Day: September 13, 2017

As Congress looks into ways to fix the immigration system, often with the goal of safeguarding job opportunities for U.S. workers, at least one immigration organization argues that current federal regulations fail to protect foreign visa holders from job misrepresentation, recruitment fees, exploitation, fraud and discrimination.

Four women who came to the U.S. on temporary visas were part of a panel discussion Tuesday in Washington to raise awareness of a system they said often treats human beings like commodities.

“In the workplace, there were about 80 of us, women, and we had a hard time,” Adareli Hernandez, a former H-2B worker, said in Spanish during a discussion hosted by the Center for Migrant Rights (CDM), a Mexico-based organization with an office in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hernandez, who is from Hidalgo, Mexico, looked for two years before she was finally able to get a H-2B seasonal non-farm work visa to work at a chocolate packing factory in Louisiana.

Inequality in workplace

While men who worked at the factory earned higher wages by carrying and stacking boxes, women were relegated to packing chocolates on assembly lines with no time off for illness.

“We weren’t able to make complaints, because if we did make complaints, we were threatened by the manager. … We were told we didn’t have a right to file complaints, because we didn’t have rights here in the United States,” she said.

But after four seasons as an H-2B visa worker, Hernandez fought for better labor conditions along with 70 colleagues. She said though work conditions improved, the company decided not to rehire her or co-workers.

Hernandez’s testimony is one of the 34 detailed worker stories featured in a CDM report, Engendering Exploitation: Gender Inequality in U.S. Labor Migration Programs.

Though the report focuses on women migrant workers, CDM policy recommendations say, “All temporary labor migration programs should be subjected to the same rules and protection so that unscrupulous employers and recruiters do not use the patchwork of visa regulations to evade liability.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, about 1.4 million people are recruited to work in the U.S. each year through temporary work visas, including H-1B (specialty occupations), H-2B, J-1 (exchange visitor program) and TN (Canadians and Mexicans in certain occupations under the North American Free Trade Agreement).

The visas may vary, but immigration and labor organizations report that recruited foreign workers face common patterns of abuses.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security cracked down on abuse within the H-2B system, hoping to prevent the exploitation of workers and to ensure U.S. workers’ awareness of available jobs.

Rosa’s story

A licensed veterinarian, who asked to be called only Rosa for fear of retaliation, submitted a statement that was read during CDM’s discussion. Rosa was unable to join the panel because the U.S. government rejected her application for a tourist visa.

“Although the U.S. government had no problem offering me a TN work visa at the employer’s request, it won’t allow me to visit the country as a tourist. Anyway, that’s not going to stop me from sharing my story,” Rosa’s statement said.

Rosa is a former TN visa worker who was hired for an animal scientist position in Wisconsin. She was “thrilled” for the opportunity to work at a place where she would put in practice the skills she acquired as a recent graduate from a top Mexican university.

TN visas were created within NAFTA to allow U.S. employers to hire Canadian and Mexican workers for specialized jobs.

“I was deceived by my employer. They promised me a salary that they failed to pay, a contract they didn’t respect,” Rosa’s statement said.

“The supervisors would yell at us constantly and tell us that our visa was only good for obeying orders. I cleaned animal troughs, unloaded them from trucks. As the only woman, they would also give me jobs they considered ‘women’s work,’ cleaning the bathroom or the kitchen,” she said.

Protecting American workers

Rachel Micah-Jones, CDM’s executive director, said there is a need to ensure workers have basic protections, including the right to understand a contract before entering into an agreement with a U.S. company.

Immigration hard-liners agree about the need to protect visa workers, but they also express concern about the welfare of American workers.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said though she agrees these visa programs “can be beneficial to certain employees for legitimate purposes,” there is a “big problem” with employers abusing the system as a way to bring in “workers who can be paid less, and who end up replacing American and legal immigrant workers.”

“The solution is not necessarily to end the program, but to reform it and for the government agencies that are responsible for these programs to do a better job of oversight to make sure that they are not abused,” Vaughan told VOA.

Vaughan was scheduled to speak about guest worker visa programs at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that had been scheduled for Wednesday. The hearing was postponed because government officials were focused on hurricane response and recovery efforts after two storms struck in Texas and Florida.
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Pittsburgh, once a dynamo of heavy industry, will soon become home to the United States’ largest urban farm, part of what advocates say is a trend to transform former manufacturing cities into green gardens.

The Hilltop Urban Farm will open in 2019, consisting of 23 acres (9 hectares) of farmland where low-income housing once stood, two miles (three kilometers) from the city center, designers say.

On top of farmland where winter peas and other fresh produce will be grown by local residents and sold in the community, the farm will feature a fruit orchard, a youth farm and skills-building program. Hillside land will eventually have trails.

The farm is believed to be by far the largest nationwide to be located in an urban area, said Aaron Sukenik, who heads the Hilltop Alliance that is coordinating the initiative.

“The land was just kind of sitting there, fenced and looking very post-apocalyptic,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

After Pittsburgh boomed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a center of coal production, steel and manufacturing, it was hit by industrial decline in the 1950s, its population cut by half over the next half century.

Reinventing itself, the metropolis has since regained much of its economic vigor with the health care industry replacing manufacturing as the city’s powerhouse.

But while “all the areas that you can see from downtown really have turned around,” several neighborhoods on the city’s outer ring have yet to see a similar resurgence, said Sukenik.

“It’s those neighborhoods that are the focus of our work,” he said.

Open to local residents, the farm will help bring fresh food to surrounding areas that often lack such options, he said. Pittsburgh has the largest percentage of people residing in communities with “low-supermarket access” for cities of 250,000 to 500,000 people, according to a 2012 report by the U.S. Treasury Department.

And local advocates say much of Pittsburgh’s south side, where the farm will be located, is particularly underserved by supermarkets and other retailers of fresh food.

Rust Belt

The Hilltop Urban Farm embodies a trend in cities across America’s Rust Belt from Detroit to Cleveland and Buffalo where manufacturing has died out, said Heather Mikulas, a farm and food business educator for Penn State Extension, an applied research arm of  Pennsylvania State University.

“You just have blight, just so much blight in Rust Belt cities,” she said.

“So you see the long-standing residents of neighborhoods who are used to trying to find their place in the world looking at this blight and just saying, ‘We can do something different, we can do something better,’ ” said Mikulas, who co-authored a report on the feasibility of the Hilltop Urban Farm project in 2014.

What were once often “guerrilla” operations have morphed into projects working hand in hand with municipal authorities to secure land rights and rezone areas to allow for agriculture, Mikulas said.

A common concern with urban farms is their reliance on grants that eventually dry out, said Stan Ernst, a professor of agribusiness development at Penn State.

The $9.9 million Hilltop Urban Farm is funded by foundations, primarily the Henry L. Hillman Foundation.

“Look for ways that you can operate enough like a business that you can hopefully provide a level of sustainability there,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

No comprehensive national study has yet measured the extent of urban farming in the United States, said Michael Hamm, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Michigan State University.

Globally, city dwellers are farming an area the size of the European Union, a 2014 study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters found.
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Leaders of Cameroon’s indigenous forest peoples say their survival is at risk if they are further deprived of access to the lands that are the source of their livelihoods.

Speaking in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, indigenous representatives said they had experienced increasingly serious violations of their land rights by palm oil and other agro-industries, mining firms and timber concessions, as well as the process of creating protected areas on their ancestral lands.

“This disturbing situation foreshadows a future where we, as indigenous peoples, will no longer have land,” said Hélène Aye Mondo, president of Gbabandi, an organization of more than 50 indigenous Baka and Bagyeli communities. “If we continue to lose our lands and forests, the very survival of our cultures and peoples is at risk.”

At the meeting on Tuesday, forest community leaders signed a joint declaration calling for recognition and respect of their customary land rights, timed to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, of which Cameroon is a signatory.

Denied access to forest

The U.N. declaration says governments must consult indigenous peoples to gain their consent before approving any decisions that affect how their land and resources are used, and they are entitled to redress for any such activities.

Suzanne Ndjele, a member of the Baka ethnic group from the village of Assoumindelé in south Cameroon, said in a written testimony handed out to journalists that her community no longer has access to the forest they depend on for food and medicine.

Ndjele used to work in the forest, hunting and gathering food and other resources with women from her community. But for the past four years she has not been able to enter it.

“Eco-guards came and told us ‘nobody can go into the forest anymore.’ If we continued to enter the forest we were threatened. I went in and was beaten,” she said.

Not enough land

The forest in question was incorporated into the Ngoyla-Mintom Reserve, created in 2014. Access to parts of the forest was restricted and local people were instead given “community forests,” smaller parcels of land which they say are not enough.

The community forest for Assoumindelé is located 10 km (6.2 miles) away from the village, which inhabitants say is not practical for their everyday activities.

Lydie Essissima, an official with Cameroon’s social affairs ministry who attended the meeting, said the government was aware of the problem, and stands by its commitments made in the 2007 U.N. declaration. Cameroon was one of 144 countries that voted in favor of its adoption in 2007.

 
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Gambia is negotiating deals with three private companies to crack down on rampant illegal fishing in its territorial waters, a senior official with the fisheries ministry told Reuters.

Made possible by poor monitoring capacity and, in some cases, corrupt local officials, illegal fishing costs West Africa’s coastal nations about $2.3 billion a year, according to a recent study.

Regional coast guards regularly seize Chinese fishing boats for fishing illegally. An investigation published by marine conservation group Oceana this week found that European vessels had also broken European Union law in West Africa.

“Fighting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing requires continuous monitoring and surveillance of our waters, and we don’t have the resources to do that,” Bamba Banja, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Fisheries and Water Resources, said late Tuesday.

A former ruler of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, fled the country earlier this year amid accusations of widespread corruption. President Adama Barrow is now seeking to bring order to a sector neglected by the old regime.

Despite its narrow coastline, Gambia possesses particularly rich waters, caused by the merging of fresh water from the Gambia River with the Atlantic Ocean.

Banja said the government was in talks with Dutch shipbuilding group Damen and two other companies, from the United States and South Africa, to provide monitoring and surveillance of Gambia’s exclusive economic zone.

“The South African and Dutch companies will provide patrol boats while the American company is for aerial surveillance to complement the patrol boats,” he said.

A spokesman for the Damen Group said it would not comment on negotiations.

Banja said the names of the two other companies would be announced following talks to complete the deal next month.

Operations are expected to begin in January.

He added Gambia was also seeking to reactivate a fishing agreement with the EU, which would probably include support for local monitoring. An existing access agreement is considered dormant because its requirements are not being met. That means EU member states cannot authorize their vessels to fish there.

Oceana’s researchers nevertheless found that vessels from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece illegally spent nearly 32,000 hours in Gambian waters from April 2012 to August 2015.

Banja said the vessels also appeared to be violating a prohibition on industrial fishing enacted under Jammeh. While the ban did little to curb illegal activity, it was only lifted in March.
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In this upper Midwestern state known for dairy, beer and Harley-Davidson motorcycles, ginseng growers want to make sure that the bitter root also gets its due.

So they’ve organized the first International Wisconsin Ginseng Festival. Set for Friday through Sunday in this mid-state river town, it will feature the root’s role in culinary, health and beauty products and local history. The event, just before the fall harvest, is expected to draw at least several hundred ginseng aficionados from Asia and from U.S. cities with large ethnic Asian populations.

Organizers hope the visitors’ appetite for Wisconsin ginseng will catch on with a broader consumer base. Even state residents, mostly of northern European descent, have limited experience with the plant beyond seeing vast “gardens” shaded with black fabric canopies.

With the festival, “we’re creating awareness,” said Tom Hack, the Ginseng Board of Wisconsin’s international marketing director for several years ending last month.

Leading U.S. production

The state produces about 700,000 pounds or 317,500 kilos a year of cultivated ginseng – roughly 95 percent of the entire U.S. crop, which still totals less than 10 percent of the global yield. The vast majority goes to China and Hong Kong, where it has been used for thousands of years as a tonic to reduce stress, boost energy, focus attention and even treat male sexual dysfunction. A 2012 Mayo Clinic study found American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) eased fatigue among cancer patients.

American ginseng has alleged “cool” or restorative properties. The Wisconsin-grown root, considered especially potent, last year commanded a wholesale price ranging from the low $30s to $55 a pound – roughly double that of Chinese-grown root, Hack said. American wild ginseng root, the most prized, can command hundreds of dollars per pound.

But growers like Will Hsu worry that consumers may not be familiar enough with the root to differentiate.

“It’s global competition,” said Hsu, whose family’s ginseng farm and sales operation near Wausau is among the country’s largest. “If you do not educate consumers on the difference in taste and yield from Wisconsin, they’ll view it as a commodity that’s interchangeable.”

Accommodating climate

The area’s long, cold winters and mineral-rich topsoil provide favorable conditions for ginseng, which takes at least three years to mature. It took off as a commercial crop in 1904 when four brothers – the Fromms – started cultivating the root as well as collecting it in the wild. Production peaked in the early 1990s, when 1,500 growers – mostly hobbyists with full-time jobs – produced over 2.2 million pounds or almost 100,000 kilos.

But some growers sold seed to Canada and China, setting up competition that flooded the market, depressed prices and drove out many Wisconsin growers. Their numbers have dwindled to fewer than 200 today. Their 317,500-kilos yield is dwarfed by output abroad, Hack said. “Canada is, like, 4.5 million pounds” or just over 2 million kilos. “China’s at least 5 million” pounds or 2.26 million kilos.  

“Seeds that came from our industry came to really haunt us,” added Hack, a hobbyist himself.

Growers face two related problems: product fraud and trademark infringement. Shady dealers misrepresent foreign-grown ginseng as American, Hack said. His board introduced a seal in 1991 to certify roots or products made entirely of Wisconsin ginseng, but “we’ve got companies using our logo that are not authorized to do that. Our industry has now started taking legal action” and alerting various regulatory agencies.  

The commodity group also reviews international shipping records and has its handful of worldwide distributors look out for suspect products.

“We have a monitoring program in place in China,” Hack said, “so we can address infringers there.”

Educating consumers

The more challenging task, Will Hsu argues, is cultivating discerning consumers of ginseng root, berries, and the resulting teas, powders, extracts and herbal supplements.

“The biggest problem for our industry, not only with labeling, is now you’re going to have some countries like Taiwan where [there’s] a whole generation of consumers who really only consume Canadian ginseng or Chinese-grown,” he said.

“They don’t even know Wisconsin ginseng,” lamented his father, Paul Hsu.

The Hsus and Hack discussed that quandary last October at the headquarters of Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises Inc., where workers in the adjoining processing facility sorted and packaged freshly harvested roots. Paul Hsu, who emigrated from Taiwan, began the business in the 1970s. Now Will Hsu, in his early 40s, oversees daily operations.

A marketing ground game  

Armed with a Harvard MBA and sales experience at food giant General Mills, the son promotes the concept of “terroir,” which links an agricultural product to the land on which it’s grown. Just as the French province of Champagne is known for fine sparkling wine, he wants to ensure that central Wisconsin retains global recognition for premium ginseng. The company’s 2017 calendar and other printed materials showcase “Terroir at N45th Parallel” – the area’s latitude.

Wisconsin’s dark loam lends the ginseng a distinctive, earthy taste, Will Hsu said: “It’s bitter, it’s herbal. That is not a taste kids look fondly upon.”

As with beer, it’s an acquired taste, he added. For the festival, the Hsus are partnering with the local Bull Falls Brewery to make a limited-release ginseng brew.

Festival vendors will peddle other items made with ginseng – such as wine, macaroons, teas, muffins and stir fries – and offer cooking demonstrations to show the plant’s versatility.

Visitors also will be able to dig their own roots at certain gardens.

Generational issues

The generational challenge affects both labor supply and consumer demand.    

On a mild day early last October, three dozen workers harvested ginseng, some kneeling in freshly turned soil to gather ginseng roots, others lugging filled buckets to a waiting truck. Almost all were Hmong, who began emigrating from Laos and Thailand to the state four decades ago, after the Vietnam War, and many were advanced in years.

“People in my age group don’t want to do the work,” said Aaron Kaiser, 28, whose family owns the garden. A third-generation grower, he fits in ginseng duties – including as a director on the marketing board – around his job as a math teacher. 

As for demand, young ethnic Chinese don’t necessarily share their forebears’ enthusiasm for the herb.

“It’s not good for young people, it’s for old people,” said Yongcheng Kuang, a student at the nearby University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County campus who hails from Shenzhen in China’s Guangdong province. Nonetheless, it was among the gifts he brought home to relatives during summer break.

Hack, the marketer, acknowledged that “the younger generation has different buying trends. But there are 1.3 billion people in the country of China, and the majority do recognize TCM – traditional Chinese medicine.”

While the board continues its focus on international markets, “we’ve never taken into consideration the market potential right here in the United States,” Hack added.

With the festival, Wisconsin growers hope to make inroads.
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Facing a backlash in Europe over palm oil’s environmental toll, the world’s top producers are scrambling to find new markets and even striking unusual barter deals, such as exchanging Sukhoi jets for the edible oil.

The European Union is the second-largest palm oil export destination after India for both Malaysia and Indonesia, which dominate production in a global market worth at least $40 billion.

But palm has come under increasing fire in Europe over its impact on forest destruction, encouraging producers to look at new markets ranging from Africa to Myanmar.

Threatened by crumbling demand in Europe, the industry is waging a public relations battle and pushing producers to enter more price-sensitive markets, where Indonesia should have an advantage over Malaysia due to its lower production costs.

“Our principle is we will not let go of even one tonne of trade contract or potential demand palm has globally,” Indonesia’s deputy Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Musdhalifah Machmud told Reuters.

Machmud said palm oil sales were being brought up in “every trade negotiation” Indonesia conducts.

Palm oil is used in thousands of household products, from snack foods to soaps, as well as to make biodiesel. 

But the demand boom has spread plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia across an area of more than 17 million hectares — an area greater than the size of Portugal and Ireland. They are mostly carved out of rainforests, which critics say has lead to an increase in the greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Environmental activists have pressured consumer companies into demanding that their palm suppliers adopt more environmentally sustainable forestry practices. But in Europe, politicians say the industry’s standards on sustainability do not go far enough.

So far, palm oil sales to the European Union have held up. 

Indonesian exports rose about 40 percent to 2.7 million tons in the first half of 2017 from a year earlier.

Indonesia’s overall palm exports were worth $18 billion last year, with EU sales accounting for 16 percent, the Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI) said. For Malaysia, the EU made up nearly 13 percent of exports, government data showed.

‘Imported deforestation’ 

Europe is particularly concerned about the soaring use of oils, including palm, as a biodiesel fuel. Once regarded as a green alternative, an EU-commissioned report now says it creates more emissions than fossil fuels.

France said in July it will reduce the use of palm in biofuels over concerns of “imported deforestation”, prompting concerns from Indonesia that other European countries could follow suit.

In Germany, the environment ministry said it will press to amend an EU renewables directive to take account of the study showing “palm oil and soyoil caused, in comparison to other biofuels, very much higher greenhouse gas emissions per energy unit through indirect land use change.”

The European parliament In April voted to phase out unsustainable palm oil by 2020. The resolution endorsed a single Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) plan for Europe-bound palm and other vegetable oil exports to ensure they are produced in an environmentally sustainable way.

In addition to environmental damage, the industry has come under fire over frequent reports of land grabs, child labor and harsh working conditions. Some of the annual forest fires that send shrouds of smoke over parts of Southeast Asia have broken out on palm oil concessions that burn forests to clear land.

Indonesian Trade minister Enggartiasto Lukita in May warned his EU counterparts that he might ask Jakarta not to buy Airbus planes in retaliation, the Jakarta Post reported.

GAPKI Chairman Joko Supriyono told a United Nations sustainability meeting in New York last week that Indonesian palm oil plantation governance met international standards.

Meanwhile, Indonesia is looking at new palm oil markets in Africa offering barter trades with palm oil. Lukita told reporters on a visit to Nigeria he had proposed to swap palm oil for crude oil.

Indonesia signed a preliminary deal last month with Russia’s Rostec to exchange commodities, including palm, as part of a $1.14 billion payment for 11 Sukhoi jets.

Indonesia’s Vegetable Oil Association executive director Sahat Sinaga said palm oil producers will open a marketing and research company in Russia, aiming to increase exports of 920,000 tons in 2016 by 4-5 percent per year up to 2023.

The group is also planning to open a storage facility in Pakistan, which imports 1-2 million tons of palm from Indonesia a year, anticipating further growth in demand.

Malaysia more vulnerable

The Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) says it will increase efforts to diversify into new markets such as Myanmar, the Philippines and West Africa regardless of the EU Resolution.

Malaysia’s plantation industries and commodities minister Mah Siew Keong said in June he met EU commissioners and members of parliament for talks. The ministry did not respond to a request for further comment.

Malaysia is more reliant on palm oil exports than Indonesia, shipping out more than 90 percent of its palm oil last year, compared to about 70 percent in Indonesia.

Production costs in Malaysia are also 10-15 percent higher than in Indonesia, analysts estimate.

“If EU doesn’t take up palm for biodiesel, demand for palm oil globally will fall and prices will be affected on the downside . . . which will impact everyone equally,” said Ivy Ng, regional head of plantations research at CIMB Investment Bank.
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Microsoft, Walt Disney Co. and General Motors are among hundreds of companies calculating how much they spend on carbon emissions to show investors they are concerned about global warming, a study said on Tuesday.

More than 700 other businesses around the world plan by 2018 to introduce so-called carbon pricing, said the report by the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).

The findings come amid efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to scale back climate change-related regulations on grounds they are burdensome to the economy.

Putting a monetary value on carbon dioxide emissions helps limit the burning of fossil fuel, which contributes to global warming, and signals to investors that companies are aware of the financial risks posed by global warming, the study said.

Some 500 companies, including 80 in the United States, reported using carbon pricing, it said, drawing on an array of previous research.

Many oil and gas companies such as British energy company BP use an internal, or “shadow,” accounting method to track their carbon emissions, it said.

“It just stands to reason that investors, in looking at enterprises, of course are looking at ‘Are they resilient to all kinds of changes in the future?'” Bob Stout, vice president for BP America, said during a telephone briefing with reporters and others.

“Climate change and carbon pricing as a policy obviously are key factors that businesses need to look at,” he said.

Other companies charge carbon fees to internal business units.

Microsoft, which charges its business units for emissions ranging from electricity consumption to employee air travel, sees carbon pricing as crucial “regardless of national policies,” said Liz Willmott, a company program manager.

“We as companies can enable partnership and collaborations with countries to help them meet the Paris targets,” she said.

Trump has withdrawn the United States from the historic 2015 Paris global agreement to fight climate change, saying the accord would cost the nation trillions of dollars, kill jobs and hinder oil, gas, coal and manufacturing industries.

According to the World Bank, 42 governments have or plan to have a way to tax carbon emissions or have a cap-and-trade system that allows industries with low emissions to sell their unused permitted capacity to larger emitters.

The United States is not among them.
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