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I’m back from a trip to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, as part of a delegation of food justice activists. For a full report, do read the thoughts of the excellent Tom Philpott. To supplement his report, though, I thought I'd jot down a couple of impressions.

Although I’d never been there before, our guided tour around the town of Immokalee felt familiar. Immokalee means ‘my home’ in Seminole. And it was peoples’ homes that I’d seen before, in another country. The trailers where tomato-pickers sleep reminded me of South African townships, filled with densely packed low-income houses, built by the government to keep the supply of black labour close, but not too close, to the cities where their work was required.

Except that the conditions in Apartheid era township houses were better than in Immokalee. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 184 comments

Posted on 7 March, 2009 - 17:15

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers won a major victory in 2005, when they brought Taco Bell to the negotiating table. The CIW are a broad coalition of farmworkers based in Florida, whose labour makes possible the ingredients in a wide range of foods. They protested their conditions of slavery in the US, and won substantial victories for their members. Read their history here, and then find out about their campaign for Fair Food, and more, at
http://www.ciw-online.org/

2 comments

Posted on 25 February, 2007 - 00:19