Building a Just and Humane Food System Through Collaborative Efforts

Twelve years after the publication of Agriculture At Risk, agriculture remains "among the nation's most hazardous occupations". While death rates in other hazardous industries such as mining continue to decrease, "death rates in agriculture remain constantly high " (Agriculture At Risk, p. 1). Certainly agriculture, like many other industries, carries some inherent risks. However, this trend reveals that the current health and safety crisis in agriculture is less due to the inherent nature of the occupation than it is a result of policy decisions that have consistently exempted agriculture from the advancements in occupational safety and health achieved in other industries. At the same time, agricultural communities in the U.S. are in economic turmoil. U.S. agriculture has been in a long and steady trend of consolidation and mechanization, resulting in increasingly larger and fewer farms. This has affected both the owners of farms (farmers) and agricultural employees (farmworkers). For example, the number of farms has been decreasing by one percent every year since 1987, while the number of hired farmworkers has decreased steadily in the past fifty years, from 9.9 million annually in 1950, to 2.9 million in 1997 (USDA, 1998). While huge profits continue to be made in the agricultural sector- the food sector is second onl