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Shining Light on Farm & Food Policy for 20 Years.
Friday, December 20, 2024
Kevin Shea has been named senior adviser in the Office of the Deputy Secretary at USDA and Veronica Nigh has joined The Fertilizer Institute as the senior economist.
The Department of Labor (DOL) is publishing today its 2022 Adverse Effect Wage Rates (AEWR), which are the minimum an employer must pay H-2A nonimmigrant agricultural workers, and proposing some changes to how those rates are set for certain jobs.
The American Farm Bureau Federation is sounding the alarm over potential duties on fertilizer imports from Russia and Trinidad and Tobago, two major suppliers being investigated by the U.S. government over claims of market-distorting subsidies.
The Adverse Effect Wage Rate that farmers are required to pay H-2A workers is rising by an average of 4.5% nationally to $14.62 per hour this year, with some western and Plains states seeing significantly higher increases.
Farmworker wages under the H-2A program will rise 6% nationally in 2020 to an average of $13.99 an hour, with farmers in some states seeing increases of up to 10%, the Labor Department says.
President Donald Trump’s latest claim that he might push back a trade pact with China until after the 2020 elections has unleashed a new wave of uncertainty for America’s farmers who had been counting on promises that a resolution to the trade war was imminent.
In the first quarter of fiscal year 2018, there were 33,830 positions requested through the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program, the highest ever for the October-through-December period and a near 17 percent increase over the same quarter in the previous year.
