The Fair Food Program, the result of a years-long campaign by tomato-farm laborers in Florida for better pay and working conditions, continues to expand, reports Modern Farmer. A Fair Food Label was introduced last year to identify tomatoes picked under its fair-work guidelines. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which founded FFP, “expects to add bell peppers to its certification scheme this season. In the meantime, the organization is helping workers in Vermont build an initiative similar to the FFP for dairies, and sharing the CIW model for ‘worker-driven social responsibility’ with farmers and farm workers abroad.”
The coalition began work in the 1990s for higher wages and better conditions, and began to succeed when it targeted retailers with its demand for pay of a penny a pound for harvesting tomatoes — effectively an 80-percent boost. “The CIW marked its biggest successes when two of the world’s largest supermarkets, Walmart and Ahold, joined the program in 2014 and 2015, guaranteeing higher wages for the 30,000 workers in their combined supply chains,” says Modern Farmer.