California is often portrayed as one of the most immigrant-friendly states in the nation. While the state has a history of creating more inclusive policies for immigrant populations than at the federal level, it’s also true that undocumented immigrants are largely blocked from state programs that would enable them to access basic necessities. Understanding why—and why many immigrant communities remain afraid of accessing benefits—requires a bit of a history lesson.

‘Immigrants don’t belong here’ 

Undocumented immigrants—including children—have never been eligible for food stamps, and over the years federal officials have implemented policies to reduce other immigrant populations from accessing food assistance. 

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This law harshly restructured the nation’s entire welfare system, but was particularly devastating to immigrant communities, forcing Lawful Permanent Residents—who had previously been fully eligible—to wait five years before they could access federal public benefits. Research shows that after PRWORA became law, eligible immigrants’ participation in safety net programs fell sharply, likely because of the fear and stigma that became associated with them. PRWORA is also shown to have increased the proportion of uninsured immigrant women and children–this is in spite of the more inclusive approach later adopted by states like California that removed the five-year wait for qualified immigrants. 

But California is a mixed bag. 

Two years before PRWORA, California passed Proposition 187 which sought to punish undocumented immigrants by denying them access to public education and health care. The ballot measure, which was eventually struck down for being unconstitutional, also required police, health care professionals, and teachers to verify and report the immigration status of all individuals, including children.

“The message that these kinds of laws send is, ‘You don’t belong here and we’re closing our door to you,’” said Benyamin Chao, a policy analyst at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “That narrative has become so deeply ingrained that even when people are eligible and it’s safe for them to use public programs, they don’t enroll because they have been told over and over again that they don’t belong, these services are not for them, and they will be punished.” 

There’s also no overstating the chilling effect that anti-immigrant laws can have on communities. Take the “public charge” rule, for example. This exclusionary and racist test has been part of federal immigration law for over 100 years; it’s designed to restrict immigrants from adjusting their status or entering the United States if it is determined they are likely to depend on the government as a source of support. In 2019, the Trump administration expanded “public charge” to include a broader scope of “government assistance.” Under Trump, this included non-citizens who received one or more public benefits for more than 12 months. The administration also added requirements that would have made it even more difficult for people to immigrate. For example, characteristics like disability status, English proficiency, and income level would be judged more harshly. 

Trump’s regulations were struck down about a year ago, but a recent survey found that three out of four immigrant families were unaware that the previous administration’s public charge changes were repealed. The good news is that 50 percent of respondents said that knowledge about the reversal of the rule made them more likely to use safety net programs when necessary.

“There’s a lot at stake here,” Estudillo said. “Food is a human right. Everyone deserves to eat, but there is still so much stigma associated with food assistance programs and so many false narratives about who needs access to these programs.”

‘Everyone should have access to food’

Nearly half of the farm workers in California’s Central Valley report that they experience food insecurity—and this is the community that Senator Hurtado had in mind when she introduced SB 464. 

Hurtado’s district is in the Central Valley, known as the “salad bowl” because it produces a fourth of the nation’s food. The senator said it’s a “cruel reality” that the farm workers who toil in the fields to keep Americans fed cannot afford to put food on their own tables. As the daughter of immigrants who grew up in poverty and experienced food insecurity, she wanted to do something about it. 

“These are people who feed us, and they are people who have worked through the pandemic and deal with the effects of climate change; they work through extreme heat, droughts, and wildfires,” Hurtado said. “It should not be controversial to say that everyone should have access to food, documented or not.” 

Yet it clearly is controversial, but there are a number of groups in California that operate from the understanding that food is a human right. Take Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, for example. The Fresno-based organization connects undocumented farm workers to services like local food distribution programs. Clarissa Vivian-Petrucci, special project coordinator at the immigrant integration organization, told The Counter that farm workers often stand in line at food distribution sites two to three hours in advance, fearful the food will run out and they won’t be able to bring anything home to their children. 

“The situation is very serious. People are going hungry and even those who can enroll in a [government] program because they have U.S. citizen children will not because they are still afraid of the public charge,” Vivian-Petrucci said. 

Even if community members don’t mention the public charge rule by name, it’s clear there is a looming fear about repercussions associated with accessing programs. 

Guillermo and Augustina, who are only using their first names for safety reasons, are undocumented California farm workers who said that food insecurity is a real issue for their family and people in the Indigenous farmworker community.  

The married couple are Mixtec and hail from the town of Santa Cruz in the Mexican state of Guerrero. According to the Indigenous empowerment organization the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), California is home to an estimated 170,000 indigenous migrants from the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán, including Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Purépechas. These Indigenous populations often only speak their native, pre-Hispanic languages.

Guillermo and Augustina, who speak Mixtec but not Spanish, settled in California with their two children in 2019 and almost immediately went to work in the strawberry fields. They joined thousands of other Indigenous migrants in the agricultural industry, earning seasonal wages and receiving no benefits. Through multiple layers of interpretation, the couple explained to The Counter that their food costs aren’t exorbitant because they rely on inexpensive staples like beans, rice, and maseca to make tortillas, but as their workloads decrease during the off season, purchasing even basic necessities is a hardship–and produce is often out of the question. 

The couple is lucky to live in a tight-knit community that includes relatives, so when they don’t have enough money for food, there are people they can turn to. However, Guillermo and Augustina’s family members also struggle with food insecurity. 

“In bad years, we may only work four hours a day and that’s all the work we can get–and that’s when the difficulty starts when it comes to accessing food,” Guillermo explained. “We always want to buy vegetables, but the cost is more than we can afford during these times. These are the circumstances that many people in my community find themselves in.” 

Removing immigration restrictions from California’s food benefits program has the ability to drastically improve the quality of life for undocumented farmworker families. Research links food insecurity to harmful outcomes for children, including poor physical and mental health and adverse effects on development. Guillermo said that if the law changed to provide access to food for undocumented families, that would be “great,” but he had concerns about how participating in the program could later be weaponized against his family. 

“What if the next [official] changes the law in the future, would we have to pay back the support they gave us? That would be our biggest worry. When our children become adults, would they have to pay back the food benefits? We would sign up for the support if it was guaranteed the law would not change to hurt us in the future,” Guillermo said. 

But there are other barriers, too. Augustina explained that sometimes agency representatives of public benefits offering help to farm workers only speak English and Spanish. “We need help from people who can speak our language. We would need support to fill out the forms and we would need to know in advance what kind of documents would be needed to access this support,” she said. 

These are issues that are already on Vivian-Petrucci’s radar. The special projects coordinator said that if the California Food Assistance Program expands to provide state-funded nutrition benefits to undocumented immigrants, efforts to reach families who speak Indigenous languages should be a priority. However, this would require collaboration between organizations and government agencies—and thinking outside of the box. In the past, live Facebook presentations have proven to be a powerful tool for reaching communities, and Vivian-Petrucci said that organizations without Indigenous language speakers can coordinate with consulate officials who have access to translator databases.

“There are people in the community who don’t speak English or Spanish, who cannot read, and who do not know how to use a computer,” Vivian-Petrucci said. “There will be obstacles, but if we can work together we can eliminate these barriers and make sure people have equitable access to food.” 

SB 464 is unlikely to move this year, so those behind the Food4All campaign have set their sights on the state budget. California currently has a budget surplus of $68 billion and thanks to a proposal from Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, advocates hope Governor Newsom will include funds in the state’s June budget to expand CFAP to undocumented immigrants of all ages. 

In the coming days, Newsom will unveil the updated 2022-23 California state budget proposal. Meanwhile, the surplus has prompted a flurry of spending proposals from lawmakers, including a plan to send $200 checks to California taxpayers to help with soaring gas prices. Estudillo said she hopes Newsom ultimately moves away from these kinds of short-term, one-off efforts. 

“The question I always go back to is whether we are helping those most in need—especially low-income, undocumented immigrants who have been on the frontlines of the pandemic and are shut out of safety net programs,” Estudillo said. “This budget surplus is unprecedented and I think it’s important to use our state’s resources wisely and not lose sight of the long-term investments we could make that would really get to the root of so many injustices and inequities in our state.”

In a statement to The Counter, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said that California has made “historic investments” to support immigrant communities, including expanding access to health care and anti-poverty programs, bolstering pro bono immigration services, and supporting entrepreneurship and educational opportunities. 

“The Governor has built upon this by proposing to expand Medi-Cal to everyone eligible regardless of immigration status, expand food assistance to all eligible older adults regardless of immigration status, invest $500 base deposits into college savings accounts for millions of immigrant families, expand migrant child care, and created Universal Transitional Kindergarten free for all four-year-olds,” the statement said. 

The spokesperson did not respond to The Counter’s question regarding whether Governor Newsom would use the budget surplus to expand the California Food Assistance Program to undocumented immigrants of all ages, or comment on how the administration weighs short-term assistance like $200 gas payments with long-term investments.

“Gas rebates for people like me who have cars? Sure, that feels really nice,” Estudillo said. “But are we truly supporting those who are most in need? Not just people who don’t have cars, but people who regularly struggle to put food on the table? You can’t eat a gas rebate.”

The post California is moving toward food assistance for all populations—including undocumented immigrants appeared first on The Counter.

The rise of industrial hog farms—and pollution—in North Carolina

Like many Black families in Eastern North Carolina in the 1960s, White-Williamson’s grandfather and other family members raised hogs. The animals roamed the fields near their home and were fed corn and kitchen scraps, a far cry from the factory farms that have since overtaken Duplin and Sampson Counties. These rural communities are now the top hog-producing regions in the state and the country.

“Starting in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, there was just a constant increase in industrialized farms in Eastern North Carolina and these operations were often slammed into low-income communities and communities of color, and these communities haven’t been the same since,” White-Williamson said.

Between 1985 and 1998, North Carolina moved up the ranks in hog production among U.S. states, becoming the second-highest behind Iowa. In large part, this was made possible by former state senator Wendell Murphy, the man credited with “building the modern pig business.” In the 1960s, Murphy founded Duplin County’s Murphy Family Farms. The company, which became one of the largest hog producers in the nation, was sold to Smithfield Foods in the 1990s.

This was around the same time Murphy sponsored a bill that, for seven years, allowed for the proliferation of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—otherwise known as factory farms—centered in Eastern North Carolina. In 1992, Smithfield Foods opened the world’s largest meat processing plant in Bladen County. The company is now the world’s largest pork producer and owns or operates more than 200 hog farms in North Carolina, in addition to six feed mills and hundreds of contract farms. 

Reporting on Murphy tends to focus on his humble beginnings and his role in the expansion of North Carolina’s billion dollar industrial hog farming industry, rather than on the way these operations wreak environmental havoc in a region now at the center of multiple ecological disasters.

In the early ‘90s, residents warned officials about environmental impacts, to no avail. The hog industry was becoming valuable—an industry worth more than $1 billion in North Carolina. And as it grew, so did the waste—to disastrous results. In 1995, the worst hog waste spill in North Carolina history occurred, followed by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which broadly contaminated groundwater, wells, and rivers with waste from hog farms. State officials vowed to do something and came up with an agreement with Smithfield, but it “lacked teeth”—to the great detriment of residents, mostly communities of color. It should come as no surprise that concentrating the state’s hog waste in a region that is low-lying and flood-prone remains a bad idea. During Hurricane Florence in 2018, at least 110 lagoons in the state either released hog waste into the environment or were at “imminent risk” of doing so. 

An uphill battle for communities of color fighting back

In 2018, the North Carolina Medical Journal published an issue devoted to environmental health in the state. The published findings confirmed what the residents of Duplin and Sampson Counties already knew: Those who live near hog CAFOs have higher death rates of all studied diseases, and rates of infant mortality, anemia, kidney disease, septicemia, and tuberculosis were higher in communities with hog CAFOs. 

“Communities don’t have the resources that the agricultural industry has, so the industry has been able to sell a story of prosperity and economic development and jobs and all the good things that you would hope from an industry. The community knows these things are not all true, but it’s hard to counter the level of money that the industry can use to support decision makers who are more likely to support what the industry wants rather than considering the needs and the health of the local community members they are supposed to be representing,” White-Williamson said.

Still, local residents put up a good fight against agricultural operations in the state. Beginning around 2014, 26 federal nuisance lawsuits were brought against Smithfield and its subsidiaries by more than 500 majority Black plaintiffs. Overwhelmingly, these were longtime residents who’d grown sick of the flies, buzzards, squealing, stench and other conditions typical of living near hog operations. In 2018 and 2019, juries awarded 36 plaintiffs a total of almost $550 million, a number that was reduced to about $98 million because of a state law that caps punitive damages.

Also in 2014, the Waterkeeper Alliance, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, and the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network filed a complaint under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality with the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging that DEQ’s permitting and oversight of swine CAFOs has a racially discriminatory impact on Black, Latino, and American Indian North Carolinians.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. As a recipient of federal funds, DEQ must adhere to Title VI of the act, which prohibits discrimination in any program or activity that receives federal funds or other federal financial assistance.

In 2018, the groups reached a settlement agreement with DEQ that included air and water quality testing in select counties and a pledge by the agency to “develop a more robust Title VI program governing all DEQ activities, including a method to assess potential community impacts related to agency decisions.” But DEQ is at the center of yet another complaint alleging racial discrimination. 

In September of last year, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a civil rights complaint with EPA on behalf of the Duplin County Branch of the North Carolina Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign, alleging that DEQ’s issuance of Smithfield’s biogas permits would have a disproportionate impact on communities of color in Duplin and Sampson Counties. The EPA, in connection to the complaint, is also looking into whether NC DEQ has a public participation policy and process that is consistent with Title VI and the other federal civil rights laws. 

Addressing Smithfield’s biogas permits with a civil rights complaint may seem like an unusual strategy, but according to Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who filed the recent complaint against DEQ, traditional legal tools like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act provide loopholes for agricultural operations. 

“Options are very limited when it comes to addressing the racially disparate impact of agricultural operations, but the Title VI complaint process with the EPA is a legal tool that communities do have at their disposal to bring to light environmental injustice,” Hildebrand said.  

One of the ways that an agency can violate Title VI, Hildebrand added, is by making policy decisions that have a discriminatory impact. 

DEQ told The Counter it is committed to the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all North Carolinians.” The agency said that since 2017, it has given significant priority to compliance with Title VI requirements, particularly with regard to animal waste permitting.

For the four biogas permits, DEQ said it conducted enhanced public outreach, an environmental justice analysis, and held a public meeting and comment period to provide an opportunity for community input on the four farm modifications. 

“DEQ staff reviewed the concerns raised by the public and carefully evaluated the permit modifications to address the concerns within the existing authority of the agency and applicable state rules and regulations,” a DEQ spokesperson said in a statement. 

The pollution caused by hog waste lagoons is in some ways preventable. After Hurricane Floyd in 1999, Smithfield said it would abandon its lagoon and sprayfield systems and develop and implement cleaner, more sustainable hog waste technologies. The company followed through on its word–kind of. 

Smithfield invested $15 million to research how to upgrade its waste management systems, which led to a 2013 report concluding that a system developed by a North Carolina company called Terra Blue met existing industry regulations and could improve existing hog farming operations and be incorporated into new or expanded hog farms. The Terra Blue system involves replacing the old lagoons with open tanks, which helps protect groundwater and land and surface waterways. But Smithfield chose not to adopt the technology, claiming it did not meet criteria for “economic feasibility.”

Instead, it appears Smithfield has chosen to pivot to biogas operations. Not only does this keep the old lagoon system in place, it increases water pollution because it leads to higher concentrations of ammonia in the sprayed waste. Smithfield will profit from these conditions while claiming to address greenhouse gas emissions, a serious environmental issue its own industry is significantly responsible for. According to Hildebrand, very little about Smithfield’s biogas operations is “clean” and “green.”

“The hog industry decided that the cheapest way to dispose of billions of gallons of hog waste was to put it in a pit in the ground and then spray it on a nearby field,” Hildebrand said. “That process produces methane, and now the industry is proposing a ‘solution’ that would cap the open air pits with the goal of reducing methane emissions. I don’t dispute that wanting to reduce emissions is a good thing, but they’re trading a methane emissions problem for an ammonia emissions problem without ever really addressing the pollution and public health crisis that has been playing out on the ground in Eastern North Carolina for decades.” 

Smithfield maintains that their biogas operations in North Carolina are designed to support communities and the environment by making existing hog farms more sustainable, but reporting has shown that they are difficult to sustainably maintain. The company also asserts that their biogas permits were approved following a “robust and unprecedented permit and outreach process.”

“Turning methane from hog farms into clean energy is an innovative, sustainable practice and an absolute win for North Carolina, the communities where Smithfield operates, and the environment,” said Jim Monroe, Smithfield’s vice president of corporate affairs. “Manure-to-energy programs are critical to making hog farming, which is vital to the economic health of Eastern North Carolina and plays an imperative role in feeding the country, more sustainable.”

University of Iowa professor Silvia Secchi studies the environmental impacts of agriculture. She told The Counter that strategically, Smithfield’s shift to biogas is a smart move. By using climate change to rationalize its push for biogas operations in North Carolina and other states, Smithfield is making it more difficult for local communities to push back on its operations. 

“Agriculture is one of the least regulated industries in the United States, so these biogas operations are going to be an uphill battle for communities because any regulations will always be subject to modifications that favor the agricultural industry,” Secchi said.“It screws with communities of color on the front end by telling them they have to put up with biogas operations because it’s a climate change mitigation solution, and it screws with them on the back end because it isn’t actually a solution and the climate change created by the operations will disproportionately affect them,” Secchi said.

Addressing false narratives

In January of this year, EPA announced that it is investigating the discrimination complaint filed last year against DEQ on behalf of organizations in Sampson and Duplin Counties. William J. Barber III sees this as a “promising development.” 

Barber grew up in Eastern North Carolina and is currently the director of climate and environmental justice at the Climate Reality Project founded by former vice president, Al Gore. Barber is also the son of Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, a North Carolina movement that confronts racism, poverty, environmental injustice, militarism, and “the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.” They’re also one of the organizations behind the complaint against DEQ.

As co-chair of the group’s ecological justice committee, William J. Barber III told The Counter that he has encountered families who have been in Sampson and Duplin Counties for decades, leading multiple generations to experience the kind of adverse health effects that have become common for those living in close proximity to hog CAFOs–including asthma. Barber said the environmental hazards wrought by agricultural companies in the Southeast are a “pressing, critical issue” that must be addressed. 

“Part of the work in North Carolina is to address false narratives,” Barber said. “These corporations try to pit environmentalists against farmers or make it appear as though we oppose small family farms. That couldn’t be further from the truth. These biogas operations are not run by small family farms; corporations are running these operations. Often, they are foreign corporations that are actually getting premiums to basically pollute American communities and call it green energy.”  

Smithfield Foods was purchased in 2013 by Chinese conglomerate WH Group, and the company’s ever-growing footprint in North Carolina is openly embraced by elected officials. In 2018 when Smithfield opened a 500,000-square foot facility in Tar Heel, farmer Steve Troxler, a Republican and the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services, applauded the company for its “continued support” of North Carolina’s agricultural industry. 

North Carolina’s stance on environmental issues is muddled. At the beginning of the year, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper issued an executive order to establish new carbon reduction emissions goals to reduce pollution, create good jobs, and protect communities. Barber said the executive order creates an opportunity for a more “robust conversation” about the connection between climate and equity, but that it’s also time to move beyond talk. 

“We have to really push decision makers beyond conversation and beyond abstract claims,” Barber said. “We have to have a real plan for addressing climate injustice that should include taking a look at our public participatory process for agriculture permits and updating our cumulative impact assessments. [DEQ] looked at the biogas permits with a minimal kind of lens, without thinking holistically about the harms to the community related to public health, environmental impacts, and their larger contributions to the climate crisis.” 

In a statement to The Counter, Cooper’s press secretary Jordan Monaghan said that state environmental regulators must follow the law to determine permits and protect the health and safety of North Carolinians.

Iowa is the top pork-producing state in the nation and it grapples with many of the same environmental issues as North Carolina–though the populations harmed by hog operations in Iowa are decidedly different than in North Carolina, Secchi explained.  

“Iowa is predominantly white and we have CAFOs pretty much all over the state. It’s different in North Carolina because the CAFOs are concentrated in certain parts of the state—not just because those areas have cropland to dispose of the manure,” Secchi said. “There is very clear evidence that these areas were chosen for operations because local communities don’t have the same pull with legislators as white communities. I think we can deduce that they decided these communities were poor and marginalized and operations would be met with less resistance.” 

This is why agencies like DEQ are so important. As the department in charge of North Carolina’s environmental resources, part of the agency’s stated mission is transparency and holding bad actors accountable. DEQ is also supposed to serve as a community’s defense against serious environmental hazards. But White-Williamson said the agency has just been “checking boxes” when it comes to low income communities and communities of color.  

“In this region, there are 18-wheelers constantly going to these industrial facilities to pick up and deliver feed or animals to swine and poultry operations, causing diesel emissions. There are trains in communities often sitting for days waiting to be loaded or unloaded,” White-Williamson explained. “The totality of all of these impacts was not considered when the biogas permits were issued. For our communities, that’s deeply problematic. It’s one environmental hazard on top of another.”

Outside of the four farms revealed as part of the permitting process, the Align RNG biogas project has not disclosed to DEQ or the public the full list of participating farms and their locations. In January of last year, 30 Democratic legislators sent a letter to DEQ asking the agency to deny water quality permits for farms who plan to participate in the project. Smithfield told The Counter that with the exception of “a few farms” that it owns, the majority of the farms that will have the opportunity to be part of the Align project are owned by independent farmers and because the permitting process is public, “their participation will be known by both DEQ and the public.” Beginning April 5, DEQ started hosting a series of public hearings regarding general biogas permits. 

As for the racial discrimination complaint against DEQ now being investigated by the EPA, a spokesperson for the agency said the decision to pursue an investigation doesn’t necessarily mean the allegations are true or that Title VI violations have occurred.

White-Williamson is concerned that Michael Regan, the administrator of the EPA, previously served as the secretary of DEQ. However, a spokesperson for the EPA told The Counter that the administrator would not be directly involved in this matter or any other Title VI matter because the External Civil Rights Compliance Office is part of the Office of General Counsel and does not report directly to the administrator. Still, White-Williamson is unsure of how the complaint will play out—and she’s concerned about the future of her county. 

“This is more than just a story about biogas,” White-Williamson said. “This is really a story about power and who makes the decisions in these counties. It seems that everything bad finds its way to places where communities are already overburdened by other polluting facilities. Community members are really tired of having their health and dignity disregarded by the powerful.”

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TSM: A lot of the communities were on strict lockdown. You weren’t supposed to leave your home. Going on a couple years now, these communities are still reeling and still having to figure out what to do. We also saw a real big uptake in direct farm-to-family. You could buy a cow in your neighborhood, or in your community, where before you couldn’t. Those farmers were selling to stockyards, who were then selling to big processing plants. Your meat could go three states before it would return to your community. Instead, we saw more direct sales. And the federal government allowed that. It hasn’t happened at that scale in a long time.

HCN: The gap in food security seems to have most impacted medium-income households as opposed to the poorest households. Is that correct? 

TSM: Yeah. … When we receive this data, and we look at the income level of the respondents, that doesn’t correlate to the requirements to participate in some of the food assistance programs that exist in the federal government, and then trickle down to state and tribal governments. So, for instance, to qualify for what used to be called the food stamp program, SNAP, or WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) or free school meals, all those programs are income-contingent. And they get continued servicing. 

For those that could qualify, income-wise, those programs weren’t obstructed in a way that the general food access (was) — getting a food distribution box versus going to a grocery store where everything is gone, everyone has purchased the goods from that grocery store. We saw it with toilet paper, but we saw it with food, too. There was a huge shortage of meat, or the meat was so expensive that it disabled people from being able to get the full nutritional value of each of their meals. They had to pick and choose. Those are, in our respondents in our survey, largely the ones that identified as being food insecure and lacking nutrition.

HCN: FRAC — the Food Research and Action Center — talks about opportunities to address food insecurity with the Build Back Better plan, or through Congress. But your organization seems more focused on tribal efforts, saying that instead of increasing benefits, the federal government should increase support and empowerment of tribal governments. Why is that distinction important?

TSM: Well, unfortunately, we have to do both. When we saw in the report that people were turning to their tribal governments, not their state governments, for assistance, it’s just another indication of the ability of tribes to administer those program dollars and keep an alignment with the requirements and mandates that come from receiving federal funding.

IFAI — the Indigenous Food and Ag Initiative — and FRAC and NAAF came together to provide the data that will help educate Congress when they’re making decisions about food implementation and agricultural production across the country, in particular Indian Country.

HCN: Why is self-sufficiency so much more effective?

TSM: Because they intimately know their neighbors. They know culturally how their communities function. And they know how to get to their membership in the best possible manner. So, in one community, it might be working through mobile slaughter (units). In another community, it might be distribution of food boxes. In another community that’s not so far removed from a town or city, it might be working with food banks. And so those community members, the tribal governing authority — they know that better than an outside entity, better than a state entity.

A lot of our tribes have economic arms of their tribal government that have some type of food- or agricultural-based business. They utilize those businesses to get that food to their community members. And that’s the model we want to see. Those producers within those communities can sell their food locally. It reduces transportation and storage costs, it reduces or works toward eliminating issues that you would see in long transportation. In the end, they will save money, because these communities will have additional dollars, so the value of their dollar will remain stronger, won’t be chipped away by having to go through multiple states or processing plants or transportation companies. And again, if we have natural disasters, we have a pandemic, then the communities can stand up and serve their citizens, as opposed to waiting for Washington, D.C., or even the state capital to try to get to them.

If you look at eastern Washington, the Yakama Nation and the Colville Confederated Tribes, collectively, we have close to 10 million acres. The export industry in cherries and apples alone is in the billions — and yet our tribes are not billionaires. So there’s an opportunity there to pivot and diversify away from, say, gaming, and work towards making agriculture not only a food-security issue, but an economic development opportunity.

HCN: Are you optimistic that Congress is going to take this data into account and begin to more deeply or meaningfully empower tribal communities to support themselves through their own agricultural infrastructure?

TSM: We hope so. Our overall vision document is, through this regional agricultural infrastructure, about standing up everything that these communities or regions will need in order to feed themselves. That’s grain elevators, it’s rail transportation, it’s kitchens and processing plants. But it’s also marketing, packaging and distribution. And so having access to all of those in a regionalized manner will unburden the individual tribe or individual farmer or producer from having to stand up that infrastructure themselves. it would all be done in a regenerative, climate smart manner. And again, reducing the amount of transportation, all of those things moving towards helping the environment and helping these rural tribal communities at the same time. We’re asking tribes to reach out and engage with us if they’re applying for federal funding, to use our work as a model of how we can all come together and actually leverage private and federal funding and expand and unify our mission, which is to feed our communities, but do so in a manner that supports those community members and not necessarily a corporation.

This is just the beginning. We’re going to continue to do more data-related research. For the first time, we’re going to take ownership of our data, and also the messaging and how that data is going to be interpreted. A lot of this generation has benefited from the work of our ancestors. And we’re in a place where a lot of tribal communities are working toward large scale, either cultural development, gaming, you name it, government contracting. These tribes are moving into spaces they’ve never been before, they’re able to support their communities better. We have higher rates of participation in higher education and vocational education. And we want to continue that upward trajectory and supply the celebration of our traditional ecological knowledge. So this is just an opportunity. And it’s our first step going after and providing this type of data.

And we’re not just working with tribal entities; we’re working across the spectrum. We’re working with other large-scale agricultural industry groups, and nonprofits and federal agencies. And our hope is that we can do some focus work, to stand up agricultural infrastructure in rural communities and show the world that it can work and that these communities can have ownership over their food and food security.

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Despite the tenuous nature of government mandates and relief for Covid-related illness, these policies have been a lifeline for those in the hospitality sector. Currently, only a little over a dozen states and Washington D.C. and at least 19 cities and counties have permanent paid sick leave mandates, according to the advocacy group A Better Balance. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 50 percent of leisure and foodservice workers had access to paid sick leave in 2021, compared to 77 percent of all private sector employees. These jobs typically require that employees work in dense, indoor environments in-person, increasing the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus. And in several cases, fast-food franchises illegally denied workers time off despite being entitled to paid Covid sick leave, or stymied their ability to take time off with logistical requirements like showing a doctor’s note or getting someone to cover their shift. 

“There are always these inequalities in access,” said Daniel Schneider, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Shift Project, a collaboration between Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco, that surveys working conditions for retail and service workers. “And what’s made it sort of egregious these days is that they are basically orthogonal to the risk—that those who have the access don’t have the risk, those who don’t [have access] have a lot of the risk.”

Business interests have pushed back on these paid sick leave policies, arguing that they place undue financial strain on already-struggling businesses, and that employees are likely to abuse the system. A 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study, however, found that sick pay is not very costly to employers—roughly 20 cents per hour that an employee works. And the investment of covering employees’ isolation and recovery doubles as insurance against more employees or customers catching the same illness, which could ultimately cost employers more in the long run.

“If [restaurant] owners do not offer that benefit, 50 percent of employees do not have that benefit,” said Nicolas Ziebarth, a health and labor economist at Cornell University and co-author of the NBER study. “If you think that’s a good solution, then you can defend it, of course, but it also means that you have more people going to work sick spreading diseases.”

Putting employers in charge of determining workers’ access to sick pay grants them the power to alter employees’ access to such security, particularly if it is tied to an emergency like the pandemic. This past December, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced its recommended quarantine period from 10 to five days, corporations such as Amazon and Walmart cut paid Covid isolation time for employees accordingly. Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at New America researching paid leave policies, said that these actions taken by employers reflect how putting the paid leave policies in the hands of business owners “necessarily tak[es] power and control away from workers who know what’s best for their own health and for their families.” 

Having paid sick leave recognized as a legal policy, be it permanent or as a temporary Covid measure, is a crucial first step in raising the floor for precarious workers such as those in hospitality, said Schneider. Recent survey data from the Shift Project from September to November last year showed that 85 percent of retail and service workers overall and 79 percent of restaurant workers in California reported having access to sick leave, a much narrower gap compared to 50 percent of workers overall and 33 percent of restaurant workers nationally. 

Even so, having a legal right to paid sick leave and taking steps to inform workers that they have such a right, doesn’t always translate to them using it. Schneider said that some workers have cited their managers pressuring them to come into work or fearing retaliation as reason not to take time off. In other cases, they were concerned that by taking sick leave they would be letting their colleagues down. 

“This particular urgent problem of paid sick leave, it is really bound up with the broader set of precarious labor practices around hours and schedules in the restaurant sector,” said Schneider. “There’s a lot to do even once these rights in theory are on the books.”

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