U.S. officials said the Labor Department had seen a nearly 70 per cent increase in child labour violations since 2018, including in hazardous occupations. In the last fiscal year, 835 companies were found to have violated child labour laws.

U.S. officials told reporters on a Monday conference call that the administration was probing the employment of children at companies including Hearthside Food Solutions and suppliers to Hyundai Motor Co. It has created an interagency task force on child labour, and plans to target industries where violations are most likely to occur for investigations.

The Democratic administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is also pushing for heavier penalties for companies that violate these laws, and more funding for enforcement and oversight, they said. U.S. federal law prohibits people under age 16 from working in most factory settings, and those under 18 are barred from the most dangerous jobs in industrial plants.

“This isn’t a 19th century problem, this isn’t a 20th century problem, this is happening today,” said one of the officials on the call. “We are seeing children across the country working in conditions that they should never ever be employed in the first place.”

The maximum civil monetary penalty is currently just US$15,138 per child, the administration noted in a press release, a figure that’s “not high enough to be a deterrent.”

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) opened an investigation into Hearthside Food Solutions, a U.S. food contractor that makes and packages products for well-known snack and cereal brands, for reportedly employing underage workers and violating child labour laws, officials confirmed on the call.

Reuters reported the DOL’s investigation into Hearthside earlier on Monday.

The company came under scrutiny following a New York Times investigation that said Hearthside’s factories employed underage workers making Chewy granola bars and bags of Lucky Charms and Cheetos, which the company would later ship around the country.

It was not clear whether the probe will lead to criminal charges, fines or other penalties. Hearthside said in a statement the company would “work collaboratively with the Department of Labor in their investigation and do our part to continue to abide by all local, state and federal employment laws,” and that they were “appalled” by the report alleging child labour at their company.

The Hearthside investigation is the latest in a rise in similar probes. Reuters last year published a series of stories on child labour including revelations about the use of child labour among suppliers to Hyundai, including a direct subsidiary of the Korean auto giant, in the U.S. state of Alabama.

The first story in the Reuters series, published in February last year, uncovered young teens working in dangerous chicken processing plants in Alabama.

Earlier this month, a major food safety sanitation company paid US$1.5 million in penalties for employing more than 100 teenagers in dangerous jobs at meatpacking plants in eight states, following another Labor Department investigation.

As Reuters previously reported, a record number of unaccompanied migrant minors entered the country in recent years, with many entering federal shelters and then released to sponsors, usually relatives, while immigration authorities resolve their requests for refuge in the U.S.

But authorities are struggling with long-term follow-up to prevent minors from being sucked into a vast network of enablers, including labour contractors, who recruit workers for big plants and other employers. At times they have steered kids into jobs that are illegal, grueling and meant for adults. The majority of minors Reuters found working were from Central America.

Separately, the Biden administration said earlier this year it will speed up the deportation relief process for immigrants in the U.S. illegally who witness or experience labour abuses.

“We also absolutely need to protect workers who do come forward and participate in wage and hour and other worker protection investigations and activities,” one official said on the Monday call.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nandita Bose in Washington and Mica Rosenberg in New York; additional reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Joshua Schneyer in New York.

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At a roundtable on farm labour at the White House last month, Trump said he did not want to create labour problems for farmers and would look into improving a program that brings in temporary agricultural workers on legal visas.

“He assured us we would have plenty of access to workers,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of 14 participants at the April 25 meeting with Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

During the roundtable conversation about agriculture, farmers and representatives of the sector brought up labour and immigration, the details of which have not been previously reported. Some farmers told Trump they often cannot find Americans willing to do the difficult farm jobs, according to interviews with nine of the 14 participants.

They said they were worried about stricter immigration enforcement and described frustrations with the H-2A visa program, the one legal way to bring in temporary seasonal agricultural workers.

The White House declined to comment on the specifics of the discussion, but described the meeting as “very productive.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment on the April meeting.

About half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally and more than two-thirds are foreign born, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Workers’ Survey.

During the roundtable, Luke Brubaker, a dairy farmer from Pennsylvania, described how immigration agents had recently picked up half a dozen chicken catchers working for a poultry transportation company in his county.

The employer tried to replace them with local hires, but within three hours all but one had quit, Brubaker told the gathering at the White House.

Trump said he wanted to help and asked Secretary Perdue to look into the issues and come back with recommendations, according to the accounts.

While other issues such as trade, infrastructure and technology were also discussed, participants were more positive after the meeting about the conversation on foreign labour “than about anything else we talked about,” said Bill Northey, a farmer and Iowa’s secretary of agriculture.

Red tape

Tom Demaline, president of Willoway Nurseries in Ohio, said he told the president about his struggles with the H-2A guestworker program, which he has used for 18 years.

He told Trump the program works in concept, but not in practice. “I brought up the bureaucracy and red tape,” he said. “If the guys show up a week or two late, it puts crops in jeopardy. You are on pins and needles all year to make sure you get the workers and do everything right.”

While use of the program has steadily increased over the past decade, it still accounts for only about 10 per cent of the estimated 1.3 million farmworkers in the country, according to government data. In 2016, the government granted 134,000 H-2A visas

Employers who import workers with H-2A visas must provide free transportation to and from the U.S. as well as housing and food for workers once they arrive. Wage minimums are set by the government and are often higher than farmers are used to paying.

Steve Scaroni, whose company Fresh Harvest brings in thousands of foreign H-2A workers for growers in California’s Central Valley, said, however, that he could find work for even more people if he had more places to house them.

Trump recently signed another executive order titled “Buy American, Hire American,” calling for changes to a program granting temporary visas for the tech industry, but not to visas used by farmers and other seasonal businesses, including Trump’s own resorts.

Farmer concerns

Trump also signed two executive orders, just days after taking office, focused on border security that called for arresting more people in the U.S. illegally and speeding up deportations.

Roundtable participants said that many farmers have worried about the effect of the stepped-up enforcement on their workforce, but Trump told them his administration was focused on deporting criminals, not farmworkers.

“He has a much better understanding about this than some of the rhetoric we have seen,” said meeting attendee Steve Troxler, North Carolina’s agriculture commissioner and a farmer himself.

The farmers at the meeting said they stressed to the president the need for both short-term and permanent workers. They said there should be a program to help long-time farmworkers without criminal records, but who are in the country illegally, to become legal residents.

Last Tuesday, Democrats in the House and Senate said they would introduce a bill to give farmworkers who have worked illegally in the country for two consecutive years a “blue card” to protect them from deportation.

Brubaker, the Pennsylvania farmer, said he liked what he had heard about the bill and hoped it would get the president’s support to make it a bipartisan effort.

“The administration has got something started here,” he said of the meeting with farm leaders. “It’s about time something happens.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Mica Rosenberg in Washington; additional reporting by Julia Love in Salinas, California.

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Colombia plans to nearly double agricultural land growing crops for food and biofuel, part of a new investment boom in the country as violence ebbs from a decades-long internal conflict fuelled by drug profits.

The idea is to transform the vast eastern plains, dotted for years with illicit coca plantations, into the country s bread basket and provide domestic food security in the face of soaring global food prices.

Colombia has 53 million acres that could be planted with crops such as corn, soy, African palm and sugar, and less than a quarter of that land is currently being used for farming.

Already the world s top grower of high-quality washed arabica coffee and mostly self sufficient in food production, Colombia imports more than three million tonnes of corn each year for animal feed. The government wants to cut those imports in half.

There are 10 million acres perfect for conversion to farmland in the eastern plains, a region known as the Orinoquia, according to Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo. In the next four years, the government wants to plant a quarter of that, spending up to $5 billion, with hopes the private sector will invest even more. The region has acidic soils similar to those of Brazil s central savanna, which was converted into vast fertile soy plots with heavy investments in lime and fertilizers. Such techniques concern environmentalists, but Colombian agronomists are eager to learn from Brazilian experts. Since 1991, Brazil s national production of grains nearly tripled while planted area only increased about 30 per cent.

But there are several challenges. Large swaths of the Andean nation were off limits for years as drug runners, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups battled over territory, although coca plantings are down sharply as a result of a U.S.-backed crackdown. Violence remains a problem, and a legacy of the conflict is poor infrastructure. Also, torrential rains and flooding have battered the country for months, damaging roads that must be fixed before new ones can be built.

Another related hurdle is land rights. Some 10 million acres were taken from peasants by heavily armed paramilitaries, drug lords and ranchers, but many expect people forced off land will be too scared to return and will likely sell to big farm companies.

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Attacks on warehouses and cargo trucks have multiplied into a near-weekly affair in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, where one of the worst cold snaps in decades wiped out corn and vegetable plots last month, pushing up prices of the remaining harvest and making it more attractive to thieves.

The unusual crime wave in major agricultural-exporting states is a new headache for the Mexican government struggling to maintain the country’s image as a top emerging market.

Mexico’s national warehousing association AAGEDE said the spike in thefts began a year or two ago, but its members are only recently coming forward and many are still too scared to report details on the number or scale of the incidents.

Jose Jimenez, director of Mexican storage company ALMER, told of one robbery last year in a tiny town in the central state of Zacatecas where an armed commando emptied a warehouse of 900 tonnes of beans, worth around $750,000, loading up 30 trucks over the course of an entire day.

The gang left five tonnes of beans with local townspeople to keep them quiet and the police did not show up until two days later, he said.

Many warehousers are boosting spending on security, adding fortress-like protections to their installations, AAGEDE’s director Raul Millan said.

“We are building war-like trenches around our warehouses… and guard houses, like a medieval castle,” Jimenez said. The company had to increase security spending by up to five per cent, he said.

Authorities have made little progress in identifying the culprits of the large-scale robberies. Some producers speculate drug gangs may be using money earned from the sale of stolen grains to bankroll criminal activities.

Robbers can easily sell truckloads of seed and corn to intermediaries and big-city markets as buyers ask few questions about where the goods came from.

“They come in groups of 20 or 30 masked men with their own trailers,” Jesus Palomir of Sinaloa’s agricultural producers association CAADES, said. “It’s very well organized.”

In March gunmen locked a warehouse owner in a room and carted off vehicles full of corn in the Sinaloan town of Los Mochis, local police said. Media reports said the thieves made off with 250 tonnes of grain.

State police have documented five similar cases so far this year but say many more are probably never reported.

“Gangs are robbing bags of seed from producers in warehouses and in the fields,” said Adalberto Mustieles, head of farm services in Sinaloa’s state government. “They beat up the farmers and steal their trucks.”

———

“Wearebuilding

war-liketrenchesaroundourwarehouses…andguardhouses,likeamedievalcastle.”

JOSE JIMENEZ

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The Agriculture Ministry granted a permit March 8 to global biotech seed maker Monsanto to plant no more than 2.47 acres (one hectare) with genetically modified corn in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

Large commercial farmers in the north say GM corn will help them compete with imports from the United States where the bulk of corn is genetically engineered. GM corn can be higher yielding and more disease resistant.

But small, subsistence farmers in southern Mexico worry the biotech crops will threaten native varieties like red, blue and multicoloured corn.

Corn, first planted in Mexico as many as 9,000 years ago, was worshipped as a deity and later spread by Spanish conquerors to the rest of the world.

Mexico imported some 7.2 million tonnes of U.S. yellow corn last year for animal feed and produces mostly white corn to make corn tortillas, the country’s staple food.

“It is necessary to advance the use of biotechnology to reduce imports and promote national production,” the ministry statement said.

A pilot program is allowed after an experimental phase of planting in a smaller field has been approved as safe by government inspectors, the ministry said in a statement.

Three petitions to expand experimental GM planting in the state of Sinaloa into larger pilot projects were rejected after failing to fulfil regulatory requirements, the ministry said.

The government says it has received 121 requests for permits since it began allowing GM corn experiments in 2009.

Currently there are around 170 acres (70 hectares) planted with GM corn in small experimental fields the northern corn-growing states of Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Durango, the ministry said.

Agriculture officials insist the experimental planting is taking place only in areas where native corn is not common.

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Mexico, widely believed to be the birthplace of corn, has long been hesitant to adopt transgenic maize seeds. But the country is also a major food importer and finds itself outpaced by exporting giants such as the U. S. and Brazil when it comes to yields.

So last year, after a decade of political wrangling, Mexico completed a package of laws to allow for controlled experiments with the genetically engineered seeds, designed to resist certain pests or herbicides, reduce costs, and increase yields. In small, isolated fields in three states in northern Mexico, Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred recently completed the tests with positive results.

It is the first time GM corn seeds have been allowed to take root in Mexican soil since 1998 when the government put a moratorium on studies until a legal framework was in place to regulate the crops.

“We have to recover lost time. Mexico should be using 21st century technology so we can compete and not be an importing country,” said Fabrice Salamanca, who heads the group AgroBIO that represents biotech companies participating in the trials.

Companies with experiments verified as safe are aiming to subsidize farmers to launch pilot projects in larger areas next year in the northern states of Sinaloa and Tamaulipas, Salamanca said. The pilot fields would not exceed around 250 acres (100 hectares), a tiny fraction of Mexico’s 20 million corn acres. Biotech companies hope to eventually see five million acres planted with GM corn. But that be years away. GM cotton plants, less controversial than corn, are only now being grown commercially after 15 years of experimental plantings because of bureaucratic red tape holding up permits, Salamanca said.

Corn gods

The Mexican farmers interested in GM seeds are major producers who see unfair competition from the United States where the bulk of corn is genetically modified. Mexico is self-sufficient in white corn used to make the daily staple tortillas, but the country imports around 10 million tonnes of GM yellow corn a year for animal feed.

But small producers are worried. Indigenous groups say corn, revered in pre-colonial Mexico by the Mayans and the Aztecs as a god, has sustained generations of farmers who save their red, blue, white and multi-coloured corn seeds using techniques passed down for generations.

And while the GM test fields are isolated from other corn crops by 2,000 feet (600 metres) and planting dates are staggered to avoid crossing, there are fears cross-pollination could contaminate the dozens of corn varieties only found in Mexico.

“My grandparents taught my family the process of saving seeds … (The worry is) we will lose our native corn,” Alejandro Nevarez, a Tarahumara agronomist in Chihuahuaha state where there have been some GM experiments.

Nevarez said some Tarahumara people, who live in poverty in the craggy mountains of the picturesque Copper Canyon, have refused government handouts of seeds fearing they are part of the GM tests.

———

…thecountryisalsoa majorfoodimporter andfindsitself

outpacedbyexporting giantssuchastheU.S. andBrazilwhenit comestoyields.

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Scientists working in the farming hills outside Mexico City found the ancient wheat varieties have particular drought-and heat-resistant traits, such as longer roots that suck up water and a capacity to store more nutrients in their stalks.

They are crossing the plants with other strains developed at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in El Batan to grow types of wheat that can fight off the ill effects of rising global temperatures.

“It’s like putting money in the bank to use, in this case, for a not-rainy day,” said scientist Matthew Reynolds.

Seed breeders say they are the first line of defence protecting farmers from climate change, widely expected to heat the planet between one and three degrees over the next 50 years.

Intensified drought, together with more intense and unpredictable rainfall, could hit crop yields hard.

Last year, Mexico had the lowest rainfall in 68 years, and this year an active hurricane season battered corn-growing areas near the U. S. border.

Corn farmer Cesar Longoria, 56, said his harvest dropped by 30 per cent in the 2009 drought, and more than half of his fields were destroyed by floods in July when Hurricane Alex hammered northern Mexico.

“For the people that depend on corn this is a tragedy,” said Carlos Salazar, head of the national corn growers’ association.

One billion undernourished

Mexico is not alone in fearing climate change.

The number of hungry people in the world had been rising for more than a decade, reaching a record spike in 2009 triggered by the economic crisis and high domestic food prices in several developing countries. Nearly one billion people were considered undernourished this year, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently reported, and jumps in food prices have led to riots and social unrest.

In India, the world’s second-largest wheat producer, it’s feared rising temperatures could cut crop output by up to 25 per cent in the next half century.

India was one of the first nations to receive the benefits of innovative techniques of plant scientist Norman Borlaug, the architect of the Green Revolution. Bourlag started his pioneering research in the 1940s in Mexico, considered a birthplace for corn where native races of the grain dating to long before the Spanish conquest survive.

Now the genes of some of those races are being mapped to isolate useful traits to produce improved lines.

“Many of these landraces have been around for tens of thousands, if not millions, of years and have lived through wide variations in the climate,” Thomas Payne at the seed bank said. “They hold valuable information that can be used to confront the uncertainties of the future.”

———

“It’slikeputting moneyinthebankto use,inthiscase,fora not-rainyday.”

Matthew Reynolds

CIMMYT

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“If it hits the No. 2 wheat producer traders will go wild. You see what happened last year, and it could be far worse than that,”

– Thomas Lumpkin, Cimmyt

A mutant form of stem rust that wipes out wheat crops could spread to top producers in Asia unless new resistant varieties of wheat are distributed widely, experts say.

Stem rust “annihilates, that’s not an exaggeration,” said Rick Ward, a rust expert from Cornell University.

“Basically the entire world’s wheat crop is fertile breeding ground,” Ward told Reuters ahead of a global meeting on the blight in Mexico last week.

The fungus has plagued wheat since biblical times, causing crop failure and famines. It was largely controlled in the 1950s as scientists passed out seeds with a gene to block the disease, a reddish dust that attacks the plant’s stalks.

But a deadly new strain of the rust discovered in Africa in the late 1990s poses a serious threat to 80 per cent of the world’s wheat supply, according to the United Nations.

Some of the 300 international experts at the event called for a coordinated push to replace the bulk of the world’s commercial wheat with new seeds bred to fight the fungus.

The effort, while costly, would be more affordable than mass spraying of expensive and potentially harmful fungicides, said Ravi Singh, a scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, or CIMMYT, hosting the conference.

JUMPED TO IRAN

The mutant rust is known as Ug99 because it first emerged in Uganda in 1999 and spread from there to Kenya and Ethiopia.

The wind then carried it to Yemen and last year it was discovered in Iran, some 2,700 miles (4,400 kms) from Uganda.

Researchers fear it will jump to India, the world’s No. 2 wheat producer after China. If weather conditions are right stem rust can devastate up to 70 per cent of an affected crop.

“If that rust goes from Iran to India it doesn’t have to take out too much before the markets just get spooked,” Thomas Lumpkin, the director of CIMMYT said.

“If it hits the No. 2 wheat producer traders will go wild. You see what happened last year, and it could be far worse than that,” Lumpkin said.

Food prices spiked last year as grain crops were diverted to make biofuels sparking food riots around the globe.

Hopes of slowing the spread of Ug99 hinge upon new wheat varieties bred with genes designed to protect against the rust. CIMMYT and researchers around the world are testing thousands of these new breeds at a giant nursery in Kenya, where Ug99 has been present since 2001.

Some 60 resistant seed strains have been discovered, and they also produce more wheat per hectare, Singh said.

Governments need to distribute the new seeds and fund more research to fight the rust, said an opinion article in the New York Times by Nobel Peace Prize winning scientist Norman Borlaug, credited with launching the Green Revolution and fighting rust in the 1950s.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has pledged $27 million to combat stem rust, which also attacks barley, and U. S. President Barack Obama has asked the U. S. Congress to approve $1.1 billion for agricultural science.

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