Do You Know Where
Your Food Comes From?

The Fair Food Across Borders (FFAB) Campaign’s goal is to make visible the human rights abuses suffered by migrant agricultural workers in Mexican agribusiness camps. We will expose the serious human rights conditions of agribusiness practices in Mexico regarding health, education, living conditions, pesticide use, child labor and labor rights.

There are estimated to be over one million migrant agricultural workers in Mexico. The majority of these migrant workers come from the Southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. These families are forced to leave their communities because they have no other way to support their families. These families leave their communities from four to six months a year to work in the agribusiness camps.

There are hundreds of trans-national agribusiness camps in Northern Mexico, in states like Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California. These camps grow a large variety of produce from tomatoes to watermelon. The vast majority of the fruits and vegetables harvested in these camps are for export to the US and Canada. For example in the winter months, if you live in the US, there is a good chance the tomatoes you buy from the supermarket are from a Sinaloa agribusiness camp.

Living Conditions

The living conditions in the camps are extremely difficult, where many times families are living in cobbled together shelters with no access to clean water. These families work in the fields unprotected, exposed to toxic pesticides. The wages they receive are below the minimum because many of the migrant workers have no formal contracts with their employer.

Poverty

What makes the situation even more dramatic is that unlike migration to the US, which has contributed to improving certain conditions for migrants in their communities of origin, and where remittances have become an important part of Mexican economy, this internal migration to Northern Mexico has not improved the marginalization and extreme poverty in which these families live. These families return from the camps with barely enough money saved to get them through till they return again to the camps six months later.

Child Labor

Child labor in agribusiness camps is not the exception but the rule. Despite international human rights law and national labor law prohibitions on child labor, many employers demand high numbers of children in order to meet their productivity quotas. 20% of the labor force in the camps are children between eight and 14 years of age. Most camps are not equipped with schools, teachers, health services; or employer obligations mandated by federal law. 74% of the children that reside in camps suffer from malnutrition due to the lack of proper food.