5-9-06
Contact: Reginald S. Hall, (803) 936-4409

Allow Guest Workers or
Outsource U.S. Food Production

By David Winkles, President,
South Carolina Farm Bureau Federation
Guest Editorial

Walk down the produce aisle of your grocery store today, and you are likely to see stickers on some of the fruits and vegetables indicating they were grown outside the United States. The chief reason is those products were not in season for U.S. growers.

However, if action is not taken soon in Congress to craft a comprehensive and workable guest worker program for agriculture, those foreign stickers on the produce you buy could become a year-round phenomenon. Studies show that without access to a legal temporary agricultural workforce, nearly one-third of our nation’s fruit and vegetable production will be outsourced.

What that means, is that instead of having full access to fruits and vegetables grown on U.S. soil you will be forced to buy more fruits and vegetables grown in other nations.

Why is that a concern? In part, it is a matter of security. Food security is something our nation has never worried about, in large part due to the productivity of American agriculture. But if guest workers are not available to help gather and transport that bounty from field to table, food security most definitely becomes a homeland security challenge. Backed by the promise of rigorous food safety regulations and cutting edge science, food grown on U.S. soil continues to be the safest in the world.

So, why is the lack of farm labor a problem now? There are several answers. U.S. agriculture’s demand for labor has stabilized at approximately 3 million workers. About 2 million workers are drawn from farm families, and about 1 million are hired.

Although no one knows the precise figure, estimates say that half or more of agriculture’s hired labor force of 1 million is not authorized to work in the U.S. If we clamp down on immigration at the border without providing a legal alternative, this labor supply simply vanishes.

Another answer is that most Americans have far better employment opportunities today. Ask any farmer. Farm work is hard, hot and arduous – work that most Americans today, beyond farmers and their family members, are unwilling to do at any wage. But, that does not mean these jobs do not present economic opportunities for some.

America always has been the land of opportunity. We shouldn’t – and we don’t need to – close our doors to people who work hard and who are law-abiding people with a strong sense of family values. They work for honest pay in order to improve their lives, while also improving ours by playing a vital role in the U.S. food production system. Legal foreign workers who will help us do the hard work of farming and ranching, and who return to their home countries on a scheduled basis, are important to the U.S. economy and keeping food affordable.

Without access to those temporary foreign workers, a large number of fruit and vegetable operations would likely shutter their packing sheds and rip out their fields and orchards for the rewards offered by the real estate value of their acreage. An American Farm Bureau study estimates that we would lose approximately one-third of our fruit and vegetable production. In these days of skyrocketing trade deficits, that would translate into an additional financial loss to our nation of between $5 billion and $9 billion each and every year.

The financial effects also would ripple across all sectors of American agriculture – with up to an additional $5 billion hit to net farm income here in the United States due to higher production costs and labor costs. Due to the structure of U.S. agriculture today – still predominantly family owned and operated, but larger in size – there just aren’t enough family members to perform all the tasks associated with running a modern farm or ranch – whether tending a herd or milking the cows.

So, the bottom line is this. America needs a viable foreign guest worker program now. The Senate must make a guest worker program part of the immigration reform package it approves, and that provision must be included in the final bill. Or sticker shock soon may have more than one definition – one that plays out each time you steer your shopping cart down the produce aisle.

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The South Carolina Farm Bureau Federation is a statewide non-profit membership organization that promotes the benefits of South Carolina’s agricultural economy and the hard work of family farmers.