Migrant farmworkers in King City, California, USA harvest romaine lettuce.
Photo: CNS How should the principle of a fair days pay apply to those who nurture, grow, and produce the very food we eat asks David Mullins
‘Social solidarity’ is apparently experiencing something of a renaissance of late.
Acts of reciprocal kindness are increasing.
Our hard-nosed individualism is being destabilised through a reawakening of a sense of interdependence.
Communities, families, and politicians have all stepped up to applaud frontline healthcare workers.
At the same time questions are already being asked about how durable that sense of solidarity will be when it comes to meeting increased pay demands from these essential workers in the post-Covid-19 world.
Will those of us who take our hands out of our pockets to clap them on be prepared to put them back in when it comes to increasing their salaries?
I suspect that many people will be more than prepared to accept such claims on the principled basis that a fairs day work deserves a fair days pay.
But what of all those other ‘frontline’ services and workers?
In particular, how should the principle of a fair days pay apply to our farmers; those who nurture, grow, and produce the very food we eat and without whom the food chain would be reduced to a series of brittle links?
This is an issue that has re-emerged with some force within the agricultural community.
For despite the reality of the coronavirus and the threats to livelihoods that it is creating; exploitative and manipulative practices by supermarkets and meat processing monopolies continue apace.
This is something that is easily forgotten as the supermarkets and monopolies undergo something akin to reputational rehabilitation.
“We are all in this together” so the messaging goes.
Except of course that from the farmers’ perspective, this is simply not true.
A recent statement on the beef crisis by the President of The Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA) sums up the issues at stake:
“The relentless focus on driving down price is part of the problem, but it is also the insistence that farmers are entitled to less than half the retail price after a process of breeding and feeding that takes three years.
“Then, within three weeks, the processors carve up the majority of the value of the animal for themselves. It is not good enough that retailers with considerable influence on the food chain can try to dodge their responsibilities.”
This statement, which could be replicated with some ease, highlights how the problems confronting farmers and many other food producers are not ‘merely’ economical.
They are also profoundly ethical.
In fact, I would argue that there is a dimension to this problem that can be usefully explored through an engagement with the theological concept of the ‘structures of sin.’
One understanding of this concept from a Catholic social teaching perspective points to institutionalised modes of behaviour that create or enable oppression and injustice.
In the sense in which it is being used here, it is about the wielding of corporate force or power toward economic ends that are in opposition to social solidarity and the common good.
It should not require a detailed theological examination in order to see how domination of the commercially-weak farmer by commercially-strong organisations is inherently opposed to a common sense notion of the common good.
The value of combatting this kind of power imbalance has also been recognised by the bureaucratic behemoth that is the European Commission in the shape of the European Union Directive on Unfair Trading Practices in the agricultural and food supply chain.
The EU even went so far as to give an Aristotelian flavour to the directive when it centrally incorporated this quote from the Rhetoric into one of its explanatory documents: “Fairness is justice that goes beyond the written law.”
The directive, which is due to come into effect in May 2021, is by no means perfect.
But at the very least it is a starting point in terms of introducing, or rather forcing under penalty, greater levels of equity into agricultural markets like those that exist in Ireland.
It also takes the ethical burden away from the ordinary consumer, who may have limited resources and who will naturally go for a good ‘bargain.’
Instead it places the weight of responsibility back onto the likes of the ‘buyer’ i.e. the supermarkets and food processing giants which are often de facto monopolies.
Of course, there are elements to this debate that are contentious.
As a matter of interest, the relationship between the Church, or at least, the bishops, and Irish farming bodies has not always been that great.
Back in 2006 the then President of the Irish Farmers’ Association went so far as to say that charities such as Trócaire had “succeeded in destroying the Irish sugar industry” in their campaign that “sharply reduced EU support prices that rendered sugar refinement in Ireland unviable.”
He went on to say that the beneficiaries of the reforms were not poor farmers in developing countries but “the sugar barons of Brazil and Australia, and multinationals like Tate & Lyle”.
It is important that we avoid such zero-sum outcomes being replicated now at both national and EU level.
The objective should not be to pit one group of ‘poor farmers’ against another. It should be about equalising hugely disproportionate imbalances in purchasing and trading power.
I mentioned at the start of this piece about how a sense of interdependence has been reawakened by the harrowing cultural experience of Covid-19.
One of the most enduring ways in which we can embed this sense is by creating, not structures of sin, but ‘structures of solidarity’ as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of The Church puts it.
At present the Irish farmer can see very little in terms of such meaningful structures being present on the ground.
The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) is supposed to be one such structure that farmers can rely on, but there is widespread suspicion toward it within the agricultural community.
This problem will become even more acute in May 2021 because the CCPC are the ones who will be tasked with enforcing the Unfair Trading Directive.
This will have to be addressed in the post-coronavirus world if anything resembling a more ethical and dare I say, a more Catholic approach, to the primary stewards of the food producing environment is to become a reality.
David Mullins is a writer and commentator on bioethics who did his postgraduate work on Catholic bioethics at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.