EPI: Farmworkers not seeing benefits of rising agricultural exports

An important new report on farmworkers’ wages and international competitiveness of U.S. fruit and vegetable harvests is available from the Economic Policy Institute.

The value of agricultural exports rose 2.5 times between 1989 and 2009, but the average hourly earnings of U.S. farmworkers increased only $1.52 over the same period. In other words, farmworkers have hardly benefited economically from the increase in agricultural exports.

A new Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper, Farm Exports and Farm Labor: Would a raise for fruit and vegetable workers diminish the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture?, finds that a 40% increase in farmworker earnings would only raise U.S. household spending by about $16 a year. The report, by Philip Martin, a Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, also provides an outline of fruit, vegetable and horticultural (FVH) production in the United States and a discussion of the earnings of the immigrant farmworkers who work on FVH farms.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States and around the world. 

Click here to read more.