A woman with pregnancy complications needed permission from her boss to visit a doctor. Community health volunteers were turned away from delivering food and covid information to worker housing. A farmworker had a serious allergic reaction but was afraid to seek treatment. To Nicole Civita, policy director with Colorado advocacy group Project Protect Food Systems Workers, such stories encapsulate an entrenched power dynamic that covid-19 has brought into focus: Farmworkers are “essential but treated as expendable,” including when it comes to accessing health care....

In Immokalee, an agricultural hub in southwest Florida known as America’s “tomato capital,” thousands of farmworkers are busy during the peak of harvest season; many of the fresh tomatoes now in grocery stores—or being delivered to doorsteps—have passed through their hands. But despite a growing outcry from workers and their advocates, little is being done, by growers or government, to help protect this community of mostly Latino immigrants from infection with the novel coronavirus, even though the country depends on their labor to keep people fed....