With President Jimmy Carter’s death, we’ve been reminded of the successes and failures of his presidency and remarkable post-presidency. Less attention has been given to what will be Carter’s continuing legacy through the work of The Carter Center, including the critical supporting role it played in what has become “one of the greatest human rights successes of our day.”
Envisioned and led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Fair Food Program is transforming agriculture, ending the endemic abuse on farms across the U.S. and, increasingly, around the globe. When this groundbreaking program was still a bold but untested idea in the early 2000s, Jimmy Carter and The Carter Center brought expertise in conflict resolution and Carter’s prestige to the farmworkers’ campaign for human rights.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
In the early 1990s, responding to rampant abuse still found in agricultural labor in the U.S. and international food chains, migrant farmworkers in southeastern Florida formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). Just before Christmas 1997, the CIW launched a hunger strike to shine light on abusive working conditions. The Carter Center staff raised the hunger strike and CIW’s cause to the former president’s attention, and as the hunger strike entered its fourth week, Carter came out in support of the farmworkers’ call for direct talks with the growers.
Carter’s involvement brought national awareness to the CIW’s protest and, by promising continuing engagement, enabled the farmworkers to end their hunger strike with dignity. It was the starting point of decades-long support of the CIW by The Carter Center as an institution and Jimmy Carter personally. The sincerity of his initial interest was demonstrated when, in 2003, the former president and The Carter Center moved from support to active conflict resolution and engagement.
The CIW recognized that corporate buyers including McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Walmart, and international grocery corporations such as Ahold had the buying power to set not only prices for food they purchased but also requirements for their suppliers. Holding these corporations accountable for their supply chains, in 2001 the CIW declared the Campaign for Fair Food, demanding corporations use their market power to boost below-poverty farmworker wages and ensure safe working conditions on suppliers’ farms.
The campaign’s first target was Taco Bell. Declaring a boycott of the fast-food chain, the farmworkers gradually gained national support across college campuses and from major faith denominations. By late summer 2003, talks with Taco Bell had broken down. Once again, the former president was called to bring his reputation and experience to the fight, in keeping with The Carter Center’s mission to support human rights through conflict resolution. Carter again responded, sending personal letters to Yum Brands, the corporation that owned Taco Bell, while the Center’s staff worked back-channel communications and facilitated negotiations.
After almost two years of on-again/off-again talks, and amid the pressure of the Taco Bell boycott, Yum! announced that it had signed a historic agreement to “work with the CIW to improve working and pay conditions for farmworkers in Florida tomato fields.” The agreement included the first-ever direct, ongoing payment by a food corporation to farmworkers in its supply chain, the first enforceable (and, ultimately, enforced) Code of Conduct for agricultural suppliers in the food industry and transparency in the company’s tomato purchases.
The agreement established the template that has continued to build and expand as Walmart, McDonald’s, Whole Foods and other national and global chains have put their corporate buying power behind enforcement of the Fair Food Program code of conduct to ensure the human rights, safety and fair pay of workers in their supply chains. The Fair Food Program is now on farms from Florida to Maine, into Tennessee and Kentucky, the Midwest through to Colorado and California, and internationally in Chile, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Multiple crops are covered with the list of farms, products, buyers, states and nations continuing to expand.
The initiative is recognized as being the only effective program to eliminate the abuses in corporate food supply chains, as exposed by the CIW and abhorred by Jimmy Carter, for tens of thousands of farmworkers each year on participating farms. The former president committed his and The Carter Center’s time and expertise believing that corporations, growers, consumers and workers must be active participants in establishing a fair wage and good working conditions in service to the human rights and dignity of every human being.
Susan L. Marquis is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Marquis’s report “Worker-Driven Social Responsibility: A New, Proven Model for Defining, Claiming, and Protecting Workers’ Human Rights” was published by the Harvard Law Center for Labor and a Just Economy, and she is the author of the book “I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won.”
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