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Gardening to build community, change habits

Published: May 1, 2013 | No Comments

LAGreengrounds co-founder Ron Finley, center, shows volunteers at a community garden planting project how to apply organic fertilizer. Photo: Chris Richard/California Health Report

By Chris Richard
California Health Report

As city planners consider lifting a five-year-old ban on new fast-food vendors in South Los Angeles, urban gardening activists say it’s especially important to promote healthy eating habits by planting publicly available produce gardens on front lawns and city parkways.

On a recent Sunday, activists met at a South Los Angeles home to build such a garden.

“We are going to create a lifestyle for our garden recipients,” said Sachiko Speaks, who organized the LAGreenGrounds event.

“We’re not just installing these beautiful edible gardens and just leaving them. There’s so much involved with a person’s emotional state, their spiritual state, their nutrition, health and wellbeing. So we’re trying to create a lifestyle.”

At LAGreenGrounds’ “Dig-in” events, volunteers help property owners plant gardens in their yards and the city-owned parkway areas between sidewalk and street. The produce grown there is offered free to anyone who cares to pick it.

In addition to building a sense of community, the goal is to turn around fundamental dietary choices. According to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, more than a quarter of the children in South Los Angeles are considered obese, as are nearly a third of adults. The area has the county’s highest rate of consumption for sugary drinks. Some 70 percent of the region’s restaurants are fast-food outlets, nearly double the concentration in the rest of Los Angeles.

Some recent research has cast doubt on how much a person’s health can be improved by dietary changes. In October, for instance, federal researches announced that they had been unable to show diet and weight loss can prevent heart attacks and strokes in overweight and obese people with Type 2 diabetes.

LAGreenGrounds co-founder Ron Finley, who drew international attention to the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables early this year with a well-received talk at the TED conference, said the evidence of the links between diet and health is clear.

“Have you ever been to Brentwood and seen used wheelchairs on the street? All that represents to me is that somebody died in that chair. And now there’s another space for somebody else to die,” he said.

“I’m no scientist. I’m not even no academic. I got common sense, though. I know what I see.”

Other health activists deplored a proposal by planning officials to lift restrictions on fast-food restaurants in a portion of South Los Angeles.

Five years ago, city officials imposed a ban on new fast food restaurants when another such outlet was already in business within half a mile. At an April 11 public meeting, planning officials proposed lifting that restriction. After speakers at the meeting vehemently opposed the suggestion, the planning officials withdrew it. Still, Gwendolyn Flynn, policy director of non-profit health advocacy group Community Health Councils, said she remains concerned.

“When you live in a community where you have no options, where you’re kind of locked in because you don’t have personal transportation, and all you have is exposure to food that are high in sodium and sugar and high calorie, and just processed foods, it has a detrimental effect on your health,” she said.

Community Health Councils has called for additional restrictions for South Los Angeles, including a requirement that fast food restaurants be located at least half a mile from schools, parks, playgrounds, child care centers, recreation facilities, and other facilities that serve children.

But Yang Lu, a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, questioned the effectiveness of prohibitions in changing dietary habits.

“If you have a ban for however many years, if people want fast foods, it still will be available,” she said. “They just go to existing food outlets. Addressing only the supply won’t remove the problem.”

Finley said projects like the recent garden planting are aimed at reversing demand.

“People don’t know what food looks like in its natural form,” he said. “Unless it’s in the store and labeled, they don’t know that this is cabbage, this is broccoli, this is chard. But gardening changes your molecular structure. And if I’m eating food from a garden, why would I want to eat something genetically modified or something like that?”

 

Advocates and activists allege environmental racism in the Coachella Valley

Published: April 30, 2013 | 1 Comment

Speakers asked community members in the audience to get involved in promoting environmental justice in the valley.

By Suzanne Potter
California Health Report

Toxic waste dumps. Poor air quality. And the slow death of the Salton Sea. The Eastern Coachella Valley has serious environmental problems – and now locals are getting involved.

Recently several hundred people gathered at a high school in Thermal, California at the inaugural Coachella Valley Environmental Health Leadership Summit. They listened to experts and brainstormed solutions on a variety of topics.

Eduardo Guevara, with a group called Promotores Communitarios del Desierto, organized the event. “We just want to bring awareness of environmental health and environmental problems that we have in the area, and to get the agencies and the residents closer together.”

Rosie Nava-Bermudez, an activist with Comite Civico del Valle, says at the summit, “Partnerships are being formed. We’re providing a map of future steps that need to be taken. The next step is to formulate a plan of action and prioritize the different problems in the community.”

The keynote speaker, Jose Bravo of the Just Transition Alliance, said that poor, non-white communities in the East Valley harbor more than their share of pollution – and called it a case of environmental racism. “So what is environmental justice? Communities that bear a disproportionate environmental impact by polluting industries, waste dumps, incinerators, polluted air, water and soil.”

Mr. Kim Floyd, a volunteer for the Sierra Club, agrees. “If this were happening in a wealthy area I’m convinced we’d get solutions much more quickly than we have here in the east valley.” Floyd is particularly troubled by the massive odor problem reported in 2010-11 at Western Environmental – a soil recycling facility in Mecca that sits on property owned by the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians.

Neighbors said the stench from the giant piles of contaminated dirt made them sick. Celia Garcia, who taught at nearby Saul Martinez Elementary School, said it disrupted much of the school year. “Exposure to the noxious smells at Saul Martinez was really, really bad.”

The authorities took soil samples and tested the air quality but everything came back within legal limits. At a public meeting in May 2012, the experts said they couldn’t definitively explain how, or if, the odors made people sick. The company denied it was the cause of the odor. It’s the kind of thing that frustrates Floyd. “There have been odor problems and a lot of investigation, a lot of work done but we really struggle on solving the issue. How do we get something actually fixed is our dilemma I think.”

County Supervisor John Benoit said he’s helped secure funding for a number of air quality projects in the east valley.

That includes money to install a new air filtration system at that elementary school, retrofit or replace diesel school buses, synchronize traffic lights and pave more dirt roads. “Children will no longer have to walk to school along a dirt road where their parents are driving to get to work in the morning.” Benoit told the crowd. “They will be breathing much cleaner air and the valley will have cleaner air as a result.”

Organizers pleaded with residents to take action by talking to their legislators, speaking at public hearings and reporting new cases of pollution.

A new computer system – highlighted at the conference – will ensure that environmental complaints get the attention they deserve. IVAN, which stands for Imperial Visions Action Network, is a website launched by a community task force where people can report pollution. IVAN’s activists follow up and then route the case to the appropriate authorities.

Bravo says that in the past, poor immigrant communities have served as a sort of sentinel for environmental abuse. “Agencies, who we at some point believed have our best interests in mind, have been using us as the canaries in the coal mine. And that’s a fact.”

An incident at the Salton Sea last year is instructive. In September a storm churned up the waters, releasing nasty sulfur-smelling gas caused by rotting vegetation and dead fish at the bottom of the polluted lake. The stink is a periodic problem in the Coachella Valley but this time the fumes blanketed most of Southern California. All of a sudden, the longstanding problem at the sea became statewide news.

People in the east valley are used to the nasty smell from the Salton Sea’s regular fish die-offs. They occur when pesticides from agricultural runoff trigger an algae bloom, which lowers the water’s oxygen level and kills millions of fish. The problem has been studied for decades but very little has been done because the proposed fix could cost billions of dollars.

Experts have warned for years that the Salton Sea is shrinking, so the problems will only get worse. “It will dry and all the sediments that are in the water now are going to be exposed and the wind is going to blow them away,” Guevara says. “And that’s gonna cause a lot of respiratory issues. It’s a problem that it’s gonna affect us all. If we make more people aware of that, we will get more people to get involved and start pushing for a solution. “

 

Study: Spending cuts hurt public health

Published: April 19, 2013 | No Comments

Photo: OnTask/Flickr

By Heather Tirado Gilligan
California Health Report

Drastic government spending cuts in times of financial crisis may be bad for public health, a new study by Greek and American researchers suggests.

Public health in Greece grew worse in the years of the world financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis and the austerity measures that followed, according to the study, which was published today in the American Journal of Public Health.

The impact of the cuts on health was larger than expected, and should inform policies in other counties, including the U.S., the researchers said.

“We were expecting that these austerity policies would negatively affect health services and health outcomes, but the results were much worse than we imagined,” Dr. Elias Kondilis, lead author and a researcher at Aristotle University, said in statement.

Between 2007 and 2009, suicides in Greece increased by about 16 percent, homicides by more than 25 percent and infectious disease by more than 13 percent. Rates of drug abuse increased drastically — more than 88 percent — among people aged 35 to 64. Meanwhile, government spending on health care decreased by more than 23 percent between 2009 and 2011.

The cuts came when the International Monetary Fund and the Eurozone required Greece to make drastic cuts in spending, called austerity measures, in exchange for bailing them out of their financial crisis.

Slashing health care spending was part of the austerity measures. In addition to the 23 percent decrease in government health care spending, public hospitals cut their payrolls by 75 percent, some services were privatized and co-payments were instituted. Patients spent 25.7 million euros in 2011 on services that were once entirely covered by the government.

Greece also saw a jump in new HIV infections and outbreaks of malaria and West Nile virus between 2010 and 2011. Researchers suggest these increases may be connected to cuts in other services including decreased distributions of condoms and clean needles and interruptions in mosquito spraying.

“Heightened needs and increased demands on public services collide with austerity and privatization policies,” the researchers said. The effects of such a collision are predictably bad for public health, they added.

 

Despite years of advocacy, some farmworker housing still deplorable

Published: April 4, 2013 | Comments (5)

Photo: Rosa Ramirez/California Health Report

By Rosa Ramirez
California Health Report

OXNARD— The stories that Dario Gutierrez, a native of Mexico City, would hear before arriving in Oxnard two years ago prompted him to make the dangerous trek to the United States illegally. People here, he recalls hearing, earn enough to live comfortably. “Dicen que aquí se barre el dinero en la calle.”—They say here, people can sweep money off the streets.

The saying has prompted flows of people from Mexico and other parts of Latin America to migrate north for work in California’s bountiful agriculture industry. They hope for upward mobility. But the reality for many toiling in the $44.3 billion industry is different. Poor pay, which characterizes the farmworker labor force, has left many struggling to find adequate and safe housing.

“A lot of the families and farmworkers who come into the valley live in deplorable housing conditions,” said Nadia Villagran, director of operations and communications with the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition. Many farm labor camps, which are generally used by single male workers, have dirt floors and are overcrowded.

So far, Gutierrez has found the nearly $8 per hour he earns picking strawberries hardly provides him enough for the room he rents, which he shares with another farmworker. During the peak season, when he has the opportunity to earn more, he earns by the piece.

After two years of working in the fields, the 23-year-old has mastered the repetitive hand motions to pick fresh strawberries. “I’m used to it by now,” he says with a smile. On average, he says proudly, he fills four boxes per hour.

Advocates and industry leaders say farmworkers housing in California is uneven. The Central Valley, a 450-mile stretch of incredibly fertile and agriculturally rich land, has the largest number of the state’s farmworkers, of which the great majority are Hispanic immigrants. Their housing needs are vast.

In poorer rural parts of Riverside County, illegal mobile parks without running water, sewages systems or electricity, have become permanent and temporary homes for other farm laborers and their families.

In Ventura County, one of the leading citrus producing areas, farmworkers must often pool their resources to rent an apartment, which are often shared by multiple families.

The average apartment is more than $18,000 per year, nowhere enough for the average farmworker salary ($22,000). An estimated 75 percent of the area’s farmworkers earn less than $15,000 per year, according to a report by the Workforce Investment Board of Ventura County.

“Obviously, we’re talking about crowded conditions that farmworkers are living in,” said Daniela Ramirez, coordinator with House Farm Workers!

While farmworkers in general experience poor housing arrangements, seasonal workers are more prone to dangerous conditions. In Mecca, a small farming community 140 miles east of Los Angeles, many farmworkers flood the area each spring to pick table grapes, bell peppers, watermelons and dates that are shipped to different parts of the state. Nearly half of the estimated 9,000 residents of the unincorporated town live below the poverty line, according to latest Census figures.

Years ago, two large empty lots near Mecca’s largest food stores had become the campgrounds where farmworkers would sleep at night. Without affordable housing options, many seasonal agricultural laborers rested their heads inside their cars or under trees. Teenagers and men would bathe with dirty canal water.

Maria Machuca, who is a member of the Mecca Community Council, said several housing initiatives, including a mobile home park and several apartments with a designated number of units set aside for farmworkers, have alleviated the housing needs for some, especially those who have families and can prove they are in the county legally.

“Is it enough? No, it’s not enough,” said Machuca, a daughter of farmworkers.

“We still have migrant farmworkers living in their cars near mini marts when it’s grape season,” says Machuca. That season, which generally runs from late April through July, is also the hottest.

“And it’s not safe,” she says.

Many seasonal workers have become targets of assaults and robberies. Earlier this month, a Fresno County Superior Court judge found that the murder of a farmworker who was killed while sleeping in his car was conducted on behalf of a gang, according to news reports.

But some regions are making strides.

Marin County, of the state’s most expensive housing markets, recently partnered with a local foundation to provide housing for low-income farmworkers in the west part of the county, says Dan Schurman, director of business development with Ag Innovations Network.

And in some regions of Napa and Sonoma counties have created private or county-run housing for seasonal migrant workers. Nick Frey, President of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission, said those “bunk houses” are the result of ordinances passed in the 1990s in those counties. Yet the two counties have taken vastly different approaches, he said. Napa’s are run by counties but not in Sonoma

“Employers would build them at their expense,” he said of the latter. He said those housing options have worked for Napa and Sonoma, mainly because they have year-round labor where farmworkers earn higher wages.

“If you’re a good harvester, you can make $20 to $30 an hour during the harvest season,” he says. “A lot of the labor is year round”

Unlike agriculture laborers in other regions, Napa’s wine industry workers earn 30 percent more, according to the 2013 initial farmworker housing report. While there are two peak seasons running from May through June and August and October, the demand for agricultural laborers is year-round, as vineyards require replanting and tending. “In such a high-value crop, there’s always work to be done,” says Schurman.

Advocates and workers have complained of poor living conditions in these houses. But Frey says workers take little precaution in keeping them clean. If they remove a light bulb, he says, the owner can get fined for code violations.

The area’s steady work and higher than average pay, nonetheless, has prompted many farmworkers to chose to live in Napa on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, which has also increased the need for more affordable housing.

In order to get a snapshot of the current housing demands of workers in the area’s agriculture industry—the backbone of the local community—the Napa County Housing and Intergovernmental Affairs ordered a comprehensive study of area’s farmworker housing needs. It found that more affordable farmworker housing is needed.

Still, Villagran, whose non-profit organization helps farmworkers obtain housing, says that even when housing options exist, workers must meet a series of requirements—something that’s not always possible for people who have limited formal education and English skills. Aside from proving they are in the country legally, these families must have good credit. They must also prove they earn enough to pay the rent and that they are indeed earning a living as farmworkers.

Schurman, with Ag Innovations Network, says his organization is currently working with stakeholders across the state assess the current housing needs. Parts of Napa and Sonoma counties have privately or county-run farmworker housing, providing some options that can be held as models.

With funds from the Agriculture Department, the organization will release a report this year with recommendations for policy makers and advocates.

 

Labor shortage doesn’t improve pay for many farmworkers

Published: April 3, 2013 | 1 Comment

Photo: Rosa Ramirez/California Health Report

By Rosa Ramirez
California Health Report

OXNARD— Ana Rosa Perez emigrated from central Mexico to work in Oxnard’s strawberry fields more than 10 years ago. She remembers she was excited about earning a steady income to feed her young son.

Since then, she has endured long hours picking strawberries, often under an extreme California summer heat. On some occasions, she has taken home $30 a day, hardly enough to pay for the bedroom she rents for $500 in a private home.

Now, her son, a high school senior who is fluent in English and Spanish, aspires to secure employment outside agriculture—a trend among a younger generation of immigrants and U.S.-born children who have seen their parents toil in California’s billion-dollar agriculture industry while living in poverty.

“They want to prepare themselves for a better job,” says Perez.

Leaning against a four-foot fence that divides the street from the vast strawberry farm, the 39-year-old looks at her co-workers as they move across the lush terrain. Their crouched bodies come upright only to fill their strawberry cases.

Covered from head-to-toe with layers of sweaters, handkerchiefs and hats, agricultural laborers work with fumigants and pests. Perez encourages her son to study hard to get a job outside the fields.

Employers say there are just not enough farmworkers to pick the fruits and vegetables. “There’s a grower who was bringing in 40 workers to pick lemons from Arizona,” said Daniela Ramirez, coordinator with House Farm Workers! Her group works primarily to assist workers obtain adequate housing.

“Right now, the labor supply is fairly tight,” says Nick Frey, president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission.

“The people who are documented and have their lives here—their children grow up and go to college. Some will come back and work for us as line packers but others move on to other careers,” Frey, who himself is the son of a farmer, told the California Health Report. “That’s not too uncommon in American agriculture.”

As Congress inches toward reshaping immigration laws, few agree on what measures should be included in an overhaul. Citing a sharp labor shortage, farmers and ranchers in California—one of the largest farm states in the nation—say a short supply of field workers is hurting their businesses. They are aggressively lobbying Congress for agricultural work visas.

On the laborers’ side, immigrants like Perez and their advocates are pushing for a solution that will allow people like her to adjust their immigration status. They say that any temporary visa program leaves an already vulnerable population susceptible to exploitation.

Earlier this month, hundreds of farm workers, students, religious leaders and grassroots organizers rallied in cities across the Golden State, including Bakersfield, Fresno and Oxnard, to urge lawmakers to allow the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants to live here lawfully.

Frey says that while agriculture employers have the H-2A visa, a type of temporary program that allows farmers to hire foreign workers when they can’t fill the jobs with U.S. employees, these visas are expensive and “are not user-friendly to operate under.”

“The H-2A program is not very robust. It doesn’t meet the demands,” he says.

Employers are poised to face years of labor shortages as an older generation retires and fewer new immigrants decide to cross the border, Frey says. Research suggests that Mexican immigrants are no longer moving to the U.S. in waves as they did starting in the 1970s.

Tighter borders, mass deportations, and a sluggish U.S. economy have deterred some from migrating here. That, combined with long-term declines in birth rates in Mexico and improving economic conditions there, has resulted in a zero-net migration in 2011, a recent Pew Hispanic Report showed.

“There’s a real concern,” Frey says. “Where are you going to find the workforce?”

Some immigrant advocates have a message for these employers: raise wages.

“In any other industry, when employers confront labor shortages, they raise their salaries and take pains to make their jobs more attractive to potential and current workers,” Farmworker Justice President Bruce Goldstein wrote in a recent opinion piece. “If they can’t compete on that basis, something is wrong with their business model.”

But the labor shortage is the result of more than just strict immigration laws, says Niam Rafferty, operations manager for the Western Farm Workers Association in Yuba City, a city about 40 miles north of Sacramento.

Increased mechanization, market downturns, the rise of agro-businesses and trade policies such as the North America Free Trade Agreement have transformed the landscape of agriculture.

To reduce the price of labor, for instance, some producers have moved jobs abroad, making it harder for U.S. farmers to compete when those products are trucked back into the country. American farmers unable to compete with Mexican-grown asparagus, which can sell more cheaply, simply stopped growing it.

Stockton’s Asparagus Festival attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors from all parts of the state each year. Yet the labor camps that once employed a bounty of asparagus pickers have been dwindling as the state’s growers have drastically reduced production.

Not long ago, five area asparagus labor camps were filled to capacity. This time around, Rafferty says, only one was open. Workers told her their earnings do not justify their traveling expenses.

Even during a labor shortage, Rafferty explains, farm workers continue to be among the lowest paid workers.

On a perfectly mild Wednesday afternoon, Perez’s supervisor, a man driving a red pickup truck who would not give his name, says he’s paying workers more money to ensure he has enough employees during the strawberry peak season.

Standing only a few feet from him, Perez is eager for the season to arrive. Since she began earning a dollar more per hour at the start of the year, she’s received fewer hours to work.

With a worried look on her face, the single mother says will be lucky if she gets to work 20 hours on this week.

 

Research shows dental care disparities among white, minority children

Published: July 28, 2010 | No Comments

By Daniel Weintraub

Latino and African American children in Medicaid have high rates of tooth decay but visit dentists less often than children with private insurance, according to a new article in the journal Health Affairs.

But the racial and ethnic disparities go beyond economic status. Latino and African American children with private insurance are less likely than white children to see a dentist, and they go longer between visits. And Latino and African American children in Medicaid are more likely than white children in Medicaid to go longer between trips to the dentist.

The findings are based on the California Health Interview Survey. The research was supported by the California Healthcare Foundation.

“The findings suggest that having insurance isn’t always enough,” said co-author Nadereh Pourat, Ph.D., and director of research planning at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “We need to address the other barriers that keep children from getting the help they need.”

To see the entire article, click here.

 
 
 

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