Feeding the System: Structural Violence and the Exploitation of Farmworkers in the U.S. Food System.

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 4: Marxist Sociology and Critical Political Economy

Abstract

Agricultural labor has long been foundational to the United States food system, but the conditions under which farmworkers labor have been shaped by enduring patterns of economic marginalization, legal exclusion, and racialized exploitation. While food production is commonly understood as a site of nourishment and abundance, it has also functioned as a domain in which harm is systematically produced through ordinary institutional arrangements. This paper examines the U.S. food system as a central site of structural violence, where exploitation is embedded within slow, normalized processes that render suffering politically and socially invisible. Drawing on the framework of structural violence, I conceptualize farmworker exploitation as a historically produced and institutionally sustained process embedded within labor law exclusions, immigration regimes, and market imperatives for cheap food. I ask two central questions: (1) How has structural violence been historically constructed within the U.S.food system to shape farmworker vulnerability? and (2) What institutional mechanisms continue to reproduce this violence in contemporary agricultural labor systems? Through a critical historical analysis of existing literature, I identify paradigmatic changes marked by demographic, political, economic, and technological shifts to trace how racialized labor regimes and governance structures have converged and impacted farmworker exploitation. This historical systems analysis reveals how violence within the U.S. food system operates through an institutionalized persistence of everyday economic and legal arrangements. These arrangements also point to a deeper tension, one between society's dependence on farmworker labor and a political economy privileging subsidized corporate management, efficiency, and profit, with the promise of lower consumer costs. It is at this nexus of social forces that farmworker suffering is produced, constrained, and rendered socially and politically invisible. This paper thereby
advances sociological understanding of how exploitation within the U.S. food system is structurally produced and institutionally sustained over time.

Author

• Frank Sarfo, Syracuse University