The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has to have a graphic enemy, and I’m it,” said Reggie Brown, holding up his palms and flaring his fingers in a what-the-hell gesture. “I cannot get off the hook no matter what—” He was cut off when one of Florida’s vicious summer storms unleashed a timely bolt of lightning followed by a sharp crack of thunder.
Technically, Brown has three jobs, though he performs all of them from the same desk in a well-landscaped office park of winding, shaded lanes and low-rise brick buildings just outside Orlando. He is executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange, and manager of the Florida Tomato Committee. Although the organizations are different legal entities, they share office space and some staff and have overlapping memberships. Observers of the tomato industry could be forgiven for viewing them as a single umbrella organization. Combined, the groups have the power to lobby politicians, advocate on behalf of tomato growers and handlers, advertise and promote Florida tomatoes, fund academic research, impose surcharges on tomato sales, and determine the size and shape of every fresh slicing tomato shipped out of the state during the winter.
Brown is a slim, compact former Marine who still carries himself with a military bearing. He speaks with the soft southern drawl heard in rural North Florida, where his family still runs a farm. Brown is a passionate home gardener, and he gives the impression that he won’t be unhappy in a few years when he can leave the politics of tomatoes behind to retire to his plot of land outside Gainesville and tend the small grove of fruit trees he has already planted there in anticipation. When Brown graduated from the University of Florida in 1969, the Vietnam War was in full swing. He was offered a place in the university’s vegetable crop PhD program but turned it down and joined the Marines. “Being a typical southerner,” he said, “I bit the bullet and did what I needed to do for the country.” He left the service in 1973 and started as an extension worker for the Florida agriculture department. He has spent his entire career advising and representing the farming industry through government posts and as an employee of trade associations. As the personification of the Florida tomato industry, he has had occasion to draw on the toughness and discipline he learned in the military forty years ago.
My first glimpse of the power of the Florida Tomato Committee came in 2005, when I encountered a grower named Joe Procacci who was making national headlines by claiming that his company, Procacci Brothers Sales Corporation, had finally cracked the tomato code. Procacci farmed thousands of acres in Florida, and by crossing thick-skinned, disease-resistant Florida field tomatoes with a French heirloom variety called the Marmande, he had managed to breed a good-tasting tomato that was tough enough to be grown in the South in the winter, shipped north, and sold in supermarkets—or so he claimed. Though it might have been good tasting, it was not good looking. Procacci was the first to admit that his new tomatoes, like their heirloom parent, were often asymmetrical, lumpy, and deeply creased. They were so ugly that produce managers often rejected orders, prompting Procacci to make a virtue out of necessity by giving them the unforgettable trade name UglyRipe. They were an immediate hit in the marketplace.
Perhaps too much of a hit. For a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Tomato Committee allowed Procacci to sell his homely fruits as an experimental crop. But in 2004 when UglyRipes started to become serious rivals to the pretty, smooth-skinned, and utterly tasteless fruits that other farmers grew, the committee ordered him to stop selling them outside the state, even though he had seven hundred acres of ripening UglyRipes in the ground. Procacci had no choice but to feed some of his premium tomatoes to cattle and compost the rest. He lost $3 million. “The cows were eating better tomatoes that winter than the consumers,” he said.
Thanks to an arcane document called Federal Marketing Order 966, the Florida Tomato Committee has the ultimate say over the qualities a slicing tomato must have if it is to be exported from the southern part of the state. The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, which paved the way for the creation of Order 966, was passed to allow certain types of farmers to band together and control commodities without being subject to antitrust prosecution. At the time, the act made good sense. In an era when fruits and vegetables were grown by hundreds of small farmers who sold their crops to packinghouses, it assured that growers met consistent standards and that their crops were sold in an orderly manner. Today, when just a dozen large companies are responsible for the vast majority of Florida’s production and pack the tomatoes they have grown on their own farms, the financial logic behind such enforced standardization no longer applies. But the power of the marketing orders has in no way diminished. The Florida Tomato Committee decrees the exact size, color, texture, and shape of exported slicing tomatoes. It prevents the shipping of tomatoes that are lopsided, kidney shaped, elongated, angular, ridged, rough, or otherwise “deformed.” It delineates down to the millimeter the permissible depth and length of the “growth” cracks surrounding the scar where the fruit has been attached to the stem. It’s worth noting that nowhere do the regulations mention taste—it’s simply not a consideration. “Taste is subjective,” said Steve Jonas, a compliance officer at the committee. UglyRipes failed to meet many of these cosmetic standards. It did not matter that consumers were happy with them and obligingly paid nearly four times what they paid for “Florida rounds,” as the gassed mature green tomatoes are called.
By taking on Procacci, the committee had picked a formidable and cagey foe. In his late seventies at the time, he looked like anybody’s happily retired Italian grandfather, and in fact a caricature of his smiling face appears on displays of a brand of his tomatoes called Papa Joe’s. For all his folksy demeanor, though, Procacci controlled one of the largest produce companies in the United States. Through various corporations, he had interests in Gargiulo, Inc., a major producer of Florida rounds, and also Ag-Mart, the large company responsible for premium niche-market products like Santa Sweets grape tomatoes and UglyRipes. Procacci had been in the business long enough to recognize a once-in-a-life-time marketing opportunity when he saw one, and he was eager to talk. When I met him in the parking lot of a Naples country club, which he and his brother had built on what was once a tomato field, he immediately plopped an inch-thick stack of photocopied press clippings on my lap. They all hewed closely to the same narrative line: A noble farmer grows a great-tasting crop and the Big Bad Tomato Committee won’t let him sell it. In reality, it was more like a family squabble among the Goliaths of Tomatoland.
“It’s very simple,” Procacci explained, as we drove out to see a plot of UglyRipes he had planted to serve the in-state market, which the committee does not regulate. “The committee members are my competitors, and they are jealous. There’s a lot of jealousy in this business. They can’t have it, so they don’t want us to have it, either.”
Whatever its motive, the Tomato Committee refused to budge. When negotiations reached a deadlock, Procacci took his case to the USDA, arguing that if the committee allowed producers to export cherry, grape, and plum tomatoes—none of which met its standards for shape—why prevent UglyRipes? The federal bureaucrats turned him down flatly. He brought in lawyers and hired the Washington, DC, lobbying firm that employed John R. Block, who had been President Reagan’s agriculture secretary, to take the UglyRipe message to the highest levels in the country.
Procacci did not have to tell me when we arrived at his UglyRipe field. Against a windbreak of cypress trees, I saw several rows of staked vines being ministered to by a harvesting crew. Instead of grabbing the tomatoes off the vines with their bare hands as fast as they could, throwing them into buckets, and unceremoniously upending those into an open truck, these pickers wore gloves to prevent scratching the fruits with their fingernails. They eased the ugly tomatoes two deep into plastic flats. The bottoms of those fruits were blushing a light shade of pink. In a field of Florida rounds, any color other than green is considered seditious. Procacci told me that the first-class treatment of UglyRipes continued at the packing plant, where they were hand sorted (only four out of ten would be deemed worthy to wear an UglyRipe trademark sticker) and individually slipped into foam-mesh “socks” for their journey to grocery stores.
“We can pack fifty or sixty truckloads of mature green tomatoes a day with the same amount of help as we need to pack two truckloads of UglyRipes,” said Procacci. “We have to charge a premium price for UglyRipes, but people are willing to pay it. My competitors have all this money invested to process the mature greens, and they want to protect that investment. But it is a diminishing market. More and more, people want flavor. Consumers are not going to eat fruits and vegetables if they don’t taste good, and they are going to eat more of them if they do taste good.”
The fight between Procacci and the Tomato Committee played out in the U.S. Senate. Senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, Republicans representing Pennsylvania, where Procacci Brothers Sales is based, introduced legislation that would specifically exempt UglyRipes from federal grading standards, provided that the agriculture department enrolled them in a special program that was designed to track genetically modified foods—which UglyRipes are not. Despite a twenty-four page appeal written by Reggie Brown on behalf of the Tomato Committee and a personal letter from then Florida Governor Jeb Bush, UglyRipes got their exemption in early 2007, days after Governor Bush left office.
Procacci had scored two victories in one. I have eaten my share of $4-a-pound UglyRipes. None have packed anything close to the flavor power of a locally grown summer tomato. Some have been quite pleasant tasting, some so-so, and others not good at all. But no matter. The melee in the press did more to polish UglyRipe’s image than the most elaborate advertising campaign ever could have. With his exemption in hand, Procacci was able to cash in on years of pent-up consumer demand. The Tomato Committee had done him an enormous favor.
Reggie Brown represents an industry that faces far greater problems than whether to allow one of its key players to sell homely tomatoes. Almost all American farmers have seen their share of the retail price of their product decline steadily as middlemen gobble up greater margins, but Florida tomato growers have been falling further behind than most. In the last three decades, the price we pay for fresh tomatoes in supermarkets has increased fourfold. During the same period, what farmers receive has only doubled. At the best of times, the business is a high stakes gamble. Growers spend millions of dollars to put in a crop and then have to hope that their plants are not hit by a hurricane or a freeze. Even after a bumper harvest, there is still no guarantee that a grower will be able to sell his crop profitably in a market that is often saturated with tomatoes. Unlike corn, soybeans, and wheat, which can be stored until prices improve, tomatoes are perishable and have to be sold soon after they are picked. “But sometimes you can make money,” Brown said.
The summer of 2010, when I met with Brown, was not one of those times. That winter, growers in Florida had been hit by a freeze that destroyed 80 percent of the state’s crop. “For every hundred acres of tomatoes that you lost in the freeze, you could kiss $1 million goodbye—gone!” said Brown. Because they had no other choice, farmers replanted the fields, but the weather refused to cooperate. Florida had sixty days of below-normal temperatures in early 2010, and the new crop grew slowly. Tomatoes that typically ripen 90 days after being transplanted into the fields were struggling to produce a crop after 110 or 120 days.
When the tomatoes did finally ripen, they landed in a market that was awash with overproduction from Mexican fields and Canadian greenhouses as well as the surge of replanted Florida tomatoes. Prices to handlers dropped as low as $3.50 for a twenty-five-pound box, less than it cost to pick and pack them. It wasn’t even worth harvesting the fields. Tens of millions of dollars of tomatoes were left to rot.
“It was a double-whammy,” said Brown. “We got hit when we lost the crop. Growers who had invested millions of dollars got nothing in return. And once there were no longer any Florida tomatoes on the market, prices soared to over twenty dollars a box. Mexicans weren’t affected by the freeze and they made a killing. Managers of quick-serve restaurants balked at the high prices and cut back on the amount of tomato-based items on their menus. They just walked away. So when our tomatoes finally ripened and the volume on the market returned to normal, we lost our shirts.”
The freeze marked the second time in two years that the industry in Florida had to struggle through a disaster. In 2008 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration implicated Florida tomatoes in a massive salmonella outbreak. At the time, Florida had $40 million worth of tomatoes picked and ready for shipping. Consumers abruptly stopped buying, and fast food chains cancelled orders. It turned out to be a false alarm. Food safety inspectors determined that the outbreak originated in jalapeños from Mexico. After six weeks of investigation, the Food and Drug Administration completely exonerated Florida tomatoes, but it was too late for producers who had lost an estimated $100 million in sales.
For some of their financial difficulties, Florida farmers have only themselves to blame. The infrastructure of the biggest sector of the industry is based on a technology that dates back to a simpler time when supermarket produce sections offered one type of slicing tomato, usually sold three-in-a-row in cellophane-wrapped cartons. During the winter, they were most likely grown in Florida. Today’s consumers demand variety. In the winter, my small town’s Shaw’s grocery store, which is a produce desert compared to larger, more urbane supermarkets, features a four-tiered display offering ten different varieties of fresh tomatoes. In addition to Florida rounds, I can buy cherry, grape, plum, on-the-vine-cluster, hydroponic, and organic tomatoes. Those tomatoes journey from greenhouses in Vermont and Canada and fields in Florida and Mexico—but mostly Mexico.
Although it has not officially been declared, a tomato war has raged for the past two decades between Florida and Mexico. Florida is losing. When it started, Mexican imports accounted for about one-fifth of the U.S. tomato consumption. That figure has since risen to one-third. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into force in 1994, certainly helped Mexico. Almost immediately after the treaty was enacted, American growers claimed that Mexico was dumping tomatoes on the market at prices below what they cost to produce. Rather than risk tariffs or other sanctions, Mexico agreed to a settlement that established a minimum value at which it would offer tomatoes for sale to this country. But Mexico still had several key advantages over Florida, among them better weather, better soils, and lower wages. But the Mexicans’ far-sighted business strategies also played a role. In the early 1990s, Mexican growers pioneered new production techniques. Instead of producing “gassed green” tomatoes, they opted to plant newly developed “extended shelf life” varieties bred by Israeli horticulturists that could be allowed to ripen on the vine and still survive shipment to distant markets, depriving Florida growers of their geographical advantage. The Mexicans also adopted greenhouse culture, which has helped increase their share of the fresh tomato market. The profits reaped during the 2010 freeze left Mexican farmers flush with capital to invest in expansion at a time when Florida growers were just hoping to hang on long enough to plant another season’s crops. “They made enough during that freeze to keep their foot on our neck for a decade,” Brown said.
While it is true that Florida’s tomato production is dominated by large agribusinesses, they are mostly family held, private companies that lack the financial leverage of most corporations. They are tiny compared with their fast food, supermarket, and institutional food-service customers. They are also dwarfed by their suppliers, who are multinational corporations such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Bayer CropScience. Almost everything a tomato farmer buys to raise a crop is petroleum based—chemical fertilizers, pesticides, plastic row covers, plastic bins, and fuel for tractors and trucks—and prices rise in lockstep with a barrel of oil. Little wonder that bankers are none too eager to lend money against a future harvest. Owners have to dig into their own bank accounts to get through lean years. And an increasing number are no longer willing or able to do that. Twenty years ago, there were about three hundred commercial tomato farms in the state. Currently there are fewer than seventy-five, and the number continues to shrink. “If Americans want imported food, they’ll be dependent on imported food before they know it, because we’ll be broke and gone,” said Brown.
Florida tomatoes also face pressure from greenhouse and hydroponic producers located in Canada and the United States as well as Mexico. “The greenhouse market has just exploded in the last decade. There have been fascinating volume shifts,” said Brown, who holds their products in the same disdain that foodies reserve for Florida’s mature greens. “Our tomatoes are not a manufactured product, as opposed to what is grown in the greenhouse industry. They have a standard set of plant genetics, a standard set of environmental conditions, and they squirt them out like widgets. That’s why the entire retail shelf is totally dominated by greenhouse tomatoes. The consumer perceives them to be of great value because they are beautiful and on the vine and they smell like tomatoes, but that’s just a gimmick. If all a tomato has is water, what’s it going to taste like? Maybe we should get scratch-and-sniff stickers for our field-grown tomatoes.”
Regardless of what they do to burnish their image, Florida tomato growers just can’t get no respect, in Brown’s view. “It’s frustrating,” he said. “The Coalition of Immokalee Workers needs a bogeyman. We’re it. And once an accusation is hurled in the media, it never goes away and rarely gets fact-checked. It just gets repeated, over and over again. When people are convinced that we’re the monsters that we’ve been painted to be, you don’t change their minds. Doing good things and being good citizens and business people does not make the papers. We’ve tried to tell our story, but reporters are not interested. Yelling Fire! sells.”
Brown said that Florida farmers got almost no press coverage when they endowed the Farmworker Community Support Foundation, which in 2010 donated $160,000 for improved health care and early childhood education programs in South Florida. Growers have been longtime supporters of the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, which operates daycare centers, preschools, and charter schools throughout rural Florida. They funded an AIDs education program for male migrant workers. They backed a campaign to provide dental care for pregnant farmworker mothers. Tomato money provides scholarships for Immokalee high school graduates to continue their education. Exchange members have underwritten a scholarship at the University of South Florida’s College of Education. In the 2008–2009 crop year, the Tomato Committee donated nearly $300,000 to fund university research projects.
The industry was also a pioneer in food safety, Brown said. “When we voluntarily started down that road, all my friends in the produce association business said that we were nuts. ‘Just stonewall the regulators,’ they said. We said that the right thing to do was figure out how we could do things better to try to lessen the chances of disease outbreaks caused by tomatoes. We worked with the Food and Drug Administration, and we came to the party long before the leafy-greens people came. We wanted to do whatever we could to prevent a major foodborne-illness crisis.”
To uncover labor abuses in the fields, the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association established a group called Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE) in 2005. Reggie Brown is on the board of directors and is listed as the organization’s contact person. The nonprofit organization was established to provide independent auditing to make sure that certified farms used fair and legal employment practices and to make sure the fields were “free from hazard and violence.” These were some of the steps the coalition’s Campaign for Fair Food was demanding farmers take, but from the outset there were complaints that SAFE was a case of the industry fox guarding the henhouse if there ever was one. No one representing Florida migrant workers sat on the SAFE board, although three of the five members headed organizations that had received generous financial support from tomato growers and other farmers. The skeptics’ position was vindicated in 2007, when the SAFE auditor declared that the fields of Immokalee were slavery free only days before the high-profile Navarrete case came to light, and further vindicated a year later when court proceedings revealed that Navarrete slaves had worked on farms controlled by two SAFE-certified companies.
Brown insisted that Florida tomato farmers abhorred slavery as much as anybody. “But there’s slavery in other places, too, in the United States. You go to any city where you have nail parlors or Chinese restaurants, and you’re going to be able to find human trafficking.” As for the housing conditions in Immokalee, he agreed they were an embarrassment to the industry but pointed out that the farmers did not own the decrepit Immokalee trailers. In other areas where they did provide housing for their workers, he noted, the accommodations were government regulated and inspected by the health department.
Tomato growers, he claimed, complied with the same labor laws as other employers. “We pay the same wage that McDonald’s and Burger King pay in their shops to the people that work the counter. It’s minimum wage. That’s the law of the land. But because we have a seasonal business, our employees may not work for us twelve months a year, but in the period they are working for us, they’re making minimum wage.” People who accuse the tomato growers of not paying the workers enough to live off of, he said, are only looking at one slice of a migrant’s income stream. “That worker might be employed by eight or ten different companies during the course of twelve months. He could be in North Carolina in the summer picking tomatoes and New York State picking apples in the fall before he comes back here.”
The proof that growers pay competitive wages, Brown contended, is that there is no labor shortage in the tomato industry. Their rates, he maintained, match those paid by other employers for jobs requiring similar skills and abilities. “Otherwise, they’d work for someone else. And some of these folks have been working for us for five or ten years. It’s hard work, but it’s good work.”
Brown was given an opportunity to present his industry’s side of the story to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions during an April 2008 hearing on improving working conditions for tomato workers. “It was the worst day in my entire career up to that point, and the toughest,” he said. “You can imagine yourself trying to make an honest presentation of how we saw the issues, when the rest of the table knew for sure that I was the devil incarnate, including the senators, all Democrats. There was not a friend in that hearing room. It was no good to be falsely accused and so defamed as an industry for something that we weren’t doing. But Senate hearings are an art—almost like bull baiting.”
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) presided over the hearing. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) were also present. All of them had reputations for being vehemently prolabor. In their opening statements, the senators focused on wages, honing in on two claims that the Tomato Exchange had made. The first, which appeared on its Web site and was later repeated by Reggie Brown at the hearing, was that the wages paid to tomato pickers averaged over twelve dollars an hour. Senator Durbin asked that the committee join him in doing the math. At the going rate in 2008 of forty to sixty cents per thirty-two-pound bucket, a harvester would have to pick about three thousand tomatoes each hour—nearly one per second. He would have to fill a bushel-size bucket, run over to the truck, dump it, and run back to his assigned row every two minutes. “Is that physically possible?” asked Durbin. “I don’t think it is.”
In his testimony, Lucas Benitez of the coalition called Brown’s bluff. He said that he could refute the claim that pickers could get twelve dollars an hour by citing reports from the U.S. Labor Department and respected sources within the produce industry. “I want to make this issue as clear as possible. If Mr. Brown can guarantee that $12.46 an hour, backed up by a verifiable system of hours with time clocks in the fields and thereby eliminate the antiquated system of work by the piece, then we will take it. However, unfortunately, I don’t think that I have to be a fortune teller to know what the response will be.”
The hearing moved on to the exchange’s refusal to pass the penny-per-pound rate increase along to the workers. Brown said that in theory the penny-per-pound idea seemed like a good one. “For the record, we do not object to the fast food chains paying extra to the workers who pick the tomatoes they buy. Our members simply do not want to be part of that arrangement.”
One of the difficulties, he said, was that it would be impossible to determine which pickers harvested the tomatoes destined for the chains who had agreed to the Campaign for Fair Food’s requests. “During harvest, tomatoes that the workers pick are not individually identified or labeled by worker or by customer. At the time of harvest, a tomato picked by a worker could ultimately be purchased by any number of the producer’s direct customers,” he said. And those customers would in turn buy tomatoes from several producers and intermingle them. Brown said that growers feared they would be open to lawsuits from workers who were treated unfairly. “Workers also could allege that there is/was a scheme to defraud them and each check issued [allegedly in an incorrect amount] could be a separate bank or wire fraud. This is by definition a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] case. What’s more, RICO allows plaintiffs to bring additional grounds to allege fraud-based activities on whatever size enterprise they seek to attack.” The exchange’s members, said Brown, were also concerned that the extra-penny-per-pound program constituted an attempt to restrain trade.
Sanders asked Brown if the legal opinions were his idea, or whether he had gotten opinions from attorneys.
Brown replied, “We purchased legal opinions from legal firms in this country to affirm those opinions, yes.”
Sanders countered that the fast food companies who entered into the penny-per-pound agreement had also sought legal advice. “Yum! Brands—and this is, as you know, not a small company. This is a huge corporation that, I gather, has the money to hire expert legal advice,” said Sanders, pointing out that the committee had received a letter from the fast food giant’s senior vice president saying, “Yum! Brands’s attorneys are fully confident that the agreement is legal.” Sanders also reported that the committee had received a letter signed by twenty-six law professors from around the country stating, “The ostensible legal concerns of the growers exchange are utterly without merit. Growers who comply with the agreements will not violate antitrust, labor, or racketeering laws. The unfounded assertions of the growers exchange should not deter any grower from adhering to the agreements, nor should those assertions deter any fast-food company or other buyer from entering into similar future agreements. The only real …” Here Sanders paused for effect and said, “I would like you to listen to this. This is according to twenty-six law professors around the country.” He resumed, “The only real antitrust concern would arise if several growers agree among themselves to not participate in the monitoring program.” Sanders also pointed out that lawyers representing McDonald’s had issued opinions similar to that of the law professors. “I gather McDonald’s has the resources to hire some pretty good lawyers,” he said. Finally, he told Brown that the Senate committee itself had engaged two nationally recognized law firms to look at the Campaign for Fair Food agreement and that they had concluded that any claims that the terms of the agreement violated the Sherman antitrust law appeared meritless.
Brown replied, “Senator, that is one group of legal opinions. Our legal opinion is different, okay?”
“You might want to reconsider the attorneys that you are currently consulting,” said Senator Sanders.
“I was fried,” Brown told me.
That seemed like an accurate summation of Brown’s bad day in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. But, although Tomato Exchange removed the threat of $100,000 fines to members who cooperated with the coalition, members of the group otherwise remained defiant. Two and a half more years would go by before the Tomato Exchange capitulated.
In early 2009, after the sentencing of the Navarrete family members for slavery, then Florida governor Charlie Crist agreed to meet with coalition members. It represented a landmark. The workers had been asking Florida governors to sit down with them and discuss their plight for fifteen years—through four administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and Crist was the first to do so, perhaps inspired by the effect that national media reports on working conditions in his state might have on his impending (and ultimately unsuccessful) run for the U.S. Senate. After the meeting, Crist wrote in a letter to Benitez and Reyes:
I have no tolerance of slavery in any form, and I am committed to elimination of this injustice anywhere in Florida. I unconditionally support the humane and civilized treatment of all employees, including those who work in Florida’s agricultural industry. Any type of abuse in the workplace is unacceptable.
I support the Coalition’s Campaign for Fair Food, whereby corporate purchasers of tomatoes have agreed to contribute monies for the benefit of the tomato fieldworkers. I commend these purchasers for their participation, and I encourage the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange and its members to participate in the campaign so that these monies can reach and provide assistance to the workers.
Florida’s agricultural industry has always had close relations with the state’s politicians. Crist’s letter must have stung, but it didn’t alter the exchange’s position.
Although major grocery chains (with the notable exception of Whole Foods) still held out, the Campaign for Fair Food had so far been a phenomenal success. Together, the fast food and food-service companies that had signed agreements bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Florida tomatoes each year. Their market share represented a huge financial incentive to any large tomato grower. If bad publicity was the coalition’s stick to prod recalcitrant producers, the buying power wielded by its roster of corporate partners was its carrot, and the carrot was growing bigger and juicier with each passing season. It seemed like only a matter of time before a large farmer broke ranks with his peers to get his share (or more) of that business. In the fall of 2009, that break occurred. East Coast Growers and Packers quit the exchange and signed on with the coalition. In a lesson that was not lost on other Florida producers, Chipotle Mexican Grill, the burrito chain with more than nine hundred restaurants across the country, immediately announced that henceforth it would be getting its tomatoes from East Coast Growers and Packers.
If supporters of the coalition thought that East Coast’s defection would have an immediate domino effect, they were wrong. When I met with Brown, the growers were still hanging tough. I asked if the exchange was in talks with the coalition, and he said, “We don’t have any contact with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. We don’t have anything to do with them.” He said that he really didn’t know what the coalition was. Was it an unofficial union? Was it a community organization? Was it a grassroots movement?
Five months later almost to the day, an unexpected telephone call came into the coalition’s office. Reggie Brown was on the line. The exchange was ready to join the Campaign for Fair Food.
In the intervening months, two other major tomato operations agreed to the coalition’s terms. Heading into the 2010–2011 season, after having been battered the previous year by the catastrophic freeze and subsequent collapse in tomato prices, and still stinging from the negative attention brought on them when it was revealed that the Navarretes’ enslaved crew had worked on their farms, Pacific Tomato Growers and Six L’s came aboard. With three of their largest competitors now part of the campaign, it was no longer feasible for the exchange’s other members to hold out.
A little after one o’clock in the afternoon on November 16, 2010, Brown sat down beside coalition members Reyes and Benitez at a folding table set up in the backyard of the coalition’s headquarters for a press conference.
“Our industry is and always has been strongly committed to supporting real, long-term and comprehensive solutions that improve the lives of all farm workers and their families,” he read from a statement issued by participating farms. “That’s why we have agreed to work with the CIW in establishing new standards of verifiable social accountability for the tomato industry as a whole. We realize that this is a work in progress and that this partnership will get stronger over time. It will not be completed overnight. As time goes by, we are confident that we will be able to weed out the bad actors and, working together, build a stronger, more sustainable industry that will be better equipped than ever to thrive in an increasingly competitive market place.”
No other fruit or vegetable growers’ group in the United States had ever inked such a far-reaching deal with representatives of its workers. With the stroke of a pen, Florida’s tomato producers had put themselves on the road to becoming the most progressive employers in the country’s produce industry. Under the terms of the new arrangement, the 2010–2011 crop year would involve only Pacific and Six L’s. These two companies would work with the coalition to iron out practical issues such as the ones Brown had raised in the Senate hearing and build a template for full implementation of the Fair Food Code of Conduct, which would be rolled out to all participating growers the following year.
With a major victory behind it, the coalition refocused its efforts on the supermarket chains. By securing the exchange’s cooperation, a conduit had been opened for those extra pennies per pound. The onus had shifted to the grocery stores to join the fast food industry and others and pay a little more for their tomatoes. “Make no mistake,” Benitez cautioned at the press conference. “There is still much to be done. This is the beginning, not the end, of a very long journey.”
Sitting together at that table in the coalition’s backyard, Reggie Brown and Lucas Benitez could certainly agree on that.