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TENANT COUNCILS OF SAN DIEGO - MARCH NEWSLETTER
We are hoping to publish these on a regular basis to provide updates on our organizing projects, news about housing policy in San Diego with context, and political education. If you have any questions or want to join our efforts to organize the tenants of San Diego against their landlords, please email tenantcouncilsofsandiego@gmail.com or attend our upcoming general meeting on April 11th at 2pm in the City Heights Library Community Room!
Organizing Update:
TCSD has several ongoing organizing projects, including:
-
Protesting a landlord’s lack of transparency and discrimination against Somali tenants;
- Amending tenants’ leases to change their flat rate utility charges into higher utility fees through the RUBS (ratio utility billing system) method; and
- Failure to adequately remediate or compensate tenants for mold issues.
However, this month we want to focus on supporting our fellow tenant organizers in Los Angeles by donating for their eviction defense fund:
Árbol de Hierro is a tenant association of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) that represents eight immigrant families from Oaxaca who are facing an unjust Ellis Act eviction in Mar Vista. The association’s name, which translates to “Iron Tree” in English, was chosen to symbolize the strong roots that the families have grown after living in their units for 30+ years.
In December of 2024, tenants received notice of their new landlord’s intention to use the Ellis Act to evict them from their homes. The Ellis Act is a California state law that landlords use to displace long-term rent-stabilized tenants from their homes, provided that the landlord intends to remove the property from the housing market. In reality, landlords buy rent-stabilized buildings and then use the Ellis Act to flip the property and earn a greater profit. This greedy landlord’s actions threaten to displace the vibrant Oaxacan community that has been a part of West LA for decades.
Árbol de Hierro’s landlords are San Diego residents, so throughout 2025, TCSD assisted Árbol de Hierro in shaming these landlords in their neighborhoods with protests at their homes. (More about that on our Instagram here and here.)
Unlike San Diego, Los Angeles has a municipal code that allows tenants who are 62 years of age or disabled and who have resided in their units more than one year to request a one year extension after receiving a no-fault eviction notice. The Árbol de Hierro tenants’ one-year extension of tenancy expired in December of 2025, and they now face a court battle to defend their homes. Many of the tenants have small children and disabled or elderly family members who have established local support networks. They cannot afford to stay in Los Angeles if they are displaced from their units, and now they are asking for community support in raising funds for legal fees. They are grateful for donations of any amount and for your support in protecting the Oaxacan community of Los Angeles.
Árbol de Hierro has almost met their funding goal, so we want to try to help them reach it!
You can donate at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-oaxacan-families-from-eviction.
San Diego Tenant News:
Lemon Grove Discussing Tenant Protection Ordinance
In San Diego County, only Chula Vista, San Diego, and Imperial Beach currently have tenant protection ordinances with more protections than the state’s Tenant Protection Act. In February of 2026, Lemon Grove City Council adopted a temporary ordinance that gave tenants 120 days to vacate their apartments for all no-fault evictions. They also increased the relocation assistance that landlords must pay tenants. This was thanks to the advocacy of the tenants of the Sierra Grove apartment complex, who pointed out that their landlord was violating the state Tenant Protection Act of 2019 regarding the requirements to evict tenants for substantial renovations. The landlord, Orsett Serra Grove, purchased their building in November of 2025 and promptly wanted to evict all tenants to raise the rents. Mayor Snow of Lemon Grove, who is a tenant rights’ attorney, had originally wanted to enact stronger protections that would severely restrict large landlords’ ability to do renovictions, but most of the city council opposed the proposal.
Unfortunately, in mid-March, Lemon Grove City Council repealed the portion of the ordinance that gave tenants 120 days to vacate their apartments when being evicted. This reversal of the policy has led to growing disagreements in the city council over how to proceed in passing a permanent tenant protection ordinance. The city is holding a public workshop on April 9, 2026, at the Lemon Grove Community Center (3146 School Ln, Lemon Grove, 91945). Lemon Grove will hopefully see a proposal for a permanent tenant protection ordinance in early summer, albeit with stiff opposition from several council members.
The Context: Avoiding Tenant Power
City councils are slow to move on proposals that would improve existing tenancies or give tenants more power to stay in their homes. Politicians tend to prefer developer-centered incentive programs requiring construction projects to create a certain percentage of affordable units. Although these units are classified as “affordable”, many are ultimately more expensive than the rents that the long-term tenants displaced by redevelopment projects were paying. Redevelopment projects can price tenants out of their neighborhoods entirely. As our friends at Los Angeles Tenant Union have argued, “affordable housing” is often an outright scam: affordability is “the term by which city officials promise housing for the poor and working people and, by those very same housing schemes, take it away.”
It is easy to see these flaws with developer-centered incentive programs in the City of San Diego’s affordable housing ordinances. San Diego’s “Inclusionary Affordable Development Regulations” require new developments, including those adding on to existing buildings, to reserve 10% of units for low-income or very low-income renters. “Low” and “very low” income are calculated using the Area Median Income, which was $130,800.00 for San Diego County in 2025. In 2025, a unit was very low income if the rent was $1,635.00 a month and low income if it was $1,962.00 a month. Rent restrictions on low or very low-income units generally last 55 years. SDMC §§ 142.1301-142.1314. However, if a developer adds accessory dwelling units (ADUs) restrictions only last 10 years. SDMC §§ 141.0302. Under these Affordable Development Regulations, there is no requirement to preserve existing tenancies or naturally occurring affordable units destroyed by a development project. Furthermore, the law doesn’t stop landlords from massively inflating rents for the other 90% of units in a given project and driving up rents across the neighborhood.
San Diego’s “Dwelling Unit Protection Regulations” (SDMC §§ 143.1201-143.1212) are only designed to preserve naturally occurring affordable housing when a property is demolished to make room for a new project. After a landlord destroys an apartment complex, the law requires that the landlord replace each unit where a low-income or very low-income resident lived in the past five years with a unit that would, in theory, be affordable for that resident. However, there are several caveats:
- First, “affordable” doesn’t mean that the rent is as low or lower than the previous rents at the building;
- Second, the protected low-income units may count toward and reduce the 10% Inclusionary Affordable Development Regulation requirement;
- Third, since the demolition regulations have no robust notice requirement and residents can be evicted six months before the demolition even begins, the original residents are unlikely to return to the “new” affordable housing anyway.
None of San Diego’s housing ordinances touch the primary mechanism that landlords use to displace residents and raise rents: Renovictions. Developers across San Diego buy up buildings, evict all the existing tenants under the pretext of making renovations so big that they can’t be completed with the tenants in place, and then raise the rents drastically. Currently, only tenants are fighting the battle against these so-called “substantial remodels.” For example, Imperial Beach only recently passed some protections against renoviction in response to extensive organizing by the tenants of Hawaiian and Sussex Gardens. Even then, the version of the ordinance that passed did not, in fact, help the tenants who advocated for it at all. Their landlord, F&F Properties, is the same landlord that lobbied hard against San Diego’s Tenant Protection Ordinance when it was being debated.
The most impactful and truly “affordable” housing solution is to give tenants the power to stay in their long-time homes and punish forcible dislocation. Since city councils and the state legislature won’t grant us that power, we have to organize to create that power ourselves.
Airbnb News:
San Diego City Council is currently opposing taxes to disincentivize turning land owner’s extra homes into Airbnbs. This is unfortunate, since the conversion of housing units to Airbnbs is driving displacement and depletion of existing housing stock across San Diego. Numerous landlords are also illegally evicting their tenants to convert their apartments into Airbnbs. City Council decided to modify a tax proposal to disincentivize empty second homes and short term rentals so that it only taxes empty second homes after Airbnb lobbied 2.5 million to persuade City Council to oppose an Airbnb tax. City Council claims that ultimately the taxes they are passing to tax empty homes will raise revenue to assist in building new housing. They insist that however homes are added to the market, it will lower the increased cost of housing. But as we noted above, there is a lot of housing development that actually drives up rent in neighborhoods. Other cities have banned Airbnbs entirely unless the Airbnb is also the land owner’s primary residence for a significant portion of the year. It is shameful that San Diego City Council cannot even pass a tax to address the issue.
Upcoming General Meeting on April 11th:
On Saturday, April 11th at 2pm, join us at the City Heights Library Community Room as we discuss recent developments in tenant organizing and how you can get involved! Can't attend in person? Join us virtually!
CRICKET IN A CAGE
Lumière d'été -
dir. Jean Grémillon, 1943
By: Ali Mehraban Ramirez
Gremillon’s direction anchors a web of romantic fallout to the labor process of a dam construction (a destructo-production) in the mountains of Provence. An airy hotel, named “The Guardian Angel”, from which we see and hear this construction, has the quality of a curio cabinet. Tucked away in this valley, the characters collecting dust within are shaken out of arrangement by the explosive conjuncture of an incoming dynamite specialist, a fashion illustrator, and a tortured artist - all in for a brief summer stint away from Paris. These characters breach the stillness of the quiet hotel, opening it up for a brief moment to the concrete world it’s kept buried in memories - nostalgic and nightmarish alike.
Dynamite explosions and the machinic churning of the expressionist work site lay down the rhythmic division of the film’s three acts, becoming the bass for some of the most beautiful and dramatic moments of the film (including montage that could have come straight out of Man with a Movie Camera). The “creative destruction” of the dam’s production, as an object of the film, illuminates different parts of the film as a field: Internally, the willingness to kill for unrequited love (and secure the impossibility of this love), or to destroy oneself when faced with the loyal love of another. Externally, the wartime context of the film’s production itself - right in the midst of the Nazi occupation of France, a few years from Liberation Day and the ensuing reconstruction of Europe which was capitalized upon by the American Marshall Plan. (For a more contemporary version of this dynamic, see this dispatch from comrades in the midst of the current war in Iran.)
As soon as we are settled into our stay at the glass house of a hotel, the fuse is lit. In one scene, the working class heart-throb (Julien), guided by the mistaken and fateful direction of the caged and diminished hotel manager (Cri Cri), enters the room already occupied by the chronically sitting duck and wounded prey (Michèle), and gropes around blindly in the dark, finding first: the arrangement of sunflowers sent up to her by the chronically hunting aristocrat and uber-predator (Patrice Le Verdier), and second: the desperate kiss missing its expected target of the emotional-contortionist firebrand (Roland) who enters and exits the film by crashing against the mountain with spontaneous self-combustion.
This encounter is a perfect exposition of the film. In it, Roland is replaced by his volatile unavailability, and Patrice by his poison gestures of love, and we get through this contretemps scene an arrangement around which the union of Michèle and Julien will be both interrupted and inevitable. This dream-like (or even sleepwalking) first kiss is a moment of becoming-necessary, a surplus of contingency, and their reaction to it perfectly attests to this,
“It’s not my fault.”
“It’s not mine either.”
In this parapraxical moment, we see chance/fate intertwine with intention/desire in the complexity that lends this film its charge.
One of the many beautiful shots comes together when Julien just barely saves the suicidal Michèle from being blown to bits at the site of the dam. (Roland told her “If you really love me, you should leave me”.) He whisks her to safety, sheltering inside a large steel cylinder as rocks rain down from the explosions. The couple sitting there, as if in the barrel of a gun aimed at the plein-air landscape behind them. They are in the crossfire of everything within the film’s narrative terrain, and also in the extra-filmic level where the actors are being “shot” into characters, stuck in the frame, dealing with the roles written from above.
Just after this scene we can see Roland experiencing a similar extra-filmic lucidity. Having awoken from his drunken entrance the night before, he strolls into the hotel bar, ordering a drink as he steps into frame, and taking a look around the inside of the frame itself he says, “ Beautiful light, mmh?” as if referring to the magic of photography, the exposure of light onto film which has captured him faithfully. There in the hotel, with all its glass and metal elements, we peer in and see the drama of summer light refracted through its elements.
The minor characters are perfect caricatures; Monsieur Louis, the easily disturbed classicist and his jolly companion Louise, Tonton the waiter with his along-for-the-ride refrain “Why not?”, Vincent and Ernest the proud laborers who are always already heroes, even in their simplest moments. Beyond their comedic relief, these characters also illustrate the outer coordinates of the high classes and the low classes, just as the blunt geography does with the luxurious estate of Patrice up the mountain, and the workers down in the valley.
Alongside this layer of class stratification, is the texture of the war and occupation that the Vichy censors couldn’t snuff out. The sadistic Patrice absorbs much of the film’s latent hatred towards the fascists, with Cri Cri as the faithful collaborationist, hiding the truth about his murderous past. In the end, however, Patrice and his reign of terror are defeated.
Ernest, the worker, has been trying to shoot down an evil eagle throughout the film, at one point describing the perched creature like a “weathervane”. Audiences at the time were surely being prompted to imagine the iconographic eagle of the Nazi regime. Patrice steals Ernest’s hunting rifle after another failed attempt at downing the eagle, and takes it out to shoot Julien who is climbing wires high up over the valley, in the midst of a suspenseful rescue attempt. Before pulling the trigger on our daring hero, Ernest wrestles him to the ground. Patrice recovers the rifle once again and is now facing off with the swelling crowd of workers. As he threatens to shoot them, they remain fearless and steadily approach him, driving him off the edge of the cliff behind him and falling to his death. Another intensely Soviet styled scene follows: Michèle and Julien, arm in arm, boldly march into their liberated future, against the wind and towards the whole earth.
Raymond Aimos, the actor who played Ernest, was a resistance fighter and died in combat during the liberation of Paris, only one year after the film’s release. Watching these scenes in light of this historical trajectory, only adds to the careful depth of this film. Lumière d'été concisely navigates a multi-polar love story of epic proportions while letting the residue of time be exposed, much like the lives spent within the hotel Guardian Angel, set against dust clouds and caught in the mystified glow of the summer light.
March 24th, 2026
CALIFORNIA FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAM - PART 2
A MARXIST WORLD-ECOLOGY ANALYSISBy: Marcelo Brasil
5. The power of farm labor contractors over labor supply chains
The district-level logic of cheap procurement, established through trade policy and the appropriation of extra-human and human natures, is operationalized by the specific structure of the migrant labor supply chain. A key mechanism is the use of third-party labor intermediaries contracted through programs like H-2A visas. It has been reported that “sixty-one percent of farmers…hired a farm labor contractor to recruit employees.”(“Survey: California Farms Face Continuing Employee Shortages,” 2023)
These third parties, known as Farm Labor Contractors (FLCs), enable companies like Wonderful Citrus, HMC Farms, and Sun Pacific Farms – all of which have contracts with SDUSD and other schools – to outsource recruitment to firms like “Fresh Harvest.” (US Department of Labor (2022). This practice reduces costs and increases profitability. Farmworkers employed by FLCs, who represent approximately two-thirds of California’s crop workers, typically earn less than direct hires. A University of California Davis (UCD) study identifies FLCs as the largest single employers of California workers, and workers at Wonderful Citrus are no exception. There, contracted workers – who typically fill less than two bins of mandarin oranges during an eight-hour shift – earn on average around US$12 an hour, on a piece-rate basis. This is where FLCs extract profit. FLC commissions are typically 30% to 40% of Farm Worker Wages. (UC Davis, 2025) If Wonderful Citrus allocates US$15 per hour for labor, the FLC may pay the worker US$12, retaining US$3 as profit. Additional revenue streams for FLCs include recruitment fees and transportation costs, which can burden workers with significant debt. In comparison, Wonderful’s direct hires performing the same work, according to Salgado, earn at least US$15 an hour. (Bloch, 2019)
This structure adheres to what Intan Suwandi identifies as a core neoliberal logic: production “is increasingly organized in global commodity chains (also known as global supply chains or global value chains), governed by multinational corporations straddling the planet” (p. 1). Suwandi’s analysis demonstrates how neoliberal capitalist imperialism functions through arm’s-length contracting and the externalization of costs to maximize profits. Corporations and farmers “increasingly prefer to externalize their operations because forcing outsourced producers into intense competition with one another is a more effective way of driving down wages and intensifying labor than doing so in-house through appointed managers.”(Smith, 2016:81)
Farmers also use FLCs to deflect liability; if labor violations occur, the contractor, not the farm, is typically held responsible. For instance, in a case against Wonderful Citrus, it was reported that “of these 33 individuals, it appears 12 individuals were Wonderful direct hires and 21 worked for farm labor contractors providing labor to Wonderful”(State of California Agricultural Labor Relations Board [ALRB], Admin. Order No. 2024-04, March 18, 2024)., including contractors such as Guerrero Labor Contractor, O.F.R. Incorporated, Kern Labor Contracting Incorporated, and Paragon Personnel. Investigations detect labor law violations in 70 to 80% of FLC cases, fueling perceptions that FLCs systematically exploit farmworkers. (Gifford Center for Population Studies, UC Davis, 2025) Such a system solidifies the “cheapness” required for profitable appropriation, a dynamic partly realized through the Farm to School program. The substandard material conditions provided by FLCs are a direct result of this cost-cutting imperative, and the literal fruits of this labor are ultimately served on a student’s plate. Consequently, many “farmers reap over US$7 billion from the harvest of valuable commodities like almonds, grapes, and pistachios.”(Bloch, 2019) This model illustrates how school procurement metabolically functions: cutting costs through neoliberal outsourcing is the operational norm.
While migrants provide cheap labor for farms, schools decide how to procure goods, effectively benefiting from this system without socializing costs. This process begins with district personnel like the Nutrition Director and the Farm-to-School Specialist – positions with higher salaries than teachers and cafeteria workers – who design menus and select vendor farms like Wonderful Citrus, Dole, Kingsburg Orchards or Sun Pacific Farms. They then issue a purchase order to a local produce distributor, for example, SDUSD and SUHSD use American Produce Distributors (APD).(San Diego Unified School District & American Mushroom Inc., 2022) APD finalizes deals with selected farms and delivers the produce to school sites. The simplified chain is: SDUSD orders from APD → APD procures from farms → APD delivers to schools.
This managerial process exemplifies capitalism as a world-ecology where specific actors make sourcing decisions based on a logic of accumulation by appropriation generated by imperialism. The produce – picked by migrant workers, transported by trucks running on stolen Venezuelan oil (Matza, 2025), delivered to school yards, and prepared by an underpaid, and overworked precarious cafeteria staff at 17.16 dollars an hour, almost entirely female 93%… more likely to be Black or Latino… 35.9% of food service workers in California are migrants (Hinkley, Sara. 2024)– is ultimately served to the future labor force – a fitting Cecil Rhodes’ model of imperial provisioning. On top of this, SDUSD just recently eliminated 221 classified positions because of a $47 million budget deficit; this includes bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and special education aides—workers essential to the daily functioning of schools. (Hessedal, 2026). Having established these material mechanics, the program then obscures them beneath a veneer of “free market” ideology under “fiscal discipline,” a discipline applied not to vendors or administrators but to the most vulnerable workers, who according to an interview with a cafeteria worker, even before these layoffs, they were “understaffed, and do not have breaks.” (Interviewee B, 2025)
This hierarchy extends beyond the supply chain into the school itself. Administrators–and their lavish salaries (superintendents in SDUSD currently hold a $445K salary, and principals currently hold a 175k salary)– at the school are dependent on not only exploited farm workers, but also on the appropriation of unpaid human and extra-human nature for their benefit, especially when standardized testing or “performance standards” and attendance is part of how an administrator is measured… .or an important metric that measures “highly effective teachers” or “high performing schools.” (Commission on Teacher Credentialing 2014, 5) Moreover, a high performing school can only attain that if students are well nourished. “School Nutrition Association” did a study that read “on average students who eat school breakfasts have been shown to achieve 17.5% higher scores on standardized math tests, and attend 1.5 more days of school per year.” (School Nutrition Association, 2022) Therefore, the school’s own reproduction is inseparable from the search for “cheap” nature.
6. Vendor case studies: The imperial architecture of “local” food
The theoretical framework and procurement logic establish a systemic imperative for “cheapness.” This section analyzes specific corporate vendors to demonstrate how that imperative is materially realized through business models built on imperial supply chains, political power, and exploitation of workers. These case studies reveal the concrete architecture of the “local” food served in schools.
6.1 Wonderful Citrus and HMC Farms: Guaranteed markets and militarized capital
This analysis raises a critical question: does supplying schools function as a guaranteed market for agricultural capital? Historical precedent suggests it does. In the 1960s, consumer boycotts targeted California grapes to protest unfair labor and anti-union practices led by the United Farm Workers. In response,
“Growers, in their greatest coup, successfully petitioned the US Department of Defense to buy the grapes which consumers didn’t want to eat, and [fed] them straight to the troops in Vietnam. In 1968, the military bought 6.9 million pounds of fresh grapes. By 1969, they bought 11 million pounds, with shipments to Vietnam increasing five-fold.” (Patel, 2008: 69)
This dynamic mirrors the current Farm to School program: even amidst potential market fluctuations or ethical scrutiny, growers would likely secure a guaranteed buyer in the Department of Education, just as they did in the Department of Defense, also referred to as the Department of War. In Farm to School’s grant program, it is clear “....to incentivize farmers and ranchers….a sustained market for those products through school food purchasing.” (Socolar and Bowles, 2025) The irony is compounded by the fact that much of the farm and reproductive labor originates from regions devastated by environmental catastrophes often induced by the U.S. military, a key appendage of U.S. imperialism that is often erased from promotional discourse.
Connecting war to environmental damages is essential to a world-ecology lens. Frontiers deemed “empty” or “hostile” are appropriated by the capitalist class, a process often secured through invasion or conflict to guarantee nature’s “free gifts.” In war, “most nature, including most humans, was sacrificed in service to the productivity of wage-labor” (Moore, 2017: 94). Capitalism’s dual need is for “cheap nature” as both input (e.g., cheap fertilizer) and output (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions) (Foster, 2000). Public school procurement functions within this same frontier logic, absorbing commodities (including migrant workers who flee) produced in militarized ecological sacrifice zones.
The case of Wonderful Citrus, a supplier to San Diego Unified and many other school districts, exemplifies this nexus. Owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the company benefits from a guaranteed school market. At the 2024 International Fresh Produce Association, Nancy Johnston, Senior Director of Foodservice Sales at Wonderful Citrus, stated: “Kids are next generation consumers, but they’re also today’s consumer. And with schools serving such a large number of students on a consistent basis, we want to ensure they know about our great tasting mandarins, and then also tell their parents to look for Halos the next time they’re at the supermarket.” She further revealed the strategic necessity of this market when she said: “Working with the K-12 sector isn’t always easy, but it’s a market we can’t afford to ignore.” (“IFPA Meetings Connect K-12 School Menu Planners with Growers, Processors,” 2024).
Wonderful’s empire is bolstered by state and military support. For instance, the Port of Los Angeles signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the City of Shafter, California, and The Wonderful Company to promote more efficient trade connections with the Central Valley, focusing on boosting U.S. exports.(The Port of L.A., 2025) This agreement illustrates how public infrastructure subsidizes agribusiness expansion. The Resnick’s are major donors to politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom (his wife Jennifer Newsom serves as co-chair of the California Farm to School Working Group) and Representative Jim Costa (who maintains the milk lobby), leveraging influence to advance an economic agenda spanning from Californian schools to Western Asia. They also support Republican Representative David Valadao, who has advocated for policies to “make the Middle East even less stable and increase the likelihood of war in the region.” (Todd, 2022) The Resnick’s support aims to protect their lucrative pistachio monopoly from international competition, particularly from Iran. Valadao also has “...commended President Trump for taking decisive action” against Iran, in the 2026 attacks. Furthermore, they have funded think tanks lobbying for aggressive foreign policy, including supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine on Palestinians and favouring hostile sanctions and opposition to any Iran nuclear deal. (Blumenthal, 2018) Thus, a corporation supplying school lunches actively profits from and promotes militarism to secure its markets, normalizing genocide and war as a backdrop to student life.
Lastly, The Resnick’s control 57% of the Kern Water Bank, one of California’s largest underground water storage facilities designed to manage droughts. Their philanthropic branding – such as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Student Union at California State University Fresno – obscures a reality where educational institutions are clients of a corporation willing to promote genocide and risk war for market dominance. This imperial logic extends to other major vendors, such as HMC Farms, whose owner Harold McClartney champions exports to “food-insecure” nations like sanction-ravaged Cuba, viewing them not through solidarity but as opportunities for market penetration within an unequal global trade system. McClarty said that “....the more markets we have available, the more legs we add to the stool that supports us,” (Rodriguez, 2015) which also echoes McClartey’s logic to “introducing good-tasting, crunchy and sweet grapes to kids is a priority, starting with grammar school exposure.” (Prevor, 2022)
6.2 Dole: Plantation legacies and structural adjustment
Promotional material from school districts reveals a reliance on corporate vendors and the frontier logic of appropriation. An Instagram post from @sandicoastcafe (SDUSD’s nutrition account), using the hashtag “farm to school”, showcases its relationship with Dole and Wonderful Citrus. Dole, headquartered in Ireland for tax advantages, grows bananas in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and the Philippines. The U.S. Bureau of International Labor Affairs has reported forced and child labor in the banana sectors of some of these countries. This practice continues Dole’s historical legacy of plantation colonialism, notably in Hawaii, where it suppressed Indigenous populations (Fujii, 2025), and Sanford Dole became the first president of the Hawaiian Republic. Countries like Costa Rica became victims of SAPs, “hit hard by debt payments and was one of the first countries in the region to default on its loans” (Ferreira et al. 2018). The same script followed: devalued currency followed by a wave of privatizations with foreign transnationals eager to capitalize on “cheap” agricultural commodities.
“The Costa Rican government launched a number of initiatives with the help of the United States Agency for International Development and other international actors (the WTO) to further develop infrastructure (transportation, processing plants, etc.) and reduce domestic barriers to trade for transnational agricultural firms.”
Furthermore,
“[T]hrough structural adjustment, international financial institutions obligated the Costa Rican state to adopt policies that favored firms like Del Monte and Dole, such as tax exonerations for foreign entities, financing for farming organizations, incentives for agricultural research, and exemptions from environmental health laws” (Brown, Flint, & LaMay, 2020) (Vagneron et al. 2009).
These lax laws have made Costa Rica a leading global user of pesticides, with application rates as high as 34.45 kg per hectare annually (Vargas Castro, 2022). Within this arrangement, “wages in the banana industry have remained stagnant for years, keeping workers impoverished.”(Link, 2025) The Farm to School program is thus built upon a plantation model, feeding what can be termed a ‘plantation mentality.’
6.3 Hormel/Applegate: The “Non-Local” Frontier
Some “non-local” vendors like Hormel Foods in Nebraska (owner of Applegate farms, a vendor to SDUSD), also reliant on migrant labor, exemplify a plantation regime with its focus on quantity and speed. A worker testimony from a Hormel plant in 2018 describes the brutal reality:
“[T]he speed of the line had jumped recently – from 1,000 pigs per hour to more than 1,100 – and Lopez was having trouble keeping up…As her co-worker reached for another shoulder, Lopez rushed to clear the cutting area, and her fingers slipped toward the saw blade...Her index finger dangled by a flap of skin, the bone cut clean through. She screamed as blood spurted out” (Genoways, 2014)
As students rush to the lunch line – a daily ritual marketed by SDUSD’s nutrition instagram account – the centrality of food to school operations is clear. Lopez’s experience reveals how the school not only depends on but actively supports and enables this violent, unequal exchange. (Bacon, 2018) An analysis of procurement contracts and public reporting for major vendors, including Wonderful Citrus, HMC Farms, Stehly Farms, Pitman Family Farms, reveals a consistent pattern of labor violations, reliance on exploited migrant labor, and documented hazardous working conditions. This directly links the school lunch program to imperial supply chains.
MY FRIEND IN DETENTION
By: Valeria Castro Abril
The Otay Mesa Detention Center is located at the base of Otay Mountain, which is the tallest peak in the San Ysidro Mountain Range. These mountains lie just North of the San Diego/Tijuana border. I have walked through the thick brush of this terrain, down makeshift trails covered with evidence of human passage. Gatorade bottles, clothes, backpacks, medicine. The detention center is an upright blocky complex, crowned with rows of barbed wire. The Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison, is located less than a mile away. In the parking lot on my first visit, I was warned by a worker that I would be allowed in with only two belongings on my person.
“Just your keys and your ID,” he said from the window of his pick-up truck. The name Core Civic was stamped on the driver’s door and proudly displayed at the entrance to the lot. Core Civic is the company contracted by the U.S. government to operate this facility and over 80 others like it across the country. Last week was my third time in a detention center and the second time I'd visited my friend who’s been detained there since December.
“Do you have an ID, do you have any weapons on you?” A voice buzzed from the intercom. I do have an ID, I do not have any weapons. After a suspenseful couple of seconds, the heavy iron gate jolted and began opening before me. Its heft was impressive. I pictured it catching me in between, not slowing as it crushed me down the middle.
My slight familiarity with this process brought some ease to my steps as I entered the building. Inside the lobby were rows of metal benches, two vending machines, and a TV mounted on the wall. There was a small circular table adorned with a rose and white tablecloth. Hanging by the table, and I suppose the reason for such romance, was a black and white POW MIA flag. Beyond the snacks and the seating was the metal detector, x-ray machine, and bin-stack area one must pass through after they've checked in. In a few minutes the families, loved ones, and otherwise supporters of the folks who are locked up were called to make a line so that we may be escorted through the facility. We removed our shoes one by one, and passed quietly through the humming machines. We were led up several sets of stairs and through passages where the doors shut behind us as we went, then we arrived in the visitation room.
“Pick a chair, a red chair,” the guard said. “You will not exchange anything with the detainees. You are allowed one kiss and one hug at the beginning and at the end of the visit. These are optional, don't make it awkward.”
This guard's subdued warmth and dry humor stood out in the cold atmosphere. I picked a table on the outer edge with one red chair and one white chair facing each other. The table had a plastic divider in the middle, about the size of a ping-pong net. If the visitor and detainee wish to hold hands, they must do so with this plastic barrier held between. As the detainees were brought in, all wearing their dark blue scrubs, I could see their eyes excitedly scan the room like children in a school recital. My friend was near the end of the line; I waved and smiled as he met me. He is not a hugger but we hug because that is what you do when someone is hurting. You smile when you greet them and you give them a hug and you don't pull back until they do. I did not know my friend (only of him) before he was detained. His mom had told me about him months before, had mentioned his trusting nature, how it got him into trouble.
It is not lost on me how this may look, how it may ring in the ears of more prudent souls. I am a young-ish woman, twenty-six, and still living a life free from much obligation. My friend is twenty-two and a young man. Young men, he's told me on the phone, do not have the same discernment women do. My intention was to provide information and accompaniment. I had access, as a citizen, that he and his mother did not. The ability to go to the place where they lock up immigrants without much fear of being locked up myself. Nonetheless, the ethics of the whole thing used to rattle in my brain– the way things may look. Now I trust that true intentions are something to lean on. And my intention was to be there with a young man affected unjustly by the times.
I understand, too, that this is not behavior that most people would engage in. It is a bit bizarre to visit somebody who is imprisoned without knowing them. But didn't all the great benevolent rockstars do it too? Jesus and Mother Teresa? It is with that spirit of benevolence that I come, I tell myself. Not desperation. Not desperation at the violence I see all around me, not at the magnitude of pain. Not at my own loneliness, my own inner feelings of lack. I am no Mother Teresa.
I spoke with my friend for an hour. We laughed and discussed his case. He described me as elegant in my black shirt and black pants. I noticed the dimple in his cheek, only one. Soon the hour was over, detainees and visitors hugged and kissed. Some couples exceeded their one kiss allotment. Most embraced lovingly, some exchanged wet kisses. These felt strange in the stiff and fluorescently-lit room. I must admit my own discomfort at being witness to their PDA. It only makes sense, though, that ravenous affection would spring up here. Perhaps the reason for the single hug-and-kiss rule in the first place. My friend and I hugged once more, our allotment, and we both waved as we went out different doors. Him, back to the inner crevices of this eerie man-made cavern. Me, out into the dark and silence of Saturday evening.
I find my car in the now nearly empty lot and drive away from the facility. I carry the silence home, give thanks to God for my ability to leave that place. I visit my friend when I can, answer the phone when he calls. He does not ask much from me: to get in touch with someone or another, to send him pictures of his baby sister. Mostly, and this is the harder more complicated thing, he asks me to have faith. He recites Joshua 1:9 from memory over the phone.
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.
I trust that he is onto something.
CALIFORNIA FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAM:
FROM STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENTS TO STUDENT LUNCHES
A MARXIST WORLD-ECOLOGY ANALYSISBy: Marcelo Brasil
1. Introduction
“Our vendors are our partners. That’s a lot of business to produce folks. By the way, we have your future customers’ loyalty. You’re building future customers, that’s an important part as well! More students to eat fruits and vegetables, more business opportunities to grow.”
- Fred Espinosa, Director of Nutrition for San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) 2021
“We believe that providing clean water and sanitation services is a real business opportunity”
- Lars Thunell, former head of the World Bank’s private-sector arm the International Finance Corporation (IFC) 2008
“Farmers would like less government regulation, but what they really need on a day-to-day basis are the essentials: good weather, af ordable water, and readily-available labor.”
- Al Stehly, Farm Manager at Stehly Grove Management Inc
These quotes from the Director of Nutrition of San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) and from farmers like Al Stehly (of the Stehly family’s farming network in North County San Diego who currently hold contracts with SDUSD), echo the same logic expressed by Lars Thunnell, former head of the World
Bank’s private sector arm. This logic is summarized in the phrases “business opportunities,” “less government regulation,” and “readily available labor” that affirms the free market neoliberal worldview. Moreover, these quotes demonstrate a model of accumulation by appropriation (Moore, 2017). California farmers, this suggests, are dependent on modern neocolonial trade deals to appropriate wealth and unpaid work/energy from the Global South and to maximize on labor productivity – a necessary prerequisite of capitalism.
“Our vendors are our partners. That’s a lot of business to produce folks. By the way, we have your future customers’ loyalty. You’re building future customers, that’s an important part as well! More students to eat fruits and vegetables, more business opportunities to grow.”
- Fred Espinosa, Director of Nutrition for San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) 2021
“We believe that providing clean water and sanitation services is a real business opportunity”
- Lars Thunell, former head of the World Bank’s private-sector arm the International Finance Corporation (IFC) 2008
“Farmers would like less government regulation, but what they really need on a day-to-day basis are the essentials: good weather, af ordable water, and readily-available labor.”
- Al Stehly, Farm Manager at Stehly Grove Management Inc
These quotes from the Director of Nutrition of San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) and from farmers like Al Stehly (of the Stehly family’s farming network in North County San Diego who currently hold contracts with SDUSD), echo the same logic expressed by Lars Thunnell, former head of the World
Bank’s private sector arm. This logic is summarized in the phrases “business opportunities,” “less government regulation,” and “readily available labor” that affirms the free market neoliberal worldview. Moreover, these quotes demonstrate a model of accumulation by appropriation (Moore, 2017). California farmers, this suggests, are dependent on modern neocolonial trade deals to appropriate wealth and unpaid work/energy from the Global South and to maximize on labor productivity – a necessary prerequisite of capitalism.
This dynamic demonstrates imperialism, aligning with what Jason Moore describes as capitalism’s world-praxis and its trinity of abstract social labor, abstract social nature, and primitive accumulation (Moore, 2017:74) In other words, within historical capitalism, abstract social labor can be accumulated only through a farflung repertoire of imperialist enclosure and appropriation of nature’s “free gifts.” The capture of surplus value and profit by a farmer like Al Stehly is therefore a result of U.S. imperialism, which creates the conditions for enclosures and primitive accumulation that benefit U.S. transnational corporations as they appropriate or externalize nature’s costs. This process results in de-peasantization, with displaced people then becoming the labor force that supplies California farms, providing the super-exploited labor required in the circuit of capital. Ultimately, a farmer like Al Stehly cannot afford to pay for all of the wage labour and care work needed to pick and harvest his food. The California “Farm to School” program is the policy membrane that rationalizes these flows. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the initial mission of the Farm to School program, initially created in 2013 with grants awarded to over 1,000 projects throughout the U.S., was a “program that works to educate children on the origin of their foods [and increases] the amount of locally produced foods served through child nutrition programs.” (Bickelhaupt, 2022) One 2023 study reported that 28.5 million students received school lunches, amounting to over 4 billion meals served that year (Toossi, 2019). There is no question that the program has some positive outcomes, such as providing universally free school meals and creating opportunities for historically excluded children to be centred in the movement. Karen Ross, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, stated that the Farm to School program assists students understand that “what I put into my body will help me achieve better in the classroom as well as on the sports field.”(PBS, 2022) However, this program is masked and exemplifies Marx’s “hidden abode” of labor (Marx, 1996:123) where “behind the sublimated coercion of wage labor lie overt violence and outright theft” (Fraser, 2016:8). Or Jason Moore’s concept of an “epistemic rift” which “is a series of violent abstractions implicated in the creation and reproduction of two separate epistemic domains: "Nature " and "Society.”(Moore, 2017) In other words, people or students become removed from their material realities, as well as create divisions of what become “civilized” and “un-civilized” which result in violence, or “primitive accumulation.” The reason these students can eat and reproduce each day is through imperialism, reliant on appropriated human and extra-human natures, as well as the super-exploited migrant labor of H-2A visa holders or undocumented migrant workers who are pushed out from their ancestral lands to pick and often serve their meals. Most literature on Farm to School is rooted in neoliberal ideology and fails to reveal the actual origin of the food (CFTA, 2024). There is seldom an examination of the actual supply chain: who picks the food, their wages, how and why they came to this work, and their material conditions. This set of relations is central to capitalism as a world-ecology, maintaining a logic and ideology from “directors” and “managers” or the professional managerial class that turns “cheap nature” into “free markets.”
SDUSD follows this logic, seeking lower costs from growers and vendors while treating certain labor as invisible and therefore “free.” The literature on nutrition scarcely mentions farmworkers, except to note they are “readily available” and “business opportunities” for partners (Espinosa, 2022). This logic is not new to California; it is the historical core of the state’s agro-capitalism, which geographer Richard Walker describes as having been “intensely commercial, opportunistic, and enthusiastic in its search for profit” from the very beginning (Walker, 2003:57).
This article documents the power relations of production and reproduction within the web of life – demonstrating how relations of capital, labor and power move through, not around, nature. In other words, schools are infrastructures of Capitalist Imperialism, and the ruling economic class invests in education very directly, to get a return on their investment. It is then up to the professional political or managerial class, like Fred Espinosa, Secretary of Agriculture Karen Ross, California Congressman David Valdavao to translate broader economic and geopolitical imperatives (including those shaped by institutions like the IMF) into serving and realizing those investments known as endless capital accumulation for growers and vendors like Stehly Farms. I will demonstrate this through an analysis of procurement contracts, government data, supply chains, interviews, testimonies, and promotional discourse. Thus, Farm to School is argued to operationalize a world-ecology of ‘cheap nature,’ depending on appropriated unpaid energy/work, exploited migrant labor, and obscured global extraction to sustain the metabolism of schools, while also cultivating a Capitalist Realism (Fisher, 2009) where students are future markets and laborers. This study is guided by three central questions: How is school procurement tied to imperial supply chains and who benefits from these arrangements? How does procurement literature obscure those arrangements? How are those relations then reproduced and made “common sense” in the cafeteria line and the classroom?
2. Capitalism as world-ecology: The school as a metabolic regime
The framework of capitalism as world-ecology reveals the school as a metabolic organ of the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016), functioning through the appropriation of unpaid work/energy and appropriated nature/labor to reproduce labor-power and capitalist ideology. The concept of capitalism as world-ecology posits that everything humans make – from clothing, food, homes, and workplaces to airports, apps, phones, railways, and roads – is co-produced with the rest of nature. (Moore, 2017) The school itself is a prime example. This framework demonstrates the fundamental co-production of earth-moving, idea-making, and power-creating across the geographical layers of human experience that embody capitalism. Production and knowledge production are interlinked in the web of life, as are labor with land and humans in nature. Under capitalism, this entire system is designed to accumulate capital, a process that depends on the appropriation of unpaid energy (Luxembourg, 2003). Capital accumulation is, therefore, the transformation of the earth and its creatures. The production of exchange value is premised on appropriating unpaid work that exists outside the circuit of capital – the circuit of capital being central to the process capitalization (Moore, 2017).
Analyzing the school procurement process and its dependence on the agro-industry supports that “agro-industrial revolutions, scientific revolutions and “new” imperialism together form capitalism’s world-praxis” (Moore, 2017). The praxis of abstract social labor, abstract social nature and primitive accumulation becomes dependent on producing the knowledge that results in mapping and quantifying reality–whether that was the cartographic revolution of the 16th century, or the current 21st century “tech” ontologies, like treating Nature or reproductive labor as external, and therefore as a “free gift.” This knowledge also produces violent excursions which dispossess peasants, coercing them into new relations. As a result of this abstract social nature, “labor” becomes dependent on these appropriations as workers maximize their labor productivity, resulting in a fetish of time/productivity metrics, or how much output could be produced relative to the amount of labor time invested, thus the very organization of time and space is transformed to serve accumulation with space abstracted as external and a grid and time as linear and disciplinary. Modes of production become modes of thought.
This analysis also reveals the contradictions of capitalism, such as when accumulation becomes too costly and exhaustion appears, prompting investments in qualitative and quantitative “solutions,” which can result in new frontiers or new technologies. Capitalism as world-ecology is thus a project in “cheap nature”, driven by the pursuit of the “seven cheaps”, that is, cheap care, energy, food, labor, lives, money, and work (Patel & Moore, 2017). This project centers on finding the cheapest possible energy, food, and labor, often by appropriating and exploiting people and places far away. It requires a continual frontier and treats nature and certain people as disposable. This system is based on a “world-historical matrix of human and extra-human nature premised on endless commodification” (Moore, 2011) and operates through “the maximization of labor productivity through the appropriation of biophysical and human natures” (Moore, 2014). Together, the seven cheaps provide the necessary elements to serve wealthy bourgeois elites.
Therefore, capitalism is a way to organize nature (Moore, 2016), and imperialism is integral to that design. As Cope argues, “capitalism is inherently a system of [imperialism]” (Cope, 2021: 2). For example, the 18th-century factories of Liverpool depended on Mississippi plantations: the proletariat (cheap labor) spinning textiles in Liverpool ate sugar (cheap food) and processed cotton grown in Southern Plantations–as a result of mass dispossession of indigenous peoples–picked by enslaved Africans (appropriated labor); shipbuilding depended on timber and unpaid reproductive labor (cheap care) – primarily performed by women – fed and cared for workers, their families, and the children who would become future workers. All of this was financed through debt (cheap money) which states used to invest in warfare, or technology. Other examples include Chinese migrants, displaced by the British Opium Wars’ ravaging of China, who provided the cheap labor to build U.S. railroads, and the Spanish mission-presidio system in California, organized to extract ‘greater abundance’ from Indigenous labor (Pellow and Park, 2000). Likewise, behind the food in California school districts are places like Mexico or Cambodia, whose displaced populations migrate to California to pick and serve food for students.
3. The global frontier: Structural adjustment programs and the making of “cheap” labor
California agriculture – and by extension, its Farm to School program – is rooted in its ability to appropriate human and extra-human natures as well as capitalize on cheap labor. One mechanism of this appropriation is through unequal exchange in global trade deals like those enforced by the WTO, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed by the IMF and WB (Hickel, 2017). As Yasha Tandon argues,
“Trade kills people; it drives people to poverty; it creates wealth at one end and poverty at another; it enriches the powerful food corporations at the cost of marginalising poor peasants, who then become economic refugees in their own countries or who (those that are able-bodied) attempt to leave their countries to look for employment in the rich countries of the West.” (Tandon, 2014: 21).
WTO rules, for instance, allow countries in the Global North to subsidize their farmers–massive Green Box subsidies (e.g., direct income support to their farmers), the US currently used over 112 billion dollars in 2018-2019 of domestic support (United States, 2021)–which flooded markets with cheaper products and further bankrupted and dispossessed farmers in the Global South (Tandon, 2014, Patel 2008). Under SAPs, countries were forced to take loans and radically deregulate – cutting tariffs, opening markets, abolishing capital controls, abandoning price supports, and curbing labor and environmental regulations in order to attract foreign direct investment (Hickel, 2017). In Mexico, laws such as the 1992 reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution were changed to facilitate the privatization and sale of communal land used for agriculture, better known as ejido (Castillo, 2004). To secure future loans and investments, the national and global private financial sector required the Mexican state to legalize the sale of ejido land, which could then serve as collateral. This supports the premise that every new era of capitalism, including neoliberalism, begins with a “new” form of imperialism, that is, accumulation by appropriating new frontiers of cheap nature. Through this new imperialism, cheap American foodstuffs flooded Mexico’s markets and as U.S. agribusiness moved in, 1.1 million small farmers – and 1.4 million other Mexicans dependent upon the farm sector – were driven out of work between 1993 and 2005. (Public Citizen, 2019) From 1991 to 2007, about 2 million Mexicans engaged in farming and related work lost their livelihoods. (Public Citizen, 2019)
Many displaced farmers and precarious workers had little choice but to accept low-wage work whether in Mexican maquilladoras (foreign-owned manufacturing plants in Mexico, primarily near the U.S. border) or on farms in the U.S. Wages dropped so precipitously that today the income of a farm laborer is one-third that of what it was before NAFTA.(Public Citizen, 2019). According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, it has concluded that migration from Mexico to the US has risen from 1990-2023 to 4 million people to about 11 million people. This same displaced population became the labor pool for the California fields that supply school districts, not to mention the source of the appropriated care work necessary to develop and sustain these workers.
The “cheap labor” feeding the Farm to School program is not a market accident but a direct product of the “free market” and its structured imperial drain. A drain that after a decade of NAFTA, 19 million more Mexicans lived in poverty, and by around 2017, more than half of the population remained in poverty (Hickel, 2017). Moreover, approximately 14% of Mexico’s extreme poverty is concentrated in Chiapas. Chiapas ranks first in marginalization due to a lack of access to education and health services, inadequate housing, and low monetary income. These conditions create precarious opportunities that obstruct full human development, reinforcing discrimination and social, political, and economic exclusion (Higuera-Domínguez et al., 2025). Migrants coming from Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca—have quadrupled from 5 percent to 20 percent from 1990-2013. (Rogers and Buttice, 2013) Transnational corporations extract wealth from Chiapas by mining their land, felling their forests, and selling tourist experiences at the expense of local communities who have the misfortune of ‘inhabiting’ the region (Banerjee, 2008). This drain siphons wealth from countries of origin into the pockets of the Global North. As Neuburger documents,
“They (migrants) plant, cultivate, irrigate, harvest, pack, and haul a bountiful $47 billion worth of farm products each year—17 percent of the total value of farm products nationally according to 2013 statistics. Their average annual income is $14 thousand and 10 percent of farmworkers live in “informal dwellings” like garages, sheds, and abandoned vehicles. Despite many hazardous job conditions, only one out of three farmworkers has any kind of health insurance.” (Neuburger, 2017: 1)
Migrants reach the U.S through various channels, including undocumented migration and the H-2A visa program, and then become responsible for picking or preparing the food students consume. According to the Center of Migration Studies, in 2022, California relied on undocumented labor for 49% of its agricultural workforce. La Cooperativa Campesina states that approximately 75% of California's agricultural workers are undocumented. It is not unsurprising that undocumented labor is highly sought in farm labor contracts, as employers can pay them even less, and treat them as such. Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, argued that California “can’t compete” with producers in states like Florida where the required wage for H-2A workers was US$14.77 an hour, unless other wages are higher. In another study UCM of the Central Valley, undocumented farmworkers had among the lowest earnings with median annual earnings of $24,000. Assuming a 40-hour per week, this translated to an hourly wage of approximately US$11.54. Lastly, H-2A workers are unable to strike, or unionize (U.S. Department of Labor, 2023)–a type of indentured servitude–which is echoed by a Mixtec farm worker: “I think H-2A is a kind of modern slavery.” (Bacon, 2018a)
These trade and loan deals also forced many Global South countries to focus on cash crops or export-oriented manufacturing. As a result, Mexico repatriated around US$100.3 billion to Global North countries from 2005 to 2023. (Global Inequality Project, 2025) Firms make profits from production in the South, using Southern labour and resources, and then transfer those profits back to the countries where they are headquartered or to third countries rather than reinvesting profits back into the local economy. Moreover, Mexico has spent around 10% of its national revenue serving debt from 2021 to 2025. (Global Inequality Project, 2025)
The prevailing logic that remittances transform lives has been debunked by Immanuel Ness (2023). It is important to note that remittances are promoted by the U.S. and the IMF as a development strategy: earning money in the Global North to send back to origin countries is framed as beneficial, encouraging migration from the Global South to assist in “development.” Some point out that remittances are transformative because–in 2024 statistics–California’s minimum wage of $16.00 is 10x to 15x the Mexican minimum wage. (Associated Press, 2024). However, as Ness has shown, remittances do not provide much needed growth, or do not assist the home country with anything, in that “remittances from an array of migrant labourers cannot build schools, healthcare clinics and transport hubs but only provide funding for family members to go to school, gain health care or buy a vehicle.” (Ness, 2023:77). This reality is voiced plainly by one migrant worker, who exposes the fundamental inequality of the arrangement:
“We dedicate everything to the fields, we are field workers. We are workers; ever since we’re born we’re planting..Poor people from Oaxaca come here [to the US]; we come here to give away our strength and everything and they don’t do anything for us…because of our will this government survives.” (Holmes, 2004:30)
His testimony lays bare the truth: remittances are not a fair exchange but a meager consolation for a system that appropriates labor and siphons wealth, where the survival of the core is built on the expanded exploitation of the periphery (Amin, 1977). Furthermore, remittances do not compensate for the unpaid, invisible reproductive labor necessary for nurturing and raising these migrants. Remittances can also act as a substitute for fair wages and social welfare in the mind of origin countries, like the Philippines. For example, since remittances support families, origin governments face less pressure to create high-paying jobs, regulate wages, or build infrastructure, therefore impairing development in the origin country. Hence, this imperialist arrangement benefits the core or destination country with cheaper inputs and costs, which in turn helps schools in the U.S. extract value to maintain their privileges (Ness, 2023).
For California, the historical processes of primitive accumulation, colonial expansion, neoliberal restructuring, SAP-driven dispossession, forced migration, H-2A-mediated exploitation, remittance-dependent underdevelopment, and climate-induced displacement form a single, integrated world-ecology. This constitutes the global supply chain that delivers food into California’s public schools. Therefore, school districts benefit directly from artificially depressed prices that result from: confiscated Indigenous land, privatized ejidos, IMF-mandated wage suppression, WTO-enforced agricultural dumping, H-2A labor containment, pesticide-intensive agriculture, and environmental sacrifice zones across the Global South. This entire system produces the “cheap labor” and “cheap nature” necessary for school cafeteria meals to remain financially viable. In other words, a double process must occur simultaneously: exploitation in the form of wage labor and appropriation in the form of unpaid social reproduction. In this sense, the cafeteria line is the endpoint of a global process of capitalist imperialism. Neoliberalism thus becomes the “common sense” of school operations, shaping not only procurement contracts but the ideological environment in which students are socialized.
4. The Procurement Engine: Codifying the Logic of Cheapness
While providing free lunches, school gardens, and more nutritious food offers material benefits, especially with the cutting of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the program operates on a capitalist-imperialist logic reminiscent of Cecil Rhodes, who saw feeding populations as a justification for empire. A logic central to capitalism’s world-ecology. Moreover, it keeps students fed while promoting an ideology that enables continued capital accumulation. This logic materializes first and foremost in the district’s procurement engine, an engine that is “...dependent on capitalist power and bourgeois knowledge to locate Natures whose wealth can be mapped, reshaped, and appropriated cheaply.”
Neoliberal values promoting fiscal discipline in public expenditure in favor of the “free market” are central to how school districts and the California Department of Education on what “makes the most business sense.” (SDUSD, 2024) The California Department of Education’s Procurement in Child Nutrition Programs guide instructs officials to “conduct procurements in a manner that promotes full and open competition.” SDUSD boasts of procuring goods at the lowest cost, mirroring the IMF’s demand for fiscal discipline in the Global South, externalizing costs onto migrant bodies while subsidizing corporate profits. This logic is stated clearly as the purpose SDUSD Strategic Sourcing and Contracts Department,
“The purpose of the Strategic Sourcing and Contracts Department is to procure goods and services at the lowest cost for the best value in accordance with Public Contract Code and California Education Code, all the while, eliminating risk in the transaction, and safeguarding fair and competitive solicitations for contractors, bidders and proposers who provide the goods and services to the students, staff, and administration of San Diego Unified School District.”
This logic is not isolated. Another district, the Central Union High School District – located in the agricultural hub of Imperial County – demonstrates that the entire procurement process is designed to systematically drive down costs. Their policy states the need to “make independent estimates before receiving bids,” (Central Union High School District Nutrition Services Department, 2017) disciplining bidders to meet a predetermined, low price. This directive stems from the California Department of Education where “the procurement of goods and services is [about] obtaining the most economical purchase price for the products or services needed must be considered when using federal funds.”(CDE, 2025) School districts and the Department of Education are, in effect, searching for “cheap nature” while attempting to capitalize on it. This common sense institutionalizes vendor profitability as a central concern while minimizing district cost. The Central Union High School District’s procurement procedures further state a goal to:
“[N]egotiate profit as a separate element of the price…To establish a fair and reasonable profit, consideration must be given to the complexity of the work to be performed, the risk borne by the contractor, the contractor’s investment, the amount of subcontracting, the quality of its record of past performance and industry profit rates in the surrounding geographical area for similar work.” (Central Union High School District Nutrition Services Department, 2017)
In other words, the district aims to provide a “fair and reasonable profit” to the supplier, but under the standards that include risk, past performance, and subcontracting. The goal is the cheapest bid that also meets these standards, allowing suppliers to secure a “fair profit.” However, where is this “fair profit” derived from?
Consider a scenario where Wonderful Citrus and Sun Pacific Farms both bid to supply oranges. Wonderful bids US$1.00 per pound, with US$0.15 as profit, and Sun Pacific bids US$0.95 per pound, with US$0.10 as profit; both have good past performance. Wonderful uses more subcontractors (e.g., Fresh Harvest for labor), while Sun Pacific owns its own orchards (i.e., representing more investment). The school district might choose Sun Pacific for the lower price and profit margin. However, if Wonderful argues its profit is “fair” due to higher “risk” (e.g., guaranteeing supply during a drought), it might win the bid. The crucial point is that the “low price” from either company is only possible because they pay pickers US$12 per hour, which is not a living wage. The “risk” they calculate excludes risks to farmworkers exposed to pesticides. Their “investment” does not account for the historical and continued theft of Indigenous land, the appropriated unpaid energy and labor from the Global South, or the drained aquifers their business relies upon. Their “past performance” measures whether fruit arrived on time, not whether they violated labor laws.
SDUSD echoes this logic, aiming to “safeguard fair and competitive solicitations for contractors, bidders, and proposers.” This managerial focus on what makes the most “business sense” rationalizes the pursuit of the cheapest bid – a pursuit viable only because costs have already been externalized onto migrant bodies and exhausted landscapes. This adheres to the principle that “when capitalists can set in motion small amounts of capital and appropriate large volumes of unpaid work/energy, the costs of production fall and the rate of profit rises.” (Moore, 2017:101). There is a triple appropriation at play: first, from the reproductive labor primarily of women sustaining migrant workers; second, from the migrants themselves whose super-exploited labor is systematically undervalued; and third, from the Mexican or peripheral land acquired through structural adjustment programs and trade regimes governed by the Global North.
The procurement process within Farm to School also highlights the dualistic ontology of Man and Nature–a worldview that positions humans as external managers of a passive, measurable world. Farm to School uses language where it “rewards innovation and improvement.” (CDFA, 2025) Managerialism is central to the Farm to school program and the procurement process, as it partly focuses on “....economic resilience, [and] environmental stewardship.” (CDFA, 2025) These are not neutral categories; they are what Moore calls 'violent abstractions' that erase the specific histories of displacement, exploitation, and ecological exhaustion that make 'innovation' and 'improvement' possible, again, what makes most business sense.
This procurement logic depends on a specific, exploitable labor supply chain through appropriation and primitive accumulation, formalized through immigration policy. The 2016 SDUSD Final Produce Bid contract includes a clause requiring vendors to comply with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Passed during the Reagan administration, the IRCA is described on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website as:
“An act of Congress passed into law to control and deter illegal immigration to the United States...legalization of certain agricultural workers, sanctions for employers who knowingly hire alien workers and increased enforcement at U.S. borders”
In reality, this act increased the risks and penalties for undocumented immigrant workers, enabling firms to pay them even less in practice. As Congressman Edward Roybal argued, IRCA was a “farm labor bill…designed to provide cheap labor for the farmers and growers of this country.” (Elberg, 1993: 203) In other words, school procurement programs depend on labor exploitation in their supply chains.