CALIFORNIA FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAM:
FROM STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENTS TO STUDENT LUNCHES

A MARXIST WORLD-ECOLOGY ANALYSIS
By: 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.

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.

AFFECT DU BOIRE: DECEMBER