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Modern-day slavery was focus of group’s tour of Immokalee
IMMOKALEE
— The fight against human slavery and unfair wage practices in Florida’s
agricultural industry got some new allies Wednesday.
For the first time, more than 10 leading sustainable food advocates
visited Immokalee as part of a tour sponsored by Just Harvest USA, a
national sustainable food nonprofit, and by the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers.
The Department of Agriculture defines sustainable agriculture as
competitive farming that is capable of maintaining its productivity and
usefulness indefinitely, while maintaining social ideals and remaining
environmentally sound.
The tour was aimed at giving the delegation an opportunity to see
first-hand the living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers.
And the impact was immediate.
“This movement has been missing something fundamentally important. Today
we are making that connection,” said Josh Viertel, president of New
York-based Slow Food USA, a sustainable food nonprofit. “Historically
this movement has focused on the environment, health and preserving
small farms. But we’ve completely missed the boat when it comes to work.
Farmworkers need to be part of this movement.”
Those attending the mini-summit were World Hunger Year executive
director and co-founder Bill Ayres; “Stuffed and Starved” author Raj
Patel; Small Planet Institute founder Frances Moore Lappé; National
Family Farm Coalition president Ben Burkett; Mike Moon with the Family
Farm Defenders; Food First/Institute for Development Policy executive
director Eric Holt-Gimenez; Institute for Community Resource Development
president LaDonna Redmond; food editor and columnist Tom Philpott;
organic farmer Jim Goodman and The Food Project’s director of national
programs Anim Steel.
The group toured several farmworker living complexes and some of the
locations where slave labor has been found in Immokalee, including the
home of the Navarrete family — the family convicted of holding workers
against their will in December.
“Inside that fence is where they parked the trucks, where they held the
people captive,” Coalition of Immokalee Workers co-founder Lucas Benitez
said during the tour outside of the Navarretes’ Immokalee home.
According to court documents, family members padlocked their workers in
trucks and charged them $5 to bathe in the backyard with a garden hose.
Although the Navarrete case was just the latest incident of human
slavery to happen in Southwest Florida, officials said it won’t be the
last.
“The fight goes on,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy said in a
recent interview. “It is not a problem that disappeared with the
Navarretes. Our office is committed to fight this.”
As of early February, Molloy said, his office was working on six human
slavery cases.
For a long time, the biggest problem faced by law enforcement agencies
was a lack of people willing to come forward and denounce the problem.
“Slaves don’t report themselves,” Molloy said.
According to a United Nations report released in February, the problem
of human trafficking and modern-day slavery has gotten worse.
But thanks to community awareness, advocates said, there has been a
slowly building turn in the tide.
“It hasn’t been easy,” Benitez said after the tour, alluding to building
trust in an originally skeptical community. “The coalition has been
working hard for 15 years on this issue.”
Benitez said Wednesday’s event was part of what the coalition has been
trying to do — making the community conscious of what is going on in
Immokalee.
He said the group has made it its mission to help farmworkers and
migrant workers know what their obligations and rights are, as well as
making the peach-pink building off Immokalee’s Second Street a welcome
place for people to stop by.
“We at the coalition are ourselves from the field,” Benitez said. “We
are people from the same community.”
He added that the connection has helped break the ice between the
coalition and the farmworkers in Immokalee, resulting in the group’s
offices having more of a community center feel than that of an actual
“office.”
Through the years, Benitez said, the organization’s various activities
have led to “compañeros” -- how coalition members refer to farmworkers
and community residents who have come to know the coalition as a place
where they can find people to turn to in a time of need.
All of those attending agreed there was no substitute for actually being
in Immokalee to witness the good with the bad, and said that between the
coalition’s Campaign for Fair Food and its involvement in stopping
modern human slavery, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Even after seeing horrible living conditions and hearing horrible
stories, I have hope from my visit,” Viertel said.
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