There has been a growing trend of plant-based and vegan diets across the world. Although many are interested in the environmental sustainability, health improvements, and other benefits, there is a growing population of vegetarians and vegans who are attempting to live a cruelty-free diet. Its estimated that 9 billion animals are killed each year for meat, dairy, and eggs. That’s in the United States alone; worldwide, the estimation is 56 billion. The worst part, is that the conditions in which these animals are kept is horrific. The Rolling Stone shared insight to these conditions with an undercover factory farm worker, who they called Sarah. She works nine hour days surrounded by feces piled three feet high, watching pigs with cut snouts and broken legs crying, many of them being left to die. Sarah works with hidden cameras and microphones to take down the Big Meat industry. Their findings often trigger arrests or shutdowns of processing plants. The clients, like fast food giants, are often unaffected by investigations. She’s been doing these operations for 5 or 6 years. An activist explained,
If you haven’t been in a hen plant, you don’t know what hell is. Chicken shit piled six feet high, and your lungs burn like you took a torch to them.
A group of corporations have taken up family farms, transforming them into indoor, prison-style plants in the middle of rural nowhere. The rural location is far from the eyes of consumers. In America, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is short-staffed, leaving the responsibility of revealing the grotesque nature of modern meat farming practices. The inspectors sent by the government usually only see a small sample of animals right before they’re killed. However, leading up to that point, the animals are on their own, kept perpetually pregnant, fed growth-promoting drugs and sometimes garbage (mixed in with the grain can be an assortment of trash, including ground glass from light bulbs, used syringes and the crushed testicles of their young), while being kept sick from constantly breathing in their own feces; this all happens in a tiny and crowded crate. Undercover activists are the only lens inside of factory farms, but drafted laws by Big Meat lobbyists are trying to stop that. Known as ‘Ag Gag’ bills are making it illegal to take a farm job undercover, apply for a farm job without disclosing a background as a journalist or animal-rights activists, and hold evidence of animal abuse past 24 to 48 hours before turning it to authorities.
The abuse in factory farms has led to a growing population of vegans and vegetarians following following a cruelty-free diet, but these meat free diets aren’t necessarily absent of cruelty on the farm.
Across the globe, 54% of the population lives in cities, up 30% in 1950, which is a process known as rabid urbanization. This increased urbanization may benefit the economy because of a persistent ‘productivity gap’ that exists between agricultural workers and workers employed in other sectors of the economy. Economists have consistently discussed the existence of an income gap between agricultural and non-agricultural workers since the 1950’s. However, it was difficult to decipher if the difference in wages was due productivity differences or the persistent underestimating of agricultural income by researchers. Agricultural income is challenging to measure because there are many informal employees and products are often consumed on the work site. By measuring the areas of individual farms, accounting for the average yield of cross, and expected crop loss, data from the Living Standard Measurement Studies released by the World Bank and from the U.N.’s System of National Accounts was able to uncover a reasonable estimate of productivity. Through surveys and research in the The Agricultural Productivity Gap, by Douglas Gollin, David Lagakos, and Michael E. Waugh found that non-agricultural workers work about 1.1 times as many hours as agricultural workers, which wouldn’t explain the disparity in wages. It implies that quality differences between the two sectors is not a sufficient source of difference.
Another theory pertaining to the income gap is related to worker quality, which includes productivity and education differences. Although worker quality can’t be measured directly, authors were able to observe that non-agricultural workers have about 1.3 times more education than the average agricultural worker. However, the average agricultural income is over 2 times lower than the average non-agricultural income, which allowed the authors to suggest that the income difference isn’t fully related to educational differences. The authors didn’t find any direct reason for the wage gap. While there may be other benefits that explain why agricultural workers remain in the industry, researchers found that access to key public goods is consistently lower in rural areas than urban centres, literacy rates and the education quality was consistently lower in rural areas, and rates of malnutrition and infant morality was also higher. This could be a factor in forcing rural workers to remain in the industry. While its possible that there are unobserved differences between the two sets of workers, a 2013 study by Gharad Bryan, Shyama Chowdhury, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak provided additional evidence that incentivizing people in rural Bangladesh to move into an urban area was associated with positive outcomes. As well, the fact that developing countries had a larger gaps between sectors suggests that monetary constraints among rural populations may be a driving force of the productivity gap. Providing assistance to people living in rural communities who want to move into urban areas may be an effective policy for increasing the wages of these people.
Regardless of the causes of the wage gap between agricultural and non-agricultural workers, its clear that farmers in rural communities are underpaid, likely even for no substantial reason. The type of work tends to be particularly challenging, physically and mentally, with injuries or abuse often going unreported. Particularly with migrant farmers, wages tends to be low and risk tends to be high. A family came forward after 39 year old Sheldon McKenzie didn’t receive proper care for a workplace injury through Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and died. They said that Canada’s program stripped the Jamaican migrant worker from his labour rights after a severe head injury and tried to cut off his access to health care. Maria Barrett, McKenzie’s cousin who lives in Winnipeg fought to keep her cousin in Canada to receive medical care. Through a practice known as medical repatriation, hundreds of workers are sent home in similar circumstance, which Barrett explained that,
It’s worse than slavery — they dispose of them.
For 12 years, McKenzie went back and forth from Canada to Jamaica, spending months doing manual labour on farms; the money he made was sent back home to his wife and daughters. In late 2014, he started working on a tomato farm in Ontario, and in January 2015, his cousin got a call saying that he had hit his head at work and was at a hospital in a coma.
His face was completely bandaged, he was swollen. We got there, he was on life-support.
Part of his brain had to be removed due to swelling and internal bleeding. Barrett recognized that there was immediate pressure to have McKenzie return to Jamaica, and due to the fact that he was no longer able to work, he lost his work visa and wasn’t qualified for health-care coverage. McKenzie’s cousin hired lawyers to try and get a humanitarian visa, and while he was granted temporary stay, McKenzie died before a decision was made on a humanitarian visa. Barrett expected support from the Jamaican liaison officer assigned to McKenzie’s case as part of the seasonal worker program, but that didn’t happen. Barrett said,
What I found out after much talking to people who will never talk on camera, when the migrants are hurt, sometimes they don’t take them to the hospital, they ship them back to Jamaica... Their only goal was to ship him back home. The only way he wasn’t shipped back in three days is because we dug our heels in and said no because the health care in Jamaica is not up to par to take care of the type of injury that he had.
When Carlton Anderson, the chief Jamaican liaison officer for Canada was asked about the allegations, Anderson said he was unaware of the incidents and that it went against obligations.
About 30 000 farm workers come to Canada each year through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, which has steadily increased over the last decade. The majority of workers come from Mexico and Jamaica. Canadian farmers hire the workers decide who is allowed to return through the program by working with Jamaican liaisons, which leaves the workers powerless. Those who complain are sent home and aren’t allowed to come back. Although the program has been running for 50 years, Canadian researchers have only recently collected data on illness and injury because the information was private. Between 2001 and 2011, 787 migrant workers in Ontario were terminated and sent to their countries of origin for medical reasons. Studies found that the workers were a vulnerable occupational group because the federal government will take away their work visa id they get sick or hurt, which allows the provinces to cut them off of health care. According to the study, only one in fifty injured or sick left willingly.
Chris Ramsaroop, is an organizer with Justicia for Migrant Workers, and he says migrant workers are denied basic human rights and are often seen as expendable. Ramsaroop has been trying to get the government to change the programs to improve access to basic rights and healthcare. He said,
To be blunt, I consider this an apartheid system. Migrant workers live and work under a different set of legal rights and obligation than we do. We [Canadians] are not denied basic human rights, we are not denied health care. They are seen as disposable and temporary.
It’s extremely shocking as the number of foreign temporary workers that have died on Canadian soil goes untracked, both as a result of a lack of awareness and an ignorance of the status of migrant workers.
Even outside of migrant workers, farmers are paid extremely low. Large vegetable companies farm and utilize cheap labour is a system that is often extremely abusive. While the cruelties faced by animals in the meat and dairy industry is horrible, similar abuses are being felt by the vegetable and fruit farmers across the world. The cruelty for these vegetable and fruit farms is heightened with people of colour, as they are generally used by international corporations and migrant worker programs. This causes the majority of abuse and poverty to concentrate in countries populated by people of colour, but the healthy food being farmed often doesn’t reach the same ethnic minorities. The health of people with low incomes, which includes mostly people of colour, suffers due to the lack of adequate housing, child care, health care, and food. The stress caused by these living conditions can also effect health, leading to higher raters of tobacco and alcohol use, with an increased risk to health problems developing or worsening. As well, low-income individuals are less likely to use preventative care services, which results in fewer opportunities for practitioners to assess and educate low-income patients about their health risks. Even when low-income people do see health care providers, the social needs and complication of treatments is rarely addressed. Systematically, the health care institution is less accessed and less effective for low-income people. As a result, the individuals and their families that are underpaid and overworked to farm “cruelty-free” food, largely don’t receive the same healthy food that they farm, and due to the income related to their job, they also don’t have access to other factors related to overall health. Data conducted by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention showed that even relatively healthy lower-income people, those who earn 200% or less of the federal poverty level (about $24 000 or less a year), and have fewer than three chronic conditions and no functional limitations, have higher health risks, greater social needs, and worse access to care than relatively healthy moderate income and higher income (200%-400% FPL and greater than 400% FPL respectively).
Unfortunately, healthy food tends to be more expensive, which means that lower-income individuals, who are more likely to be food insecure, often choose unhealthy foods. The current states of agricultural farming of cruelty-free foods is a factor that fosters low-income, particularly due to injury, abuse, and low wage, which limits the access of farmers to health care, social service, and the food they cultivate themselves. This cyclical poverty cycle is far from cruelty-free. In a system that concentrates poverty and targets people of colour, immigrants, and migrant workers, a cruelty-free diet is impossible because even if the farming practices didn’t abuse animals, the human workers are still left underpaid, overworked, and ultimately, disposed of.
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Capital per Employment in Agriculture, Industry, and GDP
A Note from the Author:
Due to a long history of racism and systematic oppression, including slavery, segregation, and redlining among other factors, people of colour, particularly black people are at heightened risk of poverty and therefore, poor health. In Canada and the United States of America, communities and cities largely inhabited by people of colour and immigrants tend to be poorer. However, even economically well off people of colour tend to have lower health than their white counterparts. Part of this is due to food advertising or the fact that healthy food is seen as ‘white people food’ and is often ignored by even the black population that can afford it on a regular basis. Tanisha Gordon, a 37 year-old IT worker, was diagnosed with pre-diabetes and was forced to clean up her diet. Gordon explained in the Huffington Post,
A lot of the time, when you go to restaurants now, they have these extravagant salads with all these different ingredients in it, like little walnuts and pickled onions, like the stuff Panera sells. For me personally, that’s like a white person’s food. A lot of the mainstream stuff that’s advertised comes across as being for white people.
The growing industry of nutritionally ambitious health is unaffordable and not relatable to many, which is largely a black population. Gordon was able to shed 60 pounds with diet change, but food and exercise wasn’t the only the only obstacle. Cultural factors forced her to retrain her brain and disassociate objectively healthy food from whiteness, which as a concept is exclusive. While there is a large health gap between poor individuals and wealthy individuals, there is even disparity between wealthy white people and wealthy black people according to New Scientist, in part because of this issue. On top of cultural barriers, institutional racism in healthcare prevents care to even wealthy black people with health insurance. Income has become an important risk factor in early death, particularly in America due to lack of insurance availability, affordability, and coverage. On top of income, race is an important factor due to cultural perceptions of health, but more importantly, inadequate care due to racism in health care institutions. This is why the abuse of migrant, primarily people of colour workers is so frightening. People of colour are farming food in terrible conditions, likely not receiving it due to income or cultural influence, and as a result, has worse health, which is heightened due to institutional racism. Fundamentally, our diets require change, not necessarily what we eat, but how we get it and further, how its distributed. If that doesn’t happen, no diet can truly be cruelty free.