You probably think all cows are purple
While farmers and reproductive work in agriculture are literally out of the picture, Corporations hold the power over shaping our image of food.
When I was a kid that was the joke everyone made to refer to kids who had never seen anything else but the city — as if their only reference to the country-side and farming was the much advertised purple “Milka-Cow”. That the myth of children who believed in the purple cow even existed (or still does) is symbolical and symptomatical at the same time: while reproductive work on soil and with animals — agriculture — as well as it’s workers — farmers — are pushed to the margins of the public consciousness, corporations hold power over the product and its image.
In a time of increasing alienation, has the farmer vanished from the cultural surface? And what does that say about our relationship to her/him?
“All the labor without the worker”
Alex Riveras Why Cybraceros? brings international labor division to an extreme by introducing the idea of “all the labor without the worker”. On the one hand, the short clip illustrates the United States dependency on Mexican workers for low-paid wage labor — in this case in the agricultural sector -, which shows that the workers do have power because without them the system would collapse. On the other hand, it emphasizes on the systems’s structural racism: while the worker is needed and welcomed, the worker is not. This ‘problem’ is resolved by a new technology that is operated on the computer by the Mexican worker and made possible through internet connection. While the worker can stay in Mexico, the actual labor on the ground is done by a machine in the United States, which “poses no threat to become a citizen”.
While Why Cybraceros? is a critical film, it is based on the Bracero program that was proposed in Californias 1950s in order to make agriculture more lucrative. The idea behind the program was that machinery could not (yet) replace human workers because of the sensitivity of the work and the ability to judge the state of the crop. So, in order to increase efficiency a lot of workers were needed to do a job that had very low pay and wasn’t valued culturally anymore. And since workers who weren’t citizens were also not considered part of society and therefore didn’t have the same rights as Americans, ‘Braceros’ from Mexico seemed to be the solution.
Just like the husband couldn’t or didn’t want to see how his dinner was made, the wife probably wasn’t interested in knowing where the produce actually came from.
When words aren’t heard, bodies become the message
Whoever thinks, times must have changed and that it is absurd that anyone might believe farmers would be no more than easily replaced low-paid labor without any ‘human rights’, might not see the problem — but doesn’t listen to the voices, either. Farmers in India have been, and still are, protesting the conditions under which they have to live and tend to the land for a century now. For the past twenty years (or even more), they’ve started commiting suicide as a form of protest by ingesting the same pesticide they were forced to use on the soil. But instead of listening to the farmers demands, the Indian Government puts corporations and international banks first by reforming the monetary system and pushing for electronic money via debit or credit card. Since a lot of farmers, due to their work, live in areas where there aren’t ATMs or banks accessible, they are one of the most affected group of people by this change to demonetization in India.
Again: I am not saying that the Indian Government should in fact just put more ATMs out there, but that
the people that are growing the produce that is supposed to satisfy one of the most basic needs — nutrition — are ignored or silenced, while the corporations that contribute to poisoning our food get special attention.
And as if that isn’t even enough, the farmers acts of resistance are treated as a charity case that can be compensated by a ridiculous amount of 3000 $ per death. That is, if they are male, since women are not even recognized as farmers.
What started as a childhood anecdote…
is still a pressing issue. Neither the ‘braceros’, nor the farmers in India are treated as humans. The value of their life and work is measured in money. Meanwhile grocerie stores are filled with vegetables that never seem to get bad and customers are satisfied if the label says “organic”.
