Hatch chilis and Canada

Is there anything left that Canada does NOT do better than us? Let's start a list:

1.

Hmm. Well, here's an easier list. What they do better than us:

1. Health care for all.

2. A sane foreign policy. (Except, of course, that island they keep fighting Denmark over. Even that dispute is conducted in a surprisingly civilized manner. Apparently, they just keep visiting the island periodically, raising their flag, and burying symbolic bottles of brandy. See: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2005/07/25/hansisland050725.html.)

3. Bilingualism. (So far the country hasn't collapsed into a quivering mass of creme brulee, despite conducting business in both French and English.)

4. A sane foreign worker policy. They have a "seasonal agricultural work visa" designed to attract seasonal workers from Mexico and the Carribean. Apparently, this is working great.

What is not working great is our paranoid, contradictory, and counterproductive seasonal worker policy, which is, in a word, non-existent. Our local paper has run several stories, and we have heard similar stories on NPR and other outlets about similar problems all over the country, that farmers simply can't get enough people here to pick the apples, corn, broccoli, and
HATCH CHILIES
in the field. See, e.g.: http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_6763210. I used to think that the farmers just weren't paying enough to attract legal workers, but I am now convinced that isn't the problem. The problem is that the bureaucracy set up to handle seasonal immigrants is so cumbersome that it is nearly impossible to operate and use.

Add this to the travesty of the water in the Arkansas River being diverted from watering the Rocky Ford cantaloupe fields in Southern Colorado to watering the bluegrass lawns of suburban Denver, Colorado and you have a prescription for ruining the agricultural economy. And folks, we cannot abandon our farmers without serious damage to our viability as a nation, not to mention the insecurity of relying on other countries for our food supplies. But I digress.

This has seriously impacted our local food scene. The Rocky Ford melons this year were a mere shadow of their former selves, and the roadside roasted chili season was shockingly short. I got an email from our favorite supplier, who regretted that he would not be bringing any more fresh chilies in, because there was no one to harvest them!

It is a ritual of autumn out here to pass by roadside vendors of Hatch chilies, their pungent aroma drifting out from the rotating barrels roasting them over a gas flame. You take home a plastic bag still warm from the roaster, chop them up (wear gloves!), add some tomatoes (or tomatillos), onion, salt, garlic, and cilantro, and you have salsa as God intended.

I suppose back in the (probably non-existent) heyday of the family farmer, the local kids would all come in and help out with the harvest (as we city kids in Nebraska all detassled corn back in the day) but that just isn't feasible anymore.

At this point the only damage is to my stock of salsa ingredients. In the future, will it be to the price of, or even availability of my food? One free marketer and anti-immigration whako interviewed for the NPR story casually stated that in the future we would just be getting all of our produce from farms across the border in Mexico. Is that really what we want?

Sigh.
Settling for bottled salsa this year,
Annie42