On Sunday, President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton honored the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) for “defending the human rights of farmworkers across the United States,” through the Fair Food Program. The CIW received the Clinton Global Initiative Award alongside actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Atifete Jahjaga, the President of Kosovo.
The Fair Food Program is a social responsibility program to protect the human rights of farmworkers carried out in partnership with Florida’s $650 million tomato industry and a dozen of the world’s largest retail food corporations.
“I want to close by saying the most astonishing thing politically in the world we’re living in today… is our Immokalee honorees,” said Clinton. “We heard our first speaker say that 20 years ago, he was an 18-year-old farmworker… The idea that 20 years later, you could have gotten the biggest companies in the world to agree to use their market power to clean up the labor conditions, to raise the wages to decent wages. You know, all over the world there are people just like you that are 18, who think that their only option is to pick up a gun or a bomb, and you proved them wrong.”
Eva Longoria, who introduced the CIW, drew on her own involvement in the struggle for farmworker justice, saying: “I chose to advocate for farmworkers early in my life. Not because I was a farm worker, I was not. Not because anyone in my family were farmworkers, they were not. I chose to advocate for them because I eat food. I care about where it’s grown, how it’s grown an in the people pick it. We are the most well fed nation in the world, and the people who pick our food often go to bed hungry.”
Lucas Benitez and Greg Asbed, Co-Founders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, accepted the award on behalf of the CIW.
“Of course, we’d also like to thank the Clinton Global Initiative, President Clinton, Secretary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton, for this award, which will only add to the growing visibility of the thousands of poor communities, from Immokalee to Bangladesh, where multinational corporations sew, grow and assemble the products we all consume,” said Benitez.
He added: “In these communities, horrific tragedies and instances of dehumanizing abuse have darkened the headlines over and over again: unsafe factories, workers forced to labor against their will, a culture of sexual harassment and violence without redress. For these workers, the traditional models of corporate social responsibility have failed them, often with tragic consequences. And so we asked a simple question: What if we as workers ourselves, designed our own social responsibility program to protect our own human rights?”
“With the approach of the Fair Food Program we’ve seen almost unimaginable change happen in only three growing seasons, including a near total reduction in the sexual harassment and violence against women in the fields, the injection of over $15 million into farm labor payrolls to address grinding generational poverty and, perhaps most dramatically, the elimination of forced labor in an industry once dubbed “Ground Zero for Modern-Day Slavery” by federal prosecutors,” said Asbed. “Indeed, in 2010, our colleague Laura Germino stood with then Secretary of State Clinton to receive the State Department’s “Hero” award for our help in prosecuting slavery in Florida’s fields. Today, just four short years later, we have traveled the road from prosecution to prevention, eliminating slavery altogether through the strict market consequences that underlie the Fair Food Program.”
Asbed also said the Fair Food Program is poised to expand into new states and new crops, not just in Florida, but around the world.
“The vast promise of market-based, Worker-driven Social Responsibility is only now beginning to unfold, but the CGI Global Citizenship Award will surely provide an incomparable boost to our efforts to establish this important breakthrough as the gold standard for the protection and expansion of fundamental human rights,” he added.
