source: Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)
State of the Program report: “Now, fourteen years since its inception, the FFP has entered into a phase of truly dramatic expansion: During 2024 and 2025, the Program’s protections will reach thousands more farmworkers, at over 30 additional farms in 13 new states.”
“…the FFP’s domestic expansion in the U.S. is increasingly urgent in light of heightened risks to farmworkers from both rising temperatures associated with climate change and serious abuses associated with the growth of the H-2A program, including the growing risk of forced labor and human trafficking.”
As the Fair Food Program continues to ramp up its national expansion — while simultaneously growing its international footprint, as well — the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC) has released its latest report on the FFP. This State of the Program report offers both a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the FFP’s progress and the transformational change it has brought to the agricultural industry. The report dives deep into the various mechanisms of the FFP to show, in full transparency, how the Program operates and leverages its unique market-based power to guarantee best-in-class protections to tens of thousands of farmworkers.
In the words of one farmworker who was interviewed by a human rights investigator for the FFSC:
“There is a huge difference now since we have started [participating in the FFP] this season, the conditions here are really improving. For example, the supervisors used to get angry, and now they behave respectfully towards us [the workers]. Now we can make a complaint without fear of retaliation, and they [the supervisors] treat us well and as if we are all equals, without preference for one over the other. Now I feel happy to harvest here.”
We are excited to share the latest report, in full, today, but over the next few weeks we are also planning a multi-part series of posts highlighting excerpts of the report that capture various specific aspects of the unique partnership among farmworkers, growers, buyers, and consumers at the heart of the FFP.
Today, we are sharing the report’s Executive Summary as an introduction to this series. If you would like to download the report to read it in its entirety, click here! And stay tuned for more highlights from the report in the weeks ahead.
Executive Summary
Fourteen years ago, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) saw two key branches of their strategic efforts come together to give rise to the Fair Food Program. On the one hand, through the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food, launched in 2001, farmworkers from Immokalee, Florida, mobilized consumers across the country to call on corporations atop the US food industry to help guarantee farmworkers’ fundamental human rights in the fields where their produce was grown and harvested. On the other hand, through the CIW’s Anti-Slavery Campaign, launched in the early 1990s, those same farmworkers worked, often at great personal risk, to uncover and investigate modern-day slavery rings operating in Florida and throughout the eastern United States.
By 2010, the CIW’s anti-trafficking efforts had helped federal prosecutors put over a dozen farm employers and supervisors behind bars for exploiting their workers through the threat and use of violence, prompting federal prosecutors to dub the Florida agricultural industry “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Also by 2010, the CIW had secured legally-binding “Fair Food Agreements” with nearly a dozen of the country’s largest buyers of produce, committing those companies to leverage their purchasing power to protect workers in their suppliers’ operations, though dogged resistance to reform on the part of Florida’s tomato growers, had, to that point, kept those agreements from being implemented on Florida farms.
In late 2010 however, this potent combination of 1) an organized farmworker community, 2) an emerging human rights crisis in the agricultural industry, and 3) a growing measure of purchasing power committed to protecting farmworkers’ rights, finally overcame decades of grower resistance and resulted in the launch of the CIW’s Fair Food Program.
Just three seasons later, the Florida tomato industry was described by one human rights observer as “the best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times. That remarkable transformation would not be contained to Florida’s tomato fields alone, however. Within a few years, the Program began to expand, first to tomato farms along the east coast and soon after that into new crops in new states across the US.
Now, fourteen years since its inception, the FFP has entered into a phase of truly dramatic expansion: During 2024 and 2025, the Program’s protections will reach thousands more farmworkers, at over 30 additional farms in 13 new states. This accelerated growth was prompted in large part by a new initiative designed by the US Department of Agriculture, launched in 2024, to expand the H-2A, or ‘guestworker’ program, while also protecting those workers from abuse. As part of that pilot program, the USDA designated the FFP as the highest – or “platinum” – level of human rights protection for US farmworkers and offered farms the highest level of financial subsidies for joining the FFP to protect guestworkers in their operations.
As of 2025, the FFP is present in at least half the states in the continental U.S., and is also operating in two additional countries, Chile and South Africa. As a result, workers and growers in the flower industry in those countries are already benefiting from FFP implementation, with broader expansion into the fruit (South Africa) and salmon (Chile) industries on the runway.
This latest report is largely the story of the Program’s accelerating expansion during and since the pandemic. But the FFP did not expand alone over this period. As the Program grew, awareness of the FFP’s novel structure and its unique track record of measurable and documented success also spread.
This most recent analysis of the FFP’s track record in enforcing compliance is clear. As the Program expands to new Participating Growers across many new states and crops, compliance with FFP requirements improves dramatically in the first few years as effective compliance systems are established. After five or six years, most minor non-compliances are also prevented through ongoing improvements of Participating Growers’ systems and practices. Over time, the types of abuses that are still so prevalent outside the FFP are remedied – and ultimately prevented – by worker-led human rights enforcement.
Today, the Fair Food Program is recognized by human rights observers, academics, business experts, and government and law enforcement agencies alike, as a proven new paradigm for protecting workers’ rights in corporate supply chains. As a result, the Fair Food Program’s worker-driven/market-enforced approach and its underlying structure of multiple and overlapping monitoring and enforcement tools – known together as the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model – is also being replicated in the U.S. and internationally.
Efforts to adapt the WSR model to new geographies and industries are currently underway by workers in multiple sectors, including the fishing industry in northeast Scotland and the sugar industry in India, with guidance and support from the CIW and the Fair Food Standards Council. The recent adoption of new Human Rights Due Diligence requirements for companies doing business in the European Union is adding still more fuel to the interest in, and uptake of, the WSR model overseas.
Finally, as detailed in this report, the FFP’s domestic expansion in the U.S. is increasingly urgent in light of heightened risks to farmworkers from both rising temperatures associated with climate change and serious abuses associated with the growth of the H-2A program, including the growing risk of forced labor and human trafficking. Beyond chronicling the recent history of FFP and WSR expansion and analyzing FFP compliance statistics during this period of rapid growth, this report also includes several sub-sections on topics ranging from the most recent forced labor cases outside the FFP, to the FFP’s approach to sexual violence, the impact of the FFP’s and CIW’s best practices on federal policy, and the newest addition to the FFP’s Code of Conduct – the Program’s heat protection protocols, which were called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” earlier this year in a front-page article in the Washington Post.
