"21ST CENTURY MODERN DAY SLAVERY" EXISTS and YOU support it with your grocery purchases.

The CIW's Campaign for Fair Food is designed to attack slavery at its roots -- to address the poverty and powerlessness that make farm labor slavery possible today. The campaign identifies the links between the brutal farm labor conditions in US fields and the retail food giants that buy the produce grown in those fields.

Modern-day slavery in Florida agriculture cannot be understood in a vacuum. It is not separate from the past, rather its roots extend deep in the state's history. While the phenomenon of forced labor has taken many forms over the past four centuries in Florida agriculture, the industry has never been entirely free of the scourge of slavery.

The movement to end modern-day slavery is a movement to defend one of our most fundamental human rights, and the CIW has been at the forefront of that movement for many years. But we are far from alone. Earlier this year, President Obama proclaimed January, 2010, "National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month," declaring: "The United States was founded on the principle that all people are born with an unalienable right to freedom -- an ideal that has driven the engine of American progress throughout our history.

As a Nation, we have known moments of great darkness and greater light; and dim years of chattel slavery illuminated and brought to an end by President Lincoln's actions and a painful Civil War.

Yet even today, the darkness and inhumanity of enslavement exists. Millions of people worldwide are held in compelled service, as well as thousands within the United States.

During National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, we acknowledge that forms of slavery still exist in the modern era, and we recommit ourselves to stopping the human traffickers who ply this horrific trade..." http://ciw-online.org/freedom_march/index.html http://flcitrusmutual.com/files/c94c8572-c61f-4c50-9.pdf