From 2011 to 2013, the Farmworker Association of Florida partnered with the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council to conduct a Community Food Assessment of the South Apopka area.
Hormone Disruptors and Women’s Health
A woman’s body changes throughout her lifetime. Each stage of life, from fetal development to post-menopause, involves a direct relationship between her hormones and how her body develops and functions. When this relationship is in balance, it helps create the conditions for good health. When this relationship is out of balance, it can lead to a range of health problems that can be painful and devastating.
Download
Food Workers' Organizations in the U.S.
Interest in sustainable, local, organic, and healthy food has been growing tremendously in the past couple of decades. And now, due to the work of the Food Chain Workers Alliance.
Download
Lake Apopka
Lake Apopka, as Florida's most polluted large lake, rose to international attention in the 1990's because the wildlife studies on the lake's alligator population that discovered drastically reduced reproductive rates, along with genetic deformities, among the lake's alligators. Fifty years of farming in the North shore of Lake Apopka resulted in pesticide and fertilizer run-off that were blamed for the Lake's distinctive pea green color. Yet, the more insidious problem would remain invisible. A spill of DDT, in 1980 into a percolation pond at what is now the Tower Chemical Superfund site at Gourd Neck Springs in the South quadrant of the lake, is likely responsible for the breakdown components, DDD and DDE, that were discovered in the tissue samples from the studied alligators.
Download
Our Common Ground
Food Workers, Sustainable Food Advocates, and Institutions of Higher Education.In the United States, universities combine to generate over $19 billion in food revenue per year, 1 and they are increasingly utilizing their imprint to help usher change in the food system as a whole.
Download
Farmworkers in the Southeast
It can be difficult to find data on the farmworker population. Contributing factors include the migratory lifestyle many lead, their undocumented status, under-reporting by employers and general lack of priority put on the needs of this semi-invisible population. The profile is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps in information about Farmworkers in the Southeast. For the purposes of this profile, “The Southeast,” includes the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.
Download
Farmworkers in Florida: Silence is their rational choice
The findings suggest that there are various types of worker abuse including: issues with proper or adequate sanitation, the constant rushing pace of farmworkers making the work environment more dangerous, lack of safety equipment, work injuries not being covered by employers through workers compensation, no overtime pay rate, and hazardous practices of pesticide application.
Download
Organophosphates, Friend and Foe
Organophosphates, Friend and Foe: The Promise of Medical Monitoring for Farm Workers and Their Families
This Article assesses the existing mechanisms designed to protect farm workers from occupational exposure to pesticides and identifies and analyzes some of the shortcomings of the regulatory system. It focuses on the class of pesticides known as organophosphates and examines the impact that such pesticides can have on farm workers as well as on their families.
Download
The Color of Food
Food justice seeks to ensure that the benefits and risks of where, what and how food is grown, produced, transported, distributed, accessed and eaten are shared fairly. Food justice represents a transformation of the current food system, including but not limited to eliminating disparities and inequities.
Examining the evidence on pesticide exposure & birth defects in farmworkers:
The purpose of this bibliography is to inform the discussion of birth defects in farmworkers. The investigations into the Ag-Mart case may contribute to a perception that the tragic birth outcomes in that case are an anomaly, because the families contend that they are the direct result of egregious pesticide misuse as documented by state investigators. However, reviews of the epidemiological literature indicate that more generally, birth defects in farmworkers may not be an anomaly, but rather a real risk for families who work regularly with toxic pesticides.
Download
Female Farmworkers’ Perceptions of Pesticide Exposure and Pregnancy Health
This article presents the results from questions focused on pesticide exposure and its impact on general, reproductive, pregnancy, and fetal health. Workers reported a belief that pesticide exposure could be hazardous to pregnancy health; descriptions of symptoms and health concerns believed to be related to farmwork and to pesticide exposure; and descriptions of barriers preventing them from practicing safer occupational behaviors.
Read the article here
Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States
In other words, the current lack of accessible data and documentation about farmworkers’ employment—and their ultimate role in the food system—has in effect kept farmworkers hidden from public attention. Few people, for example, are aware that farmworkers are excluded from the basic labor and safety standards firmly established in other employment sectors. Likewise, many people would be shocked to learn that farm work has little or no overtime limits, child labor restrictions, collective bargaining rights, or workers’ compensation insurance, although agriculture is considered to be one of the most hazardous industries in the U.S.1.
Download
The Hands That Feed Us
Challenges and opportunities for workers along the food chain
By The Food Chain Workers Alliance
The sustainability and prosperity of the United States food system is critical to the health and prosperity of workers, employers, and consumers nationwide. In addition to feeding the nation, the U.S. food system is a large and growing segment of the U.S. economy and an increasingly important provider of jobs. The food production, processing, distribution, retail, and service industries collectively sell over $1.8 trillion dollars in goods and services annually, accounting for over 13 percent of the United States Gross Domestic Product.*
Download
Los trabajadores agrícolas y la política de inmigración
Por más de un siglo, la agricultura ha sido un punto de entrada al mercado laboral para los inmigrantes en EE.UU. Actualmente, cerca de tres cuartos de los agricultores contratados son inmigrantes, la mayoría indocumentados. Dicho estatus legal, salarios bajos y horarios inconsistentes, contribuyen a una precaria situación económica.
Download Spanish version
"Requiring Clinical Diagnostic Tools and Biomonitoring of Exposures to Pesticides"
A policy statement by the American Public Health Association - 2010
The American Public Health Association (APHA) has a long history of supporting measures to improve worker protection from occupational exposure to toxic substances and surveillance of occupational injury and disease.1–9 APHA also has established prior policy in the area of chemical safety for children and the general public.
Read more
Together for Agricultural Safety
The TAS project was developed in 1997 to design, implement, and evaluate a program to reduce the adverse health effects commonly associated with pesticide exposure. The project focuses on worker communities in the fernery and nursery industries in Volusia, Lake, Seminole, Orange and Polk counties.
Download
Wage Theft: An Economic Drain on Florida
This is the second in a series of reports monitoring the growing problem of wage theft in Florida. Using previously unanalyzed data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and separate data from various community organizations, this report shows evidence of a widespread problem across a broad spectrum of industries in Florida.
Unauthorized Immigration, Hunger, and Poverty
Much of the current immigration debate centers on issues of legality. While this is an important facet of immigration policy, the causes of unauthorized or illegal1 immigration are not rooted in law, but in economics.
Fields of Peril. Child Labor in US Agriculture
Hundreds of thousands of children under age 18 are working in agriculture in the United States. But under a double standard in US federal law, children can toil in the fields at far younger ages, for far longer hours, and under far more hazardous conditions than all other working children. For too many of these children, farmwork means an early end to childhood, long hours at exploitative wages, and risk to their health and sometimes their lives.