Unless a major
miracle sprouts up somewhere, the world’s largest asparagus
processing plant will be shutting its doors for good next year, putting
over 1,000 employees out of work in the process, the majority of those
seasonal.
It’s estimated another 2,000 field workers who hand pick asparagus
in Washington’s Columbia Basin and Yakima Valley will also be
impacted.
Seneca Foods Corporation, which canned 28 million pounds of asparagus
this year under the General Mills Green Giant label in tiny Dayton,
Wash., lost its customer when GM shifted to buying processed asparagus
from Peru.
The Seneca plant closure will leave a deep crater in Washington’s
asparagus industry and also Columbia County, which has only has 4,100
residents.
The plant closure signals the end of Washington’s asparagus
canning industry, which had been handling about 60 percent of the
crop for years. In 2006 the bulk of the asparagus grown in the state
will be in the hands of fresh marketers, with a small portion of the
crop, about 10 percent, ending up pickled or frozen.
The Seneca closure is yet another casualty of the huge labor price
gap that exists among countries.
Seneca says it cannot compete with cheap labor in Peru when it has
to pay the highest minimum wage in the United States, $7.16 an hour,
and workers in Peru are paid just $5 a day.
The only thing that can save the doomed Seneca acreage is for growers
to somehow divert their crops to the fresh market, but that is highly
unlikely, said Alan Schreiber, administrator of the Washington Asparagus
Commission.
“The problem is that the fresh market is pretty much saturated
with all the asparagus left over from the Del Monte plant closure
when they went to Peru.” Del Monte closed its Toppenish, Wash.,
asparagus plant, which is about 150 miles from Dayton in the south
central part of the state, in 2003.
According to WAC, Seneca has been buying about half the asparagus
grown in Washington, providing growers with over $15 million in revenues.
To put the plant closure in perspective, Seneca’s departure
is going to have about the same impact on Dayton as would Boeing and
Microsoft leaving Seattle, said Jennie Dickinson, executive director
of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce.
“If you’re a grower you need to be figuring out something
like right now. The clock is ticking,” Schreiber said.
Schreiber said that Seneca plans to pack asparagus for the 2005 season,
which runs from April through June, and then shut down.
He puts all the blame for the predicament the Washington asparagus
industry finds itself in on the U.S. Andean Trade Preferences Act
passed in 1991, which removed the tariffs on imported asparagus. Essentially,
the act was instituted to encourage farmers in Colombia, Bolivia,
Peru and Equador to quit growing illegal drug crops and go straight.
The act is faulty, Schreiber said, because asparagus is not grown
by the same farmers growing opium and cocoa leaf, and is not even
grown in the same areas.
“It’s been a disaster for us and a windfall for them (South
American asparagus growers). The intent was a farce.”
Schreiber said the year before the Andean act was passed there were
30,000 acres of asparagus grown in Washington. The acreage began to
decline slowly during the following years to around 15,000, and when
Del Monte shut its plant acreage fell to 13,000 this year.
When the Seneca plant closes there will only be between 13,000 acres
and 7,000 acres of asparagus left in the state, said WAC chairman
Kevin Bouchey. “Who knows what it’s going to come down
to, but it needs to be half what it is now. That would basically bring
stability to those who remain in the fresh market.”
Schreiber said that the state has made funds available to develop
a mechanical harvester for asparagus and automate post-harvest equipment
to get costs down. “But right now it’s a tough deal.”
Yakima asparagus grower and WAC chairman Kevin Bouchey said that the
“death knell” of the asparagus industry began when the
state elected to tie it in with the consumer price index.
“I’m really nervous because we’re experiencing a
little inflation,” Bouchey said. “It’s (the minimum
wage) been going up with mild inflation.”
Bouchey, who grows for Seneca, said he’s been taking out some
of his older asparagus beds but is also planting new ones. He added
that since there haven’t been many new plantings, production
will continue to drop as growers take out old beds and refrain from
replanting. That should soften the fallout from the Seneca closure
“a little bit” in 2006, he said.
“All things being equal, this industry in ’06 needs to
be half the size it is now. Normal attrition is not going to take
care of that.”
Asparagus can be grown for 12 to 14 years before it must come out.
Most of Washington’s asparagus acreage is found in the Yakima
and Columbia basins. The state leads the nation in processed asparagus,
with about half the crop going to that sector.
Seneca's Dayton plant is located several miles from the production
areas. “It sits out there all by itself,” Bouchey said.
Dickinson said that Seneca will continue to process bean and pea seed
in Dayton. “Out of the 46 employees I think there are about
10 to 15 that will be keeping their jobs.”
The Seneca plant closure will also deprive other central and eastern
Washington crops, such as apples and cherries, of a sizeable workforce,
which has become available after the plant ceased production in June.
Most of the migrants who work in the Dayton plant are Mexican-Americans
from Texas, Dickinson said.
Seneca could not be reached for this article.
