Chris Knipp
11-28-2014, 06:24 PM
Sanjay Rawal: Food Chains (2014)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/fo.jpg
Geraldo Chavez (left) & CIW demonstrators in Food Chains
Documentary about a key farm worker struggle in Florida
There are all kinds of movies about food, but what about the field hands who pick the fruit and vegetables in the beginning? They are the hardest working and lowest paid workers in America, and the food delivery chain all starts with them and would not exist without them. Why are they so badly exploited? Increasing centralization of corporate power has made the exploitation of workers harder than ever to fight back against, but the power of the people to organize is as great as ever as well. Sanjal Rawal's Food Chains, a documentary about farm workers in Florida and their successful struggle to organize for their rights, narrated by Forest Whitaker, is plainly an act of advocacy, and perhaps utilitarian rather than artful. It's a direct appeal to people to get involved in supporting low wage workers' rights through the highly successful Florida Coalition of Immokalee Worker's Fair Food program, and concludes by giving the website, http://www.fairfoodnow.com. Their programs, this film argues, provide a pattern for worker organizing that can be effective in many other fields. Bringing back memories of the United Farm Workers and their leaders César Chavez and Dolores Huerta, who is heard from here, Food Chains is moving as well as informative.
Fun fact: the supermarket chains in the US earn more money than Monsanto, Golman Sachs, Microsoft and Apple. This gives them tremendous power, which they use to bully the farm workers who are grossly mistreated and underpaid. Using this power supermarkets have cut into farmers' profits, preventing them from charging more for foods that now cost much more to produce than they did a decade ago. This excessive retailers' power is due largely to Walmart getting into the supermarket business since the Eighties and using mass production methods, enabling them to cut prices and forcing other supermarkets to consolidate until only a few other giant supermarket chains remain. Down with competition.
That is the larger picture. Food Chains concentrates with a campaign in heavy tomato-producing Immokalee, Florida to gain better wages and conditions for tomato pickers through the influence of Florida's dominant giant supermarket chain, Publix. Which brings us to another fun fact: tomato pickers make only a penny a pound for the tomatoes they pick, less than the minimum wage. The Florida advocates are asking the supermarket chains, and all who sign agreements with them, to agree to pay a penny more, doubling their salary. This would only cost Publix a million dollars a year from their multi-billion profits. It would cost consumers only a little more on their food bill. Yet the company refuses to talk to farm workers, claiming to do so is not their responsibility but their suppliers'. But it is they who control the market, not the suppliers.
As a dramatic example of the inequality of the system the film digresses to discuss the wine growing industry in Napa Valley, California, which claims to be the premier wine-growing area of the world (some might differ). Bottles of new Napa Valley wine can sell for as much as $100, $150, $1,000. It's the highest-value agricultural product in California. But the agricultural labor cost of producing one of these bottles is only 40 cents. The vineyard workers are working 8-10 hours a day, but are homeless, because of the high cost of housing in the wine country, which is very desirable and high-rent. Where are the vineyard workers going to get $1,800 a month for rent, when they are making $350 a week, on a good week?
The Hispanic migrant farm worker problem has been the American government's own creation, the film explains. The number of underpaid workers has greatly increased since President Clinton signed NAFTA into law. NAFTA caused crop prices to drop precipitously in Mexico, driving agricultural workers north. Denying these workers legal status makes their labor unfairly cheaper because they have no power to speak up. This goes for other countries -- North African migrants in Spain, Persian migrants in Japan: migrant workers provide the low-wage work involved in food production in many countries. All these groups are exploited by not creating fair wages and conditions for them.
Props to Sanjay Rawal, who made Food Chains, for showing if only briefly that these issues seen in Florida and California are global, and apply to more than the food workers. The collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh, mentioned here, can be traced to Walmart. Exploitation of basic tech workers in China making iPhones, needless to say, can be traced to Apple. The big American corporations try to dodge the responsibility every time, blaming it on intermediaries, but they are the root cause of horrible working conditions of the lowest paid workers and it is their production and sales that perpetuate worker exploitation.
Director Rawal relies on a number of activists and journalists to present his information in Food Chains while showing original footage of workers at work, their living conditions, and their labor action campaign against the supermarket chain Publix. Key figures of the local struggle are Lucas Benitez and Geraldo Chavez of CIW, Coalition of Immokalee Workers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Immokalee_Workers). We hear from Barry Estabrook, autor of Tomatoland, and Eva Logoria, an actress and farm worker activist (and producer of the film). We hear from Eric Schlosser, of Fast Food Nation, and see a government ally, the Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. In the last decade, we learn, CIW has won Fair Food agreements from most of the major fast food chains. The agreements guarantee the penny per pound increase in pickers' pay and also pledge to prevent slavery and sexual harassment of workers.
But the supermarket chains remain a big hole in the chain, and throughout the film the fast, demonstrations, and marches against Publix continue with steady enthusiasm but little response. The director himself, a little like Michael Moore, perhaps, gets directly involved enough so that when a Publix spokesman appears at the CIW Fast for Fair Food, Sanjay approaches him in person as an intermediary - but is rejected. As the fast comes to an end, the Kennedys come out, Bobby junior, Ethel, and Kierry: decades earlier, clips show, Bobby Kennedy had ended a fast with César Chavez.
In early 2014, we learn that following two years of secret talks Walmart cooperated in a CIW Fair Food agreement, a tremendous step, and we see the warm signing ceremony, hugs, and group photos. So we end on a happy note. But as the film closes, Publix has not signed any agreement.
Sanjay Rawal previously made Ocean Monk (2010), about followers of Sri Chinmoy who explore the spiritual side of surfing; and Challenging Impossibility (2011), again about Chinmoy, about the man himself as a weightlifter in his seventies. Rawal's father was a scientist who was a "tomato breeder" for Del Monte, which led him to Florida and the farm worker's struggle there. Rawal's impetus for the film was his discovery that through the efforts of the CIW, the "most oppressive sector of American agriculture, namely the tomato industry in Florida, has been transformed into one of the most progressive."
Food Chains, 83 mins., debuted at Berlin. Also Tribeca, Vancouver, Abu Dhabi, and the Food Film Festival. US limited theatrical release 21 November 2014. Limited US release starting 21 November 2014. Opening at the Roxie Theater, San Francisco 28 November.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/fo.jpg
Geraldo Chavez (left) & CIW demonstrators in Food Chains
Documentary about a key farm worker struggle in Florida
There are all kinds of movies about food, but what about the field hands who pick the fruit and vegetables in the beginning? They are the hardest working and lowest paid workers in America, and the food delivery chain all starts with them and would not exist without them. Why are they so badly exploited? Increasing centralization of corporate power has made the exploitation of workers harder than ever to fight back against, but the power of the people to organize is as great as ever as well. Sanjal Rawal's Food Chains, a documentary about farm workers in Florida and their successful struggle to organize for their rights, narrated by Forest Whitaker, is plainly an act of advocacy, and perhaps utilitarian rather than artful. It's a direct appeal to people to get involved in supporting low wage workers' rights through the highly successful Florida Coalition of Immokalee Worker's Fair Food program, and concludes by giving the website, http://www.fairfoodnow.com. Their programs, this film argues, provide a pattern for worker organizing that can be effective in many other fields. Bringing back memories of the United Farm Workers and their leaders César Chavez and Dolores Huerta, who is heard from here, Food Chains is moving as well as informative.
Fun fact: the supermarket chains in the US earn more money than Monsanto, Golman Sachs, Microsoft and Apple. This gives them tremendous power, which they use to bully the farm workers who are grossly mistreated and underpaid. Using this power supermarkets have cut into farmers' profits, preventing them from charging more for foods that now cost much more to produce than they did a decade ago. This excessive retailers' power is due largely to Walmart getting into the supermarket business since the Eighties and using mass production methods, enabling them to cut prices and forcing other supermarkets to consolidate until only a few other giant supermarket chains remain. Down with competition.
That is the larger picture. Food Chains concentrates with a campaign in heavy tomato-producing Immokalee, Florida to gain better wages and conditions for tomato pickers through the influence of Florida's dominant giant supermarket chain, Publix. Which brings us to another fun fact: tomato pickers make only a penny a pound for the tomatoes they pick, less than the minimum wage. The Florida advocates are asking the supermarket chains, and all who sign agreements with them, to agree to pay a penny more, doubling their salary. This would only cost Publix a million dollars a year from their multi-billion profits. It would cost consumers only a little more on their food bill. Yet the company refuses to talk to farm workers, claiming to do so is not their responsibility but their suppliers'. But it is they who control the market, not the suppliers.
As a dramatic example of the inequality of the system the film digresses to discuss the wine growing industry in Napa Valley, California, which claims to be the premier wine-growing area of the world (some might differ). Bottles of new Napa Valley wine can sell for as much as $100, $150, $1,000. It's the highest-value agricultural product in California. But the agricultural labor cost of producing one of these bottles is only 40 cents. The vineyard workers are working 8-10 hours a day, but are homeless, because of the high cost of housing in the wine country, which is very desirable and high-rent. Where are the vineyard workers going to get $1,800 a month for rent, when they are making $350 a week, on a good week?
The Hispanic migrant farm worker problem has been the American government's own creation, the film explains. The number of underpaid workers has greatly increased since President Clinton signed NAFTA into law. NAFTA caused crop prices to drop precipitously in Mexico, driving agricultural workers north. Denying these workers legal status makes their labor unfairly cheaper because they have no power to speak up. This goes for other countries -- North African migrants in Spain, Persian migrants in Japan: migrant workers provide the low-wage work involved in food production in many countries. All these groups are exploited by not creating fair wages and conditions for them.
Props to Sanjay Rawal, who made Food Chains, for showing if only briefly that these issues seen in Florida and California are global, and apply to more than the food workers. The collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh, mentioned here, can be traced to Walmart. Exploitation of basic tech workers in China making iPhones, needless to say, can be traced to Apple. The big American corporations try to dodge the responsibility every time, blaming it on intermediaries, but they are the root cause of horrible working conditions of the lowest paid workers and it is their production and sales that perpetuate worker exploitation.
Director Rawal relies on a number of activists and journalists to present his information in Food Chains while showing original footage of workers at work, their living conditions, and their labor action campaign against the supermarket chain Publix. Key figures of the local struggle are Lucas Benitez and Geraldo Chavez of CIW, Coalition of Immokalee Workers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Immokalee_Workers). We hear from Barry Estabrook, autor of Tomatoland, and Eva Logoria, an actress and farm worker activist (and producer of the film). We hear from Eric Schlosser, of Fast Food Nation, and see a government ally, the Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. In the last decade, we learn, CIW has won Fair Food agreements from most of the major fast food chains. The agreements guarantee the penny per pound increase in pickers' pay and also pledge to prevent slavery and sexual harassment of workers.
But the supermarket chains remain a big hole in the chain, and throughout the film the fast, demonstrations, and marches against Publix continue with steady enthusiasm but little response. The director himself, a little like Michael Moore, perhaps, gets directly involved enough so that when a Publix spokesman appears at the CIW Fast for Fair Food, Sanjay approaches him in person as an intermediary - but is rejected. As the fast comes to an end, the Kennedys come out, Bobby junior, Ethel, and Kierry: decades earlier, clips show, Bobby Kennedy had ended a fast with César Chavez.
In early 2014, we learn that following two years of secret talks Walmart cooperated in a CIW Fair Food agreement, a tremendous step, and we see the warm signing ceremony, hugs, and group photos. So we end on a happy note. But as the film closes, Publix has not signed any agreement.
Sanjay Rawal previously made Ocean Monk (2010), about followers of Sri Chinmoy who explore the spiritual side of surfing; and Challenging Impossibility (2011), again about Chinmoy, about the man himself as a weightlifter in his seventies. Rawal's father was a scientist who was a "tomato breeder" for Del Monte, which led him to Florida and the farm worker's struggle there. Rawal's impetus for the film was his discovery that through the efforts of the CIW, the "most oppressive sector of American agriculture, namely the tomato industry in Florida, has been transformed into one of the most progressive."
Food Chains, 83 mins., debuted at Berlin. Also Tribeca, Vancouver, Abu Dhabi, and the Food Film Festival. US limited theatrical release 21 November 2014. Limited US release starting 21 November 2014. Opening at the Roxie Theater, San Francisco 28 November.