On California Agriculture

Agriculture, like any other industry, is in a constant flux, responding to the changing nature, for example, of the national and world economies, consumer markets, competition, and technological developments. These changes have profound effects on rural society. Recently, for instance, the expansion in farm acreage devoted to labor-intensive vegetable and fruit specialty crops, as a response to growing national and international demand, has generated significant socioeconomic consequences.

We need to better understand through renewed research efforts the current dynamics of the State's agricultural industry in order to effectively address its impacts on society, and particularly upon the domestic, immigrant and migrant agricultural labor force. There are, for example, current disputes among agricultural specialists about such basic issues as whether the State's agricultural labor force is growing or contracting, and no accurate estimates of current or future labor required to sustain agricultural activity.

State agricultural policy has been tailored to the immediate interests of local agribusiness with disregard for the increasingly international nature of the industry and the social consequences of its development. The successful development and international competitiveness of the industry hinge, however, on an ever-expanding agricultural labor force derived mostly from international sources. State agricultural labor policy has relied exclusively on past and current federal immigration, rather than upon State needs and responsibilities.

Agricultural labor supply policy, including State and federal legislation, must be developed in light of the current and foreseeable needs of the industry and in harmony with existing labor laws and regulations. Therefore, research must be done to enable accurate estimation of agricultural labor requirements and the domestic farm workers' capability of fulfilling them. This implies studies of labor needs, employment schedules and employment conditions applicable

to specific crops and regions, as well as studies of the availability of the domestic labor force. This is in strong contrast to unofficial current State policy, which bends in favor of the industry's desire for a chronic oversupply of disorganized labor, undermining the already precarious livelihood of both the domestic and immigrant farm worker and raising essential human rights questions.

As labor-intensive specialty crops spread and expand throughout California, additional Latino immigrant and migrant farm workers will be added to the agricultural labor force. Given the 'RCA provisions, employers have developed new avenues to access and contract labor which reduce their liability and circumvent laws. Two such avenues are sharecropping and the employment of labor contractors, whereby the farm worker is not a legal employee of the farmer or grower Both modalities have recently proliferated throughout the industry, but little information is available on their methods of operation and impacts on the farm worker. Research is needed on these matters and, if warranted, policy developed to regulate them according to standing labor and immigration laws.