H.R.3564 - CARE Act of 2009

Sustainable Agriculture includes many, many things: the way the soil is raised; the fertilizing cycle and materials used; the crop runoff into watersheds and the collecting and harvesting of quality, nutrient-dense food to supply a community, to name just a few.

One widely unspoken area within the agricultural industry, sustainable or not, is labor.  Labor is expensive, as it should be. Hand-picked fruits and vegetables require exactly what the term describes: hands. And these hands come in many sizes with many cultural, economic and social backgrounds.

A few years ago during the candidate declaration process to elect the 44th United States President, there was an article that talked about Mit Romney's connection to a slave labor in domestic tomato farms. The connection went something like this: Mit Romney (R, MA) was CEO of the company that owned Burger King, and Burger King purchased tomatoes exclusively from a tomato farm in Florida which had been holding farm workers without sufficient wage in ridiculously unsavory conditions.

Here it is, 3 years later and the issue comes up again, except this time it revolves around using children as young as 12 years old to legally work as fruit and vegetable pickers. Children have worked farms and farmsteads for as long as agriculture has been an industry, but in antiquated times, children worked on family farms to help the family. This is, in fact, why our children have summer vacations in the first place. It wasn't meant for beach combing; it was instituted as a break to help with the harvests to families that desperately needed the extra hands.

There has been a video put out by Human Rights Watch that discloses information about child labor laws in the United States of which the agriculture industry is somehow excluded. This creates a loophole in which the ag-industrialists exploit.

States the Human Rights Watch:

The Children's Act for Responsible Employment (CARE Act) would update US law to ensure that all working children are protected equally. Please contact your Congressional Representative to ask them to support this important bill.