Profits Frozen for Hmong Farmers

FRESNO, Calif. – Buoyed by the modest success of his four years as a farmer in this Central Valley town renowned for its abundant harvests of fruits, vegetables and nuts, 57-year-old Hmong farmer Zia Xiong boldly planted Chinese broccoli, mustard green, okra, lettuce, lemon grass and chayote in his 40-acre farmland here last November.

Now, instead of preparing to harvest those vegetables, Xiong and his family have just finished plowing over much of the planted area, with nary a vegetable to show for the weeks of backbreaking work they had endured.

“In the last few days, every day, we have come here to look at the field, and every day it seems like the plants were going down, not up,” lamented Xiong’s 25-year-old daughter, Jee, as she gazed at the rain-starved, frost-burnt farmland in the south-eastern part of Fresno.


More
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=821595496c40280afccae09dfc925f91