Stephanie Barrientos, Anna Bee, Ann Matear, and Isabel Vogel, Women and Agribusiness: Working Miracles in the Chilean Fruit Export Sector. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. xv + 231 pp. $72.00 cloth.

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, US and European consumers have enjoyed year-round availability of fresh grapes, pears, apples, and peaches in their local supermarkets—fruits that, in the winter months, come disproportionally from Chile. As the authors of Women and Agribusiness: Working Miracles in the Chilean Fruit Export Sector make crystal clear, this First World bounty is made possible through international agribusiness's hyper-exploitation of predominantly female labor in the Third World. Chile's highly profitable fruit-export industry was nurtured during Augosto Pinochet's military dictatorship (1973-1989), which promoted a radical liberalization of the economy and ruthlessly silenced a once powerful rural labor movement. Women comprise just over half of the estimated 300,000 temporeros/as (temporary workers) who labor for poverty wages under seasonal contracts in the industry's orchards, vineyards, and fruit-packaging plants. By the mid-1980s, the fruit industry's profits reached a half-billion dollars, making fresh fruit Chile's third most important source of foreign currency and prompting The Wall Street Journal to hail Chile's “economic miracle.”