Women’s participation in the agricultural sector took center stage at the VII Symposium on Agricultural Social Responsibility, organized by the Mexican Association of Protected Horticulture (AMHPAC) and the International Fruit and Vegetable Alliance for the Promotion of Social Responsibility (AHIFORES).
The panel “Women in the Agricultural Sector and Corporate Social Responsibility,” moderated by Elena Villafuerte and opened by Raquel Salgado of AHIFORES, brought together two perspectives that complement each other: that of a woman who lives agricultural work firsthand, and that of someone who has accompanied it in the territories for years.
Nubia Díaz, from Guasave in Sinaloa, shared her experience as a farmworker and showed how the lack of full access to social security runs through every dimension of workers’ lives and those of their families. It is not only a question of health services: without social security there is also no access to childcare for daughters and sons while parents work, no right to adequate housing, and no possibility of building a retirement pension. Her testimony opened moments of reflection among those present, who were able to hear directly what these conditions mean in the daily lives of the people who sustain agricultural production.
Margarita Nemecio, of the Centro de Estudios en Cooperación Internacional y Gestión Pública (CECIG), brought the perspective of internal agricultural labor migration, drawing on her experience accompanying workers who migrate mainly from Guerrero and Morelos to the fields of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California. Her message was that recruitment is the foundation of the entire labor migration process. When it takes place under abusive schemes, such as illegal fees that leave families in debt before they even begin to work, incomplete information about the jobs on offer, or unsafe transportation, workers arrive at their destinations in conditions of vulnerability that later shape the whole employment relationship. Guaranteeing ethical recruitment processes is, for that reason, the starting point of safe and dignified labor migration.
The symposium also addressed the shifts underway in international markets. Angélica Barrera, manager of the Mexico Program at Stronger Together, a PERIPLO ally organization, took part in a panel alongside Esdras Ambriz, Agricultural Labor Development Manager at Driscoll’s, on incorporating a human rights perspective into labor migration processes. The discussion concluded that human rights due diligence has ceased to be a voluntary practice. European corporate sustainability legislation turns it into a condition for accessing that market, with direct implications for recruitment processes, working conditions, the protection of migrant workers, freedom of association, and grievance and remedy mechanisms. Placing people at the center of these processes is what makes the sector sustainable.
That business organizations in the fruit and vegetable sector are opening their spaces to the voices of women workers, and that exporting companies are actively adopting human rights due diligence approaches, points to a sector in motion. PERIPLO and its allied organizations will continue to accompany that path: one in which agricultural workers are not an item on the agenda, but its protagonists.
