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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As water tankers race across northern Mexico to reach far-flung towns, and crops wither in the fields, the government has allotted US$2.7 billion in emergency aid to confront the country’s worst-ever drought, which has caused $1.2 billion in crop losses and killed 60,000 head of cattle.

“Droughts are cyclical — we know that — but they are growing more frequent and severe due to climate change,” said Elvira Quesada, the country’s environment minister.

The drought helped push Mexico’s food imports up 35 per cent last year, a trend likely to persist through the 2012-13 crop cycle. Zacatecas state, the country’s main bean producer, harvested only a quarter of the usual crop after months without rain, and water shortage has forced Mexican farmers to cut back cattle herds.

“There was talk of drought when I got here 16 years ago,” said Ignacio Becerra, a priest working in the rugged town of Carichi in Chihuahua state, which has suffered massive water shortages. “This year, not even corn or beans came up. Watering holes that never ran dry are empty.”

A dry future

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, an outspoken advocate for mitigating and adapting to climate change, has ordered his government to start getting ready for tougher times.

Experts estimate Mexico will have to spend billions of dollars in the next two decades to maintain the water supply for irrigation and drinking water. Water authority Conagua says it must invest $24 billion by 2030 to safeguard and modernize infrastructure by sealing leaky pipes, expanding reservoirs, and even recycling household waste water.

As policy-makers plot their response to climate change, Mexicans must simply come to grip with years of little rain — and higher food bills for staples like beef.

Darrell Hargrove, owner of farming and trucking firm Southwest Livestock in Del Rio, Texas, said the price of Mexican cattle has risen to about $2 per pound from $1.50 since February.

“We have the lowest cattle herd count here that we’ve had since about 1950,” Hargrove said.

The human cost has also been harsh.

The government said it provided food rations to more than two million people, while more than 400,000 residents in the six driest states were without water at the end of December and an estimated eight million are grappling with water shortages.

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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 in February, 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.”

Australia To Legislate Carbon Farming Scheme

An Australian scheme to generate farm-and forest-linked carbon credits for sale to polluting firms will start slowly when it comes online later this year, as the government struggles to garner support for a national carbon price seen as crucial to the plan’s long-term success.

The government aims for Parliament to pass the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) in time for its expected start on July 1. Approval would usher in the world’s first nationally legislated market for carbon credits from farm projects and be a boost for carbon forestry firms.

But for the scheme to succeed, analysts said, Parliament would also have to pass matching laws that set a national price on carbon emissions from industry, to underpin demand from polluters.

“The government has not explicitly said this (the use of CFI offsets) will be included in any future carbon price. But the expectation is that it will,” said Martijn Wilder, head of Baker &McKenzie’s global environmental markets practice, who helped advise the government on the draft laws.

Big polluters could buy the offsets to meet mandatory emissions cuts, giving them another way to manage their carbon risks and drive investment in projects that cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Until that happens, the initiative will only serve a small voluntary market for offsets and limited international demand for offsets from forestry projects.

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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 in 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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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 Center 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 1 and 3 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 who 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 Bourlag, 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 land races 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.”

Seeds of change:A scientist stands in a storage room for grains in the International Maize and Wheat

Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in El Batan on the outskirts of Mexico City.

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The official government gazette said the new tariffs, which will range from 10 per cent to 45 per cent, were effective March 19.

Mexico said the U. S. ban on its trucks violates the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

To avoid raising prices for local consumers, the Mexican government excluded major staples like rice, corn, wheat and meat products and instead focused on imports that could affect as many U. S. states as possible without hurting Mexican manufacturers.

The list of 90 imports, estimated by the Mexican government to be worth $2.4 billion a year, included sunglasses, toilet paper, pet food, ornaments, soy sauce, Christmas trees and produce such as strawberries, pears and onions.

Mexico, the United States’ No. 3 trade partner, is angry the U. S. Congress scrapped a pilot program this month that allowed Mexican trucks to haul goods deep into the United States.

Some U. S. lawmakers and truck driver unions say Mexican trucks do not meet U. S. safety standards, a charge Mexico denies.

Mexico said it imposed the sanctions according to NAFTA rules since the two countries have not been able to resolve the dispute simmering since 2001.

Only about 1.5 per cent of U. S. exports to Mexico are affected by the new rules but trade experts say the flap will be the first real test of President Barack Obama’s trade strategy.

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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 co-ordinated 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 scient ist 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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