Ep. 134 - Food Systems, Community Power, and the New Face of Agriculture with Rizpah Bellard

For our listeners, they're probably like, oh my gosh, right now, can you layman's term kind of explain even like what that looks like for day to day? Because I think you're going to spark, there's a lot of conversation about this in the world at large and in the Western industry right now.

I think we can spark some potential new students in these universities to study these issues that are happening based off of what you know.

Yeah, so a lot of my understanding of trafficking, both for labor and sex, it's push-pull factors, right? So let's say if we're talking about agricultural labor trafficking, the push factor for folks who go into these spaces where they end up being trafficked or taken advantage of, the push is money, right? The push is they need money or they need an opportunity or they may not be a legal citizen, so they have to find some type of under-the-counter money, right, under-the-counter pay.

And then the pull factor may also be like, this is a paying job.

It's low pay, but it's a quick, easy pay.

I can do the work, it's no problem.

And then what happens is you have predators, and it's both in sex and labor trafficking, there's predators who are taking advantage of people.

So a predator can be the employer, it can be a John who's a buyer in the sex space, it can be like a pimp in the sex space as well, somebody who's like a romance boyfriend or we call them Romeos, somebody who's acting like they love the girl or guy who's gonna go into the sex trafficking space.

So there's a lot of factors at play And a lot of times it's an accident that people fall into these worlds or spaces of trafficking.

It's not intentional.

Like I want to go be taken advantage of.

It's an accident.

But there's also the understanding of it's kind of like the domestic violence circle.

They fall prey to like the relationship that's held or a Stockholm syndrome or something like that.

The devil you

know.

Yeah, they want to leave, but they don't know.

And this is but, you know, it's like that.

OK, they hit me once, but then they said they really love me and they gave me food the next time.

Right.

So trying to figure out what do I do? And then also you have language barriers for folks who don't speak English.

Where do they go? Or if they're not a legal citizen, where do they go? Yeah.

Or girls who've been kicked out of the home.

My mom, my dad, they don't want me.

And this is who says they want me.