THE 2010s HAVE SEEN A GLOBAL REFUGEE CRISIS on a scale larger than any since World War II. Millions are fleeing war and famine. Millions more have become economic refugees. Between those who move abroad for work and those who migrate internally, something close to half a billion people are on the move, one in fourteen people on earth. Mostly, when people think about labor migration, we imagine rural people choosing to move to cities or other places where workers are needed. But in the twenty-first century, much labor migration has been involuntary. To make sense of the waves of peasant protest, we need to understand that.
In 2007–2008, a global spike in food prices fueled protests in Haiti, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, Yemen, Indonesia, and other places in a hungry world. UN officials warned that unrest would likely increase as hunger spread. Emissaries from many of the world’s nations met in pursuit of “food security.” The solution proposed by agribusiness, the World Bank, and some scientists was to modernize farming, to wage a new “Green Revolution.”
We will soon be unable to feed the world’s people, proponents of this crisis narrative argued, if we do not grow food more efficiently. We can no longer depend on small farmers who have fed the world for millennia. Indigenous seeds do not produce high enough yields. Scientists have invented “better” seeds. Chemical companies have patented and mass-produced them. Global lenders stand ready to help governments buy and distribute them to farmers, and to enable farmers to purchase the fertilizers and pesticides that will make the new seeds produce.1
The 2008 global economic meltdown heightened the sense of urgency. As investors scrambled to find lucrative, stable places to invest, corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Company and other analysts argued that investing in agriculture promised higher returns than information technology or heavy manufacturing. A global land rush followed.2
Across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, governments eased the way for foreign agribusiness. Plantations spread rapidly. Millions of farmers lost land and income. To get loans, small farmers switched from subsistence to cash crops. Others became contract farmers for foreign buyers. Debt deepened, foreclosure loomed.3
How much land changed hands after 2007? The Spanish organization GRAIN recorded land deals in seventy-eight countries for 75 million acres (30 million hectares), an area the size of Italy. The farmers’ group No Land No Life counted a thousand land deals over fifteen years in which 67.5 million acres (27 million hectares) of land were transferred from small farmers to corporations. That’s an area the size of New Zealand. And these were only the deals for food production. There were also land deals for biofuel plantations, timber, mining, fishing, and resort development.4
Across Asia, the twenty-first century has seen what activists call “agrarian reform in reverse.” South Korean farmers lost 30 million acres (12 million hectares), Filipino farmers the same amount. In China, 70 million acres (28 million hectares) passed from small farmers to “land trusts” after 2010. Meanwhile, Chinese agribusinesses bought or leased land for mega-farms in thirty-one countries, including the US, Brazil, Mozambique, and Australia. In Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, tens of millions of hectares of rain forests fell as palm oil, rubber, and sugar plantations spread like weeds.
In Cambodia, 70 percent of arable land was leased to rubber and sugar plantations after 2003, and 770,000 farm families were evicted. In 2014, these farmers organized, asking the International Criminal Court in The Hague to charge Cambodia’s leaders and private corporations with crimes against humanity. In October 2016, the court broadened its criteria for accepting cases to include land grabs and environmental destruction. Perhaps a new era is beginning.5
Sub-Saharan Africa was hit hard by these land grabs: especially Mozambique, Tanzania, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Sudan. Nine percent of Africa’s arable land changed hands. International investors bought the equivalent of the combined farmlands of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Vast rice and palm oil plantations displaced small farmers. In Liberia, one official sold rights to one-quarter of the country’s forests in 2012, including the last primary rain forest in West Africa. The deal earned forest-dwelling communities $2 a cubic acre for wood that brought $200 an acre on the world market. Mozambican leaders marketed their country as a “biofuel hub,” considering leases for millions of hectares every year.6
Meanwhile, palm oil plantations swallowed Global South rain forests. Driven by rising demand for biofuels and edible oils, palm oil production grew tenfold in the twenty-first century. Soon, it could be found in half of all supermarket products. Wilmar, which controls nearly half of the global palm oil market, was ranked by Newsweek in 2016 the most environmentally damaging company on earth, using up scarce water, spraying banned toxic pesticides, felling rain forests with breathtaking speed. The company was also cited for using child and slave labor. Most palm oil plantations are in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. But they are spreading across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Philippine government announced plans to expand palm oil production from 73,000 hectares in 2016 to 1.3 million hectares by 2020. Mindanao and its people are for sale.7
Industrial farming also transformed Latin America and Europe during the twenty-first century. Almost a million hectares of land in Brazil, 750,000 in Uruguay, and 500,000 in Argentina passed from small farmers to corporations after 2007. Small farms in Germany, Italy, France, and Austria were bought by Chinese, European, and Middle Eastern agribusiness companies. Ukraine became home to some of the largest farms in the world—flush with cash courtesy of Cargill, DuPont, and SigmaBleyzer, a global private equity firm based in Houston. In southern Spain, a sea of plastic greenhouses—“el mar de plastico”—is filled with tomatoes, citrus, and berries grown for export. Driscoll’s, “the world’s berry company,” bought up smaller Spanish growers to expand their empire.
Small European dairy farms began going under, unable to compete with mega-dairies. Mudanjiang, a twenty-two-million-acre dairy farm in China is the world’s largest farm, more than fifty times the size of any European dairy and as large in acreage as the nation of Portugal. The world’s second-largest farm is also a Chinese dairy, with acreage equivalent to that of Israel.8
European farm consolidation has been intensified by EU subsidies. Many Eastern European farmers went bankrupt when local markets were flooded with subsidized industrial farm produce. By 2013, 3 percent of European farms controlled more than half of the region’s farmland. In February 2017, dairy farmers from across Europe dumped a ton of dried milk on the grounds of the European Parliament in protest. Sardinian farmers occupied land where giant greenhouses were planned. Dairy farmers formed continental cooperatives to market their brands collectively. It is an uphill battle, say small farmers.9
Through it all, prices for the world’s staples—maize, rice, and wheat—continued to rise. One reason is that many hastily commenced large projects failed. Investors pulled out, leaving abandoned fields and ruined landscapes. In 2014, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization declared the new Green Revolution a failure, announcing that 70 percent of the world’s food was still being grown by small farmers. UN food scientists concluded that small-scale organic farming (or agroecology) is the only system that can generate true food security.10
By this time, hundreds of millions had been pushed off their lands, though, entering vast migrant streams, hoping to find work far from home. Many have become farmworkers. Global agriculture employs a third of the world’s workers. Many are dispossessed farmers.
In every high-income country, commercial farms depend on migrant labor. In the US, 80 percent of farmworkers are immigrants. The industry would collapse without them. Some farms are mechanizing, but that is exorbitantly expensive and only the wealthiest can afford it. Migrant workers feed the world. Without them, food prices everywhere would rise.
Most farmworkers are men under thirty-five, but there are millions of women and children in the fields too. They are common in berry fields where they harvest for the fastest-growing and most profitable sector of the global produce market. In the 2010s, strawberry growers in Spain explicitly recruited Moroccan mothers as guest workers, arguing that they would be compliant, hardworking, and—forced to leave their children behind—unlikely to overstay their work visas. But without homes to which they can return, many farmworkers bring children with them.
Child labor is declining worldwide but agriculture employs more children than any other sector. Of 168 million child laborers in 2016, two-thirds worked on farms: in Uzbekistan, local children were forced out of school and into cotton fields; children from Mali and Burkina Faso labored on cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire; Kyrgyz children picked tobacco in Kazakhstan.11
Three hundred thousand migrant children labor in US fields, the majority Mexican and Central American. US law permits growers to hire children between the ages of twelve and eighteen with no special permit. Those under twelve may work with parents’ permission. In North Carolina tobacco fields, where child labor is common, nicotine leaches into children’s blood through the plants they pick, causing headaches, nausea, and other symptoms of poisoning.12
As migrants flood the globe, labor traffickers profit from their desperation. Dispossessed workers go into debt to finance their travel. They pay exorbitantly for food, transportation, and housing. After migrants’ arduous journeys, traffickers sell their labor to farmers who have contracted for workers. Women and children, though promised good jobs, are always at risk of being sold as sex slaves.
Labor slavery is widespread in farmwork. When debts for travel, food, housing, and farm gear are not paid off by season’s end, migrants may be sold to another farmer and forced to work for free. In Russia, brokers have sold workers to farmers who destroyed their passports and then held them captive. In Malaysia, where a million migrants from Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam work, an employer may legally confiscate passports and physically “discipline” workers. In Greece, in 2013, a field boss shot twenty-nine Bangladeshi strawberry pickers when they dared to demand long-overdue pay.13
Wage theft is endemic. Some employers pay “gang-masters” rather than workers, husbands instead of wives. Or they pay in scrip, food, or alcohol rather than cash. Employers create fake social security numbers and, so they won’t be arrested or fined, pay into social insurance programs from which their undocumented workers will never draw benefits.
Dramatically substandard housing is common. Farmworkers are housed in pig stalls, tin sheds, cardboard boxes, greenhouses. And if workers want protection from sun, rain, or pesticides, they usually must buy or devise something themselves. Few farmers supply free protective gear.
As if all this were not hard enough, migrant farmworkers’ lives and labor are increasingly being criminalized worldwide. Rising right-wing populism, xenophobic violence, and deportation raids have made life in the twenty-first century difficult and dangerous. And farmworker-activists have become prime targets for arrest and detention by immigration authorities—for the simple reason that they refuse to hide.