Life itself under contract: rent-seeking and biopolitical devolution through partnerships in California’s strawberry industry

Abstract

Following the legal demise of sharecropping in California’s strawberry industry, shippers and other intermediaries began to forge contractual ‘partnerships’ with former farmworkers and ranch managers, providing financing and market access, while giving these new growers responsibility for hiring labor and paying other expenses. Within an array of contracting arrangements, these operate in the worst of all worlds with many expenses returning to the shipper and little possibility of upside reward. Yet these arrangements are touted in the name of helping former farmworkers become farmers. Building on the literature on contract farming, this contribution discusses the ability to obtain rents as an under-recognized advantage of contracts for shippers, which further compromises the livelihoods of growers, especially those in ‘partnership’ arrangements who are particularly squeezed. This paper then suggests a further advantage to shippers: the ability to devolve biopolitical responsibility to growers. Growers are put in the impossible position of having to produce healthy berries at low cost while protecting human health through enhanced fumigant regulation. Partner-growers who tend to farm in poor ecological conditions are in the worst position to meet these competing imperatives. Shippers, however, are able to take the high road by claiming to move beyond pesticides.

Keywords:

• contract farming
• sharecropping
• strawberry production
• biopolitics
• pesticide use

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Sandy Brown and Rachel Cypher for assistance in conducting interviews. I am particularly grateful to Sandy, who taught me much about California strawberry production. Madison Barbour, Yajaira Chavez and Savannah Coker were very diligent in transcribing and coding interviews, and Madison provided outstanding secondary research and editorial assistance in addition. The Mesa Refuge provided an inspiring and comfortable space to draft the manuscript. I am also thankful for the generous and helpful comments of three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It is not clear that this claim has held up to time, especially in light of the huge wave of land grabs that have taken place since the early 2000s.

2 Writing at the same time, Schlosser (1995) reported that about half of the acreage in the Watsonville and Salinas area was sharecropped. My sense is that as a journalist Schlosser was using a less strict definition, perhaps conflating sharecropping with contract farming or any arrangement in which growers obtain financing from buyers.

3 At the same time there has been a substantial uptick in direct marketing, driven by the organic and farmers' market booms.

4 For what it is worth, all of the custom growers I met were white. But the relationship between ethnicity and grower resource endowment is not nearly as clear cut as when Wells wrote. Although low-resource growers are almost all Latino, not all well-endowed growers are Anglo or of Japanese descent. The sector is now dominated by Latino growers, and some of the second- or third-generation Latino growers control vast amounts of acreage.

5 In Mexico, Driscoll’s affiliates work with over 120 share growers, according to one knowledgeable interviewee.

6 These 30 or so such growers therefore represent less than 10 percent of a total of about 400 California growers (California Strawberry Commission 2015). But I cannot be sure of this, as my convenience sample of growers may have somehow selected out for those working with other intermediaries. I am certain that the intermediaries mentioned in Schlosser's piece are now defunct, unless they have reconstituted under different names.

7 For example, Agricultural and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), located in Salinas, is a nonprofit organization that serves as an ‘incubator’ to move recent Latino migrants out of poverty by training them in organic farming methods.

8 Specific data on turnover in the sector is hard to come by and would not be available for partner-growers at all. That said, my research sample was drawn from county lists of pesticide use permits that showed about a 20–30 percent change in permit holder names from year to year. In calling through these lists, I constantly came across disconnected phone numbers, and a significant number that I managed to reach claimed to have recently gone out of business, corroborating data gleaned from interviews on high turnover, especially among low-resource growers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation [grant no. 1262064].

Notes on contributors

Julie Guthman

Julie Guthman is a geographer and professor of social sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses primarily in global political economy and the politics of food and agriculture. She has published extensively on contemporary efforts to transform food production, distribution and consumption. Her publications include two multi-award winning books: Agrarian dreams: the paradox of organic farming in California and Weighing in: obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism. She is the recipient of the 2015 Excellence in Research Award from the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society.