You Say Tomato, I Say...

Everything about the tomato industry alarms me. Barry Estrabook's most recent work, Tomatoland, exposes some of the worst aspects of the tomato industry.  From egregious working conditions to unsustainable farming practices to sheer lack of quality,  I am shocked that there has yet to be any sort of intervention to alleviate the problems.

Working Conditions:
Estrabook is not the first to highlight some of the worker's rights violations that are occurring in the tomato industry.  In fact, the working conditions in Immokalee are often described as modern day slavery.  Workers are paid about 40 cents per bucket of tomatoes where one bucket weighs about thiry two pounds. Some math: for an annual income of 15,000 a worker would have to pick 37,500 buckets of tomatoes which is over 1 million pounds of hand-picked tomatoes. Please note that the poverty level for 2011 is $22,350 for a family of four.  Can you even imagine bearing a weight of over 1 million pounds and still being significantly below the poverty line?

In addition to being underpaid, the workers are not only uncared for but are actually coerced into neglecting their health. Tomatoland  describes the stories of three pregnant workers who were forced (via financial threats) to work in the fields throughout their pregnancy despite the risks of fetal exposure to pesticides. The employers have significant control over their workers because many rely on their employers for food and housing in addition to their annual income.  Not shockingly, all three women gave birth to babies with serious birth defects linked to pesticide exposure.  

Environmental Sustainability:
About a third of the fresh tomatoes sold in the United States are from Immokalee, Florida.  This is a very strange fact considering that Florida's physical environment is pretty much the worst for raising a crop.  The quality of the soil in Immokalee is atrocious.  Instead of rich dark soil, you see what appears to be white sand.  This type of soil is not only completely devoid of nutrients which must be synthetically supplemented and is incapable of retaining water meaning that the crops require much more water than crops grown in other regions.  To give you some perspective: agricultural ventures in Florida use about eight times more chemicals (pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers) per acreage than crops in California.

Quality:
Sky-high demands on the industry have changed the way we farm tomatoes.  The largest purchasers of tomatoes are companies like McDonald's and Burger King and they want hard tomatoes which are best for easy slicing.  So the industry responded to their main consumers' desires and began harvesting the tomatoes long before they are ripe.  The only reason the tomatoes appear red in the stores is because they have been chemically "de-greened."  Don't be fooled by their rosy appearance, the tomatoes we buy and eat are unripe.

Solutions?
The tomato industry perfectly demonstrates all of the failures of industrial agrcitulture.  The most frustrating part of it all is that there have been proposed solutions that were either ignored or shot down by politicians and corporations alike.  One possible solution in the works right now is the Penny-a-Pound project which suggests charging 1 penny more per pound of tomatoes to wholesale purchasers in order to increase the wages of farm workers.