly with government leaders, members of the industry believe they can find a solution to a farm-labor shortage and attract workers with the needed skills -- avoiding past problems associated with an existing U.S. government program.

"We need a workable guest-worker program," said Manuel Cunha Jr., who helped host a delegation of nine visitors from Honduras on visits to Valley farms and packinghouses.

Cunha, who heads the Nisei Farmers League in Fresno, said the visit is the first of several expected in the months ahead as a consortium of farm leaders seeks to meet anticipated labor needs. Others will visit from Mexico, which supplies the bulk of California's farm labor force, and El Salvador.

Some say the alliances are sure to bear fruit.

"I visited Guatemala, where a worker makes $5 to $8 a week," said Barry Bedwell, who heads the Grape and Tree Fruit League. "Starting in January, [California's] minimum wage goes to $8 an hour.

"It becomes clear why people want to come here, and we're saying we need your labor. It boggles my mind that, with the need on both sides, we can't match that up."

Members of the consortium hope the proposed AgJobs bill will make it easier to use a federal guest-worker program, often ignored by U.S. growers.

Cunha said industry leaders have been frustrated in efforts to get immigration reforms passed in Congress and are facing tougher enforcement penalties for hiring illegal workers.

Various industry groups are combining to form the Ag Labor Network, which would oversee the guest-worker program. Cunha said a pilot program could bring guest workers into California as early as next May.

The consortium will include, in addition to Cunha's organization, the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, California Cotton Growers and Ginners Association, California Citrus Mutual, Sun-Maid Growers, the Raisin Bargaining Association, California Apple Commission and the California Fig Advisory Board.

Bedwell said that by pooling their efforts, the organizations should be more efficient at addressing labor needs than individual growers. Moreover, they may be able to package jobs so that workers can be employed longer -- for example, moving from work in tree fruit to apples to raisins to citrus.

The group from Honduras included three government representatives and six from the private sector, including a foundation that deals with small enterprises and representatives of a training center.

At a citrus grove near Sanger, they were shown the skills needed to harvest oranges.

Roberto Flores-Bermudez, ambassador to the United States, walked through the grove Monday as thunder rumbled and large rain drops fell. He stopped at one point to talk with worker Rosario Perez of Mexico, whose face was covered with a handkerchief, as she picked oranges.

"How are they treating you?" he asked.

"Fine," she replied.

All of the visitors were given a chance to use little clippers to harvest the fruit. Enrique Reina, vice minister of foreign affairs, tried it and left a bit too much of the stem on an orange he picked.

"That has to be shorter; it would poke the other oranges," Cunha chided. "You couldn't earn the minimum wage like that."

From the orange grove, the Hondurans traveled to the Bee Sweet Citrus packinghouse in Fowler. They would later visit a dry fruit dehydrator, table grape vineyard, a dairy and Stockton-area apple and walnut orchards.

Phil Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis and an expert on immigration issues, said that because there have been abuses in recruitment of workers, the consortium's efforts "appear to be admirable."

Martin said employers in Canada also formed an association to handle guest-worker programs, and that a Guatemala organization called the International Organization for Migration is supplying the country with some workers.

"I think you will see more of this," he said. "The governments of Central America are saying, 'Let's play a more active role.' "

But Martin, who is skeptical of Congress passing AgJobs, questions whether such programs will bear fruit in the United States, where few farmers use the H2A guest-worker program.

Martin said he also sees a downside.

"If we were to get easy access to a guest-worker program, it might reverse some of the trends we have seen" toward mechanization, he said. He cited the raisin harvest as an example, where labor needs have dropped significantly as mechanical harvesting has boomed in the wake of labor shortfalls.

Joe Sharp, a Christmas tree grower in Oregon and a member of the Nisei Farmers League, said the consortium's actions amount to "very forward thinking. It's better to work together to figure this out."

Many of the workers Sharp hires to produce about 700,000 trees a year also toil in the Valley's tree fruit orchards, then move to harvesting apples in Washington before going to his Yule Tree Farms 30 miles south of Portland.

Bert Mason, professor of agricultural economics at California State University, Fresno, said the consortium's leaders may be wise to look to countries other than Mexico as a source of labor.

"As that country's birth rate declines and its economy develops," he said, "that might reduce the push factor from Mexico. There may be less of an economic incentive to emigrate.

"It does appear that ag employers will have to learn how to deal with some form of guest-worker program that looks like H2A."

Cunha and Bedwell said an effort is being made in Congress to submit AgJobs as part of the next Farm Bill.

AgJobs is a two-track effort: It would change the H2A program to make it less cumbersome -- and costly -- for farmers to use. And it would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented workers already in the United States, provided they work a specified time in agriculture and take other steps.

Pat Ricchiuti, a Clovis farmer and past president of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, said farmers can't afford the present H2A program, because it requires farmers to supply housing and transportation. Others say it is cumbersome because of the red tape involved. "H2A will have to change," he said.

Right now, the program only brings about 59,000 workers per year to the United States, a small portion of the estimated nationwide farm labor force of 1.6 million, said Sharon Hughes,executive vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Council of Agricultural Employers.

Although state-by-state figures are hard to come by, Hughes estimated that fewer than 10,000 H2A workers per year work in California, a state that employs about one-third of the nation's farmworkers.

That's because, while farmers are eager to hire the legal workers the program provides, "it's too complicated and difficult to use," Hughes said. Growers complain the program doesn't always deliver workers in time for harvest and costs too much, she said.

The council, which represents growers groups including the California Farm Bureau and the Nisei Farmers League, is working with the Bush administration to make some fixes to the program, Hughes said. But without legislation to change certain aspects of the bill, she fears any attempt to expand the number of workers using H2A visas will be mired in bureaucratic delay.

"Right now, the government system is so bogged down with only 59,000 workers," she said. "If we were even to double usage, and go to 100,000 workers" per year, "the system would collapse on itself."

That's why the council is also backing the so-called AgJobs bill, which would offer legal residency and eventually U.S. citizenship to 1.5 million illegal immigrants working in agriculture.

Among reforms it would bring to the H2A program is that it would allow farmers to offer workers an allowance for housing, instead of forcing farmers to build or buy their own housing units for workers, which can be prohibitively expensive, Hughes said.

The AgJobs bill would also change rules that keep H2A workers' wages too high for many farmers to afford, Hughes said. Right now, the program sets wages at an average of $10 an hour, while the AgJobs bill would allow farmers to pay prevailing wages for less-skilled farm labor that usually pays about $7 to $8 an hour, she said -- "still high above the minimum wage, but still in line with market conditions," she said.

As to the prospects of attaching AgJobs to the Farm Bill, Hughes said, "We recognize that whenever anything that begins to talk about immigration comes up on the House or Senate floor, that the anti-immigrant forces will come out full-force against it."

Still, she adds, "If we don't have labor to produce the crop, then the farm bill is of no use to us."