by Karen L. Willoughby, Christian Examiner
The life expectancy of farmworkers is the shortest of any occupation in the United States, according to statistics compiled by Andrew Kang Bartlett, an associate with the Presbyterian Hunger Program.
The work is backbreaking and dangerous: laboring in fields under a hot sun without ready access to fresh water, working with and on equipment without training, being exposed to fertilizer chemicals; and for women, the 80 percent probability that they will be sexually assaulted while working in a field.
The average annual income for farmworkers is $12,000, well under the poverty level for an individual, and many farmworkers have families, Bartlett added.
Farmworkers labor across the nation, planting, weeding and picking in due season, all manner of garden vegetables and fruits, as well as other crops such as tobacco, sugar cane and even, in Louisiana, crawfish.
The Presbyterian Church (USA), involved in hunger ministries since the 1970s through its Presbyterian Hunger Program, connected in 2003 with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a human rights organization founded in 1993, which now counts 4,500 farmworker members.