Colonizing the immigrant dream: The agri-foods industry’s deadly cycle of dispossession, appropriation and substitution

Just eight weeks before elections Congress is unable to agree on legislation regarding the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants. Everything from conditional legalization and guest-worker programs, to massive deportations and a $2.2 billion 700-mile fence are being debated. Remarkably, not one single US lawmaker has addressed why an estimated 1.1 million people cross the border every year looking for work. This omission allows our politicians to divert public attention away from the way US policies cause massive migrations.

In the 1960s and 70s, when the Rockefeller Foundation’s Green Revolution increased grain production in Mexico and Central America, the world applauded, convinced this signaled the end of world hunger. But the region’s fragile tropical and hillside soils—where the majority of farmers cultivate their grains—lost organic matter under the Green Revolution’s intensive fertilizer regimes. Pest outbreaks became chronic. Smallholder farmers took out loans to buy more and more chemicals. In the 1980s, when the World Bank and the IMF imposed structural adjustment programs, government credit, marketing programs and agricultural extension disappeared overnight. Then the North American Free Trade agreement—NAFTA, and its Central American cousin, CAFTA— flooded local grain markets with cheap, subsidized corn from the United States that sold below its cost of production. The region’s peasant farmers struggled, squeezing out every last ounce of family labor to compete in the so-called “free” market. Debts piled up. When droughts or hurricanes hit—as they frequently do in the tropics—the Green Revolution hybrids withered and died. In Mexico from 1994-2004, 1.3 million smallholders went bankrupt. Abandoned by their governments, run over by the Green Revolution, broke, hungry and exhausted, they joined the ranks of the dispossessed.

Desperate to feed their families, dreaming of a better life, smallholders send their most able-bodied family members to the U.S. to look for work. They find backbreaking jobs in the poisonous vegetables harvests, in the deadly industrial slaughterhouses, and in the grueling food processing plants. According to the US Farm Bureau, immigrant labor may add up to $9 billion to the nation’s $200 billion annual agricultural output. Because they are undocumented, they are forced to sell their labor cheaply and receive no health or insurance benefits. This results in tremendous labor savings for an industry that already benefits substantially from agricultural subsidies. Agri-foods depends on immigrant labor, and it requires their illegal status to realize windfall profits.

Immigrant working families make up a large portion of the 12 million food-insecure people in the United States who often do not know where their next meal is coming from. They cannot afford to buy the fresh fruits, vegetables or meat they produce. In order to obtain the necessary calories for survival—like most low-income people in this country—they substitute sugars, fat and starch, for protein, fresh vegetables, and fiber, eating the cheap, processed food sold by the agri-foods industry. These diets are the primary cause of the obesity, heart disease, and type II diabetes epidemics afflicting the nation’s poor. Not only do immigrants give up their land and their labor to the agri-foods industry, they sacrifice their health as well.

But the story does not end here. Immigrants send an estimated $27 billion a year in remittances to their families. Remittances are the second largest source of income in Mexico and the largest contributor to GNP in Central America. Without these remittances, the economies of those countries—and the markets for US-based agri-foods products—would crash. The tragic irony is that the lion’s share of remittances is spent on processed food packed with high-calorie corn syrup produced and distributed by the agri-foods industry. The impacts on health and the cost to immigrant families are devastating. The vicious cycle of dispossession, appropriation and substitution is complete. With help from the Green Revolution, US economic policies, and subsidies from the US taxpayer, the agri-foods industry colonizes every step of the immigrant dream.