CEPED_MIGRINTER_ICMigrations_santé

Fil d’actualités Covid19-Migration-santé (veronique.petit@ird.fr) relié à CEPED-MIGRINTER-IC MIGRATIONS.

  • In these West Virginia and California agricultural towns, farmers and ranchers are battling the pandemic and big industry - Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/road-to-recovery/farmers-ranchers-coronavirus-food-california-west-virginia

    In these two American breadbasket communities, small farmers and ranchers have been left to improvise as their markets swivel and contract. In its early months considered an urban problem, the coronavirus has been especially brutal in rural agricultural communities, where farmworkers were slow to get personal protective equipment and effective safety protocols.
    In both Salinas and Moorefield, the coronavirus has contributed layers of complexity to an already backbreaking professional path. Several years of historically poor planting conditions and retaliatory tariffs under the Trump administration have cut off potential for agricultural exports and left farmers with few reserves before the pandemic began to hopscotch across the country.
    For Mary Jo Keller, 90, Moorefield has always been home, where she and her family make a dwindling living from dairy cows. Not far away, Rick Woodworth raises cattle on Flying W Farms — he owns them from birth to slaughter, growing all his own feed, a refutation of modern industrial agricultural models epitomized by Pilgrim’s. “We have not participated with Pilgrim’s Pride or been involved with them in any way, shape or form,” he says. “I’m a Type A personality clear off the chart: I want to be in control of my destiny, not be on a contract to produce for Pilgrim’s. We’ve chosen to go our own way and take our own risks.” More than half of all agricultural sales in the state are poultry and eggs, a market dominated by large-scale, vertically integrated facilities owned by multinational food companies. They depend on tight margins, a constant supply of new workers and government support that prioritizes increased line speed and efficiency. Cattle ranchers in the area are rare these days, dairy farmers all but extinct. What these small operators lack in economies of scale they gain in autonomy and open space.
    In Salinas, the small independent farmers have few choices: sell to restaurants and at farmers markets, or at a reduced price to wholesalers. Most of Salinas’s organic growers sell their products to a single distributor: Coke Farm, an organic grower/shipper in nearby San Juan Bautista.
    Celsa Ortega, Rigoberto Bucio and Javier Zamora each have taken a new route to independence. Immigrants from Mexico, all three began as workers on large farms, going through programs with the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), a nonprofit that trains limited-resource and aspiring organic farmers and then equips them with land. Ortega farms only an acre, Bucio farms 12 and Zamora a little over 100 — small farmers battling the “get big or get out” ethos that has taken root in agriculture since the 1970s.

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