Citrus Workers Leaving Fields for Food Lines
The December freeze that destroyed most of California’s citrus crop has had immediate consequences for the economy of the Central Valley, where farm workers in some hard-hit towns are lining up by the hundreds for food and other necessities during what should be the peak of their season.
In a region already defined by poverty and high unemployment, the arctic blast threw about 13,000 pickers and packers out of work. Most have little hope of working again until summer, when grape-picking season begins.
“This is a total economic disaster,” said Mayor Victor Lopez of Orange Cove, a town of 8,000 that depends almost entirely on orange groves and packinghouses for employment. All eight packinghouses in Orange Cove are closed, and as damage estimates continue to inch upward, managers have nothing but bad news for their employees.
“I have contractors calling all day long. ‘Have you got anything? Anything at all?’ ” said Mike Guinn, field operations manager for Orange Cove-Sanger Citrus, which laid off 92 full-time packers after Christmas.
Normally, the house employs 250 pickers this time of year, and fills 14 semitrailers a day with packed crates of navel oranges. This week, several hundred workers reported to the plant, but only to line up for bags of food and clothing being distributed in the parking lot.
Such queues have quickly become a fixture in Orange Cove and other citrus-dependent cities in the Central Valley, where residents shuffle in the cold dampness from one giveaway to the next, grasping at rumors in a void of information and hoping to scratch a few hours’ work out of salvage operations.
“Yesterday, I got $20 picking oranges for juice. Today, nothing,” said Emilio Hernandez, who has worked the orange crop in Orange Cove since 1974. Hernandez, a father of nine, has no idea how he’ll make the $605 mortgage payment on the modest house he bought five years ago, during a citrus boom. His neighbors are in the same boat, he said. “They’re all pickers,” said Hernandez, taking in the block with a sweep of his deeply calloused hands. “Nobody is working now.”
Across the street, Orchard Gardens apartment manager Liz Pierce said she already is facing $20,000 in delinquent rents in her 188-unit complex. “It’s only going to get worse,” she said. “If I don’t get some money soon, I’m going to have to start evicting people. I have no choice. I have a business to protect.”
Even in the best of times, poverty is a fact of life in the Central Valley. Unemployment in Fresno County hovers around 15%. In small rural communities, it runs as high as 40%, said Vickie Hoyle, emergency relief coordinator for the county Economic Opportunities Commission.
Orange Cove’s main street reflects those chronic difficulties in boarded-up buildings, a failed supermarket crammed with junk, a onetime theater that now houses a youth diversion program. The few businesses that remain face a bleak winter, with some owners already reporting a sharp slump in sales. “We are in very dire straits,” said Sue Jones, treasurer of the Chamber of Commerce.
Lasting Repercussions
After a similar citrus freeze eight years ago, the economic crisis ricocheted through rural communities for months. “About six months into it, local businesses started closing,” recalled Joel Nelson of California Citrus Mutual, a trade organization that represents about 800 growers. “It’s going to happen again unless we start finding employment for people. We need some kind of jobs program so that we have money going through the local economy.”
For the last three weeks, however, most aid has gone directly into emergency relief, primarily through churches and nonprofit groups such as United Way and the Salvation Army.
Within days of the freeze, private contributions began pouring into community organizations. “We had one individual walk in this week with a $1,000 personal check,” Mayor Lopez said. “And he said he’d be back later with food.” Businesses such as Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which earmarked $500,000 for assistance with utility bills, also quickly responded.
But the donations have been swallowed up immediately. At the Apostolic Church in Orange Cove, volunteers handed out 315 boxes of basic foods Monday afternoon and still had to turn away several hundred people. By Tuesday morning, the line again snaked around the block.
The Salvation Army allocated $20,000 for rental assistance in Orange Cove. It was gone in a day, with about 300 applications left unfilled. And the story has been repeated throughout the Central Valley.
“We’ve been overwhelmed, and we don’t have the staffing to accommodate all the needs,” said Michael McCann of Proteus Inc., a relief organization that will receive more than $1 million of a $1.7-million federal emergency grant announced Tuesday by Vice President Al Gore. “We’re already booked for assistance well into February.”
The Cooperativa Campesina de California, an umbrella group representing California farm workers, said much more help is needed to offset about $112 million in lost earnings to citrus pickers and packers.
Latest estimates by state agricultural officials put total damage to the state’s orange and lemon crops at $634 million. Gov. Gray Davis, who toured an orange grove Tuesday afternoon, has declared states of emergencies for six counties--Tulare, Kern, Fresno, Madera, Monterey and Kings.
Relief organizations are pressing the Clinton administration to declare the Central Valley a disaster area, which would free up assistance through emergency programs such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
However, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), who has argued for greater assistance for workers as well as farmers during agricultural crises, said that even under a declaration of disaster, fieldworkers would receive little direct aid. “It’s a tough situation and I don’t know how we totally address it,” he said. “Unfortunately, farm workers have never been part of the calculus when we come up with these disaster-relief packages.”
Complicating matters, about 20% to 30% of the farm workers are undocumented immigrants and ineligible for government assistance. Others who are working on temporary visas said they feared that seeking government aid would jeopardize their chances of gaining permanent legal status, and immigration officials confirmed that it could.
Throughout the Central Valley this week, citrus trees were heavy with bright orange fruit, a bitter reminder of the harvest that might have been.
When the freeze hit Dec. 22, only about 10% of the crop had been picked. Now, growers wait impatiently for warmer temperatures, which will tell them with certainty how much of the remaining oranges can be salvaged. Navel oranges, which should have been picked from November through March, received the most damage. But even Valencias, which ripen in the spring and provide two more months of work, may have been destroyed.
Assessing the Damage
“Lemons are a total loss. We know that,” said Lee C. Bailey, chairman of Orange Cove-Sanger Citrus and a third-generation orange farmer. “We’re hoping to salvage 20% of the navels. With the Valencias, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Every day this week, Guinn of Orange Cove-Sanger and other packinghouse managers have pulled samples, slicing into the fruit to check the extent of the damage. Next week, Guinn said, he hoped to harvest an entire lot of trees and sort the oranges, either by weighing them on special scales or floating them in vats of water. Both methods will separate out lighter, dried-out fruit, which will be discarded.
If only a few good oranges are found in the mix, some growers may decide against a costly salvage operation and simply allow the fruit to rot and drop. In either case, the need for workers will be sharply reduced.
“We will run smaller crews. The packing will be slower,” Bailey said. “At best, pickers will get half their normal income. And most of them won’t have any work at all.”
In a good winter, pickers could be in the field six days a week, up to 12 hours a day. They would clip the fruit, drop it into a sack slung around their shoulders, and dump the sack into a bin. Each bin holds about 2,000 oranges, and workers earn about $11 for filling one. An experienced picker can make as much as $65 on a good day. And in a good year, he or she may work as long as nine months.
Most packers, on the other hand, earn the minimum wage--$5.75 an hour, with frequent overtime during the peak season.
It is grueling labor, but when the weather is kind, orange picking and packing provides enough stable income to support a family, set down roots, even buy a house. When the weather turns, however, most workers have nothing to fall back on. They must simply wait, and try to survive.
That was the philosophy of Linda Marquez, a lifelong Orange Cove resident who supports herself and her teenage daughter by packing oranges. Tuesday afternoon, Marquez stood in a slow-moving food line at the Apostolic Church, waiting her turn to take home a crate of potatoes, pasta, canned goods and bread.
“If we can make it through the next few months, we’ll be OK,” she said, pulling her coat tight against the cold, damp air. “Until then, this is what we have to look forward to.”
GROWING CONCERN
Scientists are working to develop cold-resistant crops, but efforts may not bear fruit for years. C1
