Irene de Barraicua: not all farms are flooded equally
An advocate for immigrant farm workers and small farmers calls for a better safety net after droughts and floods
When droughts and floods descend on California’s agricultural lands, they destroy crops and change growing practices. When agriculture takes a hit, it isn’t just farmers who feel the pain. Irene de Barraicua, the director of policy and communications at the California-based farmworker advocacy group Lideres Campesinas, says farmworkers and small farmers with immigrant backgrounds typically struggle the hardest to keep themselves afloat when water-related disasters hit an agricultural area. In these cases, the people who are often the most affected also have the least access to help.
This year, small farmers and farmworkers who have already lost income due to years of drought (and pandemic) have faced continuing struggles after historic floods inundated acres of California farmland. Floods ruined crops and washed out farm roads, leaving farmworkers, many of whom work in the United States without documentation, adrift. Small independent farmers with immigrant backgrounds have also suffered from flood-related damages.
In the future, climate scientists estimate that precipitation patterns in the western United States will only become more dramatic, with droughts and floods becoming more common and more severe.
These events have become one of the many issues de Barraicua deals with while advocating for farmworkers and BIPOC small farmers in California.
De Barraicua has worked with farmworker communities in the United States and Latin America for over 20 years. She first engaged the topic as a student filmmaker at San Francisco State University, working on a documentary about indigenous farming communities in Guatemala seeking to reclaim their ancestral lands.
After graduating, de Barraicua worked as a research assistant at the National Agricultural Workers Survey, where she traveled through agricultural communities around the country and interviewed farmworkers on topics related to health, personal finance, and legal rights. She particularly mentioned one project investigating the way exposure to pesticides caused a rise in autism rates among farm workers’ children.
“That's where I feel like I really got to dive in and understand the whole structure of the agriculture industry — the injustices and exploitation and the way the system is very dependent on a labor force that is not treated so well,” de Barraicua said.
During the pandemic and following this year’s floods, de Barraicua has toured agricultural communities in California to understand how farm workers and small farmers adapt and survive through times of scarcity.
This summer, after historic flooding destroyed so many fields, she said many farm workers relied on as little as $1300 per month to support entire families.
“You see the mental state of folks. People are extremely depressed,” she said.
In dramatic cases, some farmworkers have said floods cost them up to $3,000 in income by eliminating a few days of work during critical harvests. Undocumented workers are ineligible for unemployment benefits in California.
“People who have residency with incomplete immigration status, or no status at all, were getting nothing, and yet they were being deemed essential by the federal government,” de Barraicua said, referencing the “essential worker” status granted to certain workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even for farm workers who have saved up the money and become their own bosses by leasing or purchasing their own farms, floods and droughts proved disastrous. De Barraicua said small farmers who struggle with language and social barriers are often last in line to receive government aid after disasters. Small farmers often don’t have the resources to navigate complicated government farm aid programs. Undocumented farmers, who have built their farms without government support, are also ineligible for agricultural aid altogether, even though de Barraicua said they are often responsible for growing rare and unique crops (like lemongrass) that are absent on most large farms. While government agencies often proactively reach out to large corporate growers after disasters strike, small farmers have to seek out help on their own, de Barraicua said.
Because of their niche crops and mixed growing practices, de Barraicua said it’s also difficult for small U.S. farmers to obtain crop insurance. Crop insurance typically covers large amounts of single, common crops – like corn or soy.
De Barraicua mentioned two farmers featured in an April article from the Guardian about the impact of flooding on small-scale California agriculture. Lideres Campesinas works with both of them. Antonio Palma, a farmer in Ventura, California, saw a flood destroy more than 100 acres of his cropland and ruin more than $1 million worth of equipment. Palma has struggled to communicate effectively with government agencies, de Barraicua said. At one point, he understood that he could use government-provided equipment to repair the flood damage in his fields. But the equipment was never delivered.
“A lot of them really feel disillusioned at times,” de Barraicua said.
Farmers like Palma often continue to struggle with the debt and lease payments on their farms for years in the wake of disasters.
María Inés Catalán, a farmer in Hollister, California, lost her entire spring harvest and her home to flooding. De Barraicua said Catalán is well known for her work as a female immigrant farmer and that government agencies have identified her publicly as a shining example of an immigrant farm worker who worked her way up to becoming a farmer. Nonetheless, she has struggled to obtain aid from government agencies because of her immigration status.
“It's very sad that she can be invited to be a keynote speaker to talk about her expertise, and yet she’s struggling incredibly,” de Barraicua said.
Even when disasters haven’t struck, de Barraicua added, there is still a need to support farmers who struggle to understand legal systems and restrictions because of language barriers and unfamiliarity with the U.S. and California laws. In some cases, immigrant farmers have begun growing crops on land not zoned for agriculture only to face penalties and fines they didn’t expect.
“There are many immigrants who have invested 25 to 30 years in farm work and have now come to a point where they can afford to purchase a home or purchase some land. And oftentimes they encounter all sorts of challenges and make mistakes because they don't speak English,” de Barraicua said.
De Barraicua said this is one issue she will examine in her position on California’s new Agricultural Land Equity Task Force, a state-appointed body meant to increase access to agricultural land and resources for farmers not traditionally included in California’s agricultural community. The task force includes state officials, academic experts, women, and farmers from ethnic and racial minority backgrounds.
De Barraicua attended her first task force meeting on Oct 30. So far, the group is still establishing goals and discussing logistics, but de Barraicua has exciting plans for future meetings.
In recent years, de Barraicua and Lideres Campesinas have worked on various efforts to secure a stronger safety net and greater access to aid for farmworkers and farmers in California during the pandemic and subsequent water-related disasters. Many of those efforts have proved unsuccessful.
A bill to provide state unemployment benefits for undocumented workers passed the California legislature but died on Governor Gavin Newsom’s pen. The governor said he had to veto the measure because of its potential impact on the state budget. Newsom said it would take $200 million simply to put together the staffing and the program infrastructure, not including the unemployment benefits themselves.
In general, de Barraicua said she and her colleagues are up against a system that disincentivizes traditional agricultural practices in favor of large, established growers (often large companies).
“It's like a monopolization of our food system,” she said, “There’s the takeover of small farms. Small farmers (not specifically those with recent immigrant backgrounds) in the Midwest and all over have told me they can't afford to bring in H2A workers, saying the government’s taking their workers away. And these are small farmers that have farmed for a long time. It is very sad to see that because that, to me, coincides with the monopolization of our foods. Our foods aren’t as healthy when you're getting them through mass production.”
De Barraicua said she hopes for a future where large, corporate agriculture has less power and ease of access to resources — where small farmers and people growing healthier food on local levels are incentivized to farm by local and national policies. She said many immigrant farmers, farmers of color, and small farmers generally take on traditional agricultural practices that produce healthier food.
“There's still this time to reverse that monopolization because the traditional ways of tending to the land will hopefully create more opportunities to keep growing food in the way that it should be done,” she said.
In the meantime, she hopes there are some avenues to reduce the burden placed on the agricultural community’s most vulnerable members. As climate change continues to exacerbate floods and droughts throughout the western United States, the issue of that vulnerability is not going to disappear.