Beyond big exposés and industry reports on business as usual, food system worker issues demand greater attention and sustained collective action.

The past year highlighted some highs and lows for Hawaii’s food and agriculture industries. This includes reporting on the difficult conditions of Hawaii’s “foreign” fishing crews as well as industry reports concerning the economic contribution of seed production to the state. While the AP investigation decried the conditions and treatment of those working on fishing boats, a Hawaii Crop Improvement Association op-ed lauded the contribution of agriculture to shaping “Hawaii’s politics, its economic foundation and its demographics.”

While both pieces are distinct, they nonetheless paint a familiar picture in the history of local food debates: expose-style investigations of food industry abuses alongside “business as usual” corporate reports recounting the economic contributions of big ag to the state. In between, coverage of farmers and foodies is far from lacking in Hawaii glossies, while the voices of many food and farm workers remain mostly absent. (For example, a search of Honolulu Magazine for “farmer” yielded 584 results, while there were zero results for “farmworker.)

Indeed, the majority of food system workers’ voices are relegated to the background not just in media portrayals but also in policymaking spaces. And yet as anyone familiar with Hawaii food systems knows, it’s not just fishing industry workers that lack rights: In 2014 alone, undocumented immigrants accounted for one in eight workers employed in Hawaii’s food services industries and 16.3 percent of workers in agriculture.

Regardless of status, Hawaii’s immigrant and migrant communities from Thailand, Laos, Tonga, China and more make up the backbone of local food production and yet statewide goals for doubling this production by 2030 have hardly, if ever, addressed farmworker challenges.

While the AP report rightly brought visibility to the situation of some 700 fishing industry workers, at last count, the state had more than 12,000 farmworkers, in addition to thousands of others employed in food-service industries. And yet the representation of these voices within food-system debates is minimal, in part because of difficulty sustaining collective organizing for food and farm workers.

The challenges of hard-to-organize food sectors are compounded by the fact that neither state agriculture nor labor officials appear to have the conditions of farmworkers clearly within their sights, leaving redress of the most egregious violations to federal agencies. These problems are not simply lack of oversight, labor violations or loopholes (of which there are many) but are also founded on the “revolving door” between industries and government — corruptive relationships that stall change before it starts.

And while the problems with under-recognized paid food work are flagrant, a large amount of food-related economic activity is itself not even recognized as work and therefore unpaid. The work of preparing a home-cooked meal, for example, is central to our food economies and yet remains economically unvalued. Together, unpaid and underpaid food and farming work account for significant economic and social value and yet this value is largely invisible from food systems debates.

In spite of these limitations, ongoing efforts to investigate, organize and represent the concerns of those most marginalized by mainstream food system debates are gathering strength across the paeʻaina. From recent farmworker training programs, research on farm labor issues and a newly founded Eco Labor Group on Hawaii’s fisheries, commitment is rising to ensure food system worker voices are key elements of an ecologically regenerative, Native Hawaiian-centered food system.

We support these efforts and call for more resources for this collective organizing. Not only must food system change be led by those most directly affected, but changes today must engage with Native Hawaiian visions for just and abundant futures. Only through such collective effort can the contributions of food and farming industries be gaged by more than dollar figures and workers’ concerns be addressed before they become too egregious to ignore.

Centering these perspectives from the margins is critical to moving beyond familiar frames toward a conversation about what truly constitutes economic value.