Chile Labor Shortage

PKG for 2002-02-21 - RUNS 1:40

Intro

The machine harvesting of red chile and jalapeños becomes an increasingly hot topic as the Southwest's chile industry faces labor shortages. New Mexico State University's Anna Maria Pérez-Wright reports.

Video	Audio
	Rising costs and labor shortages have New Mexico's 200-million-dollar chile industry fighting for its existence. As labor for hand harvesting chile becomes increasingly scarce, New Mexico State University researchers are working hard to perfect mechanical harvesting. Gale Carr's farm is in Fort Hancock, Texas, on the United States-Mexico border, but he still has difficulty finding enough labor to harvest his crop.
Insert title at :28 - :38 Gale Carr Owner/Business Manager Border Land Farms	"If we don't get machine harvesting perfected in the next few years, there won't be any chile industry in New Mexico. What we're facing competition from other places that have much cheaper labor and our costs are rising and prices are not rising, so we're having to work on a smaller and smaller margin every year and here pretty soon it's just not going to exist. Even Mexico is facing the same threat."
	Forty to 60 percent of a grower's chile production costs are for hand harvesting. NMSU agricultural economics professor Jim Libbin says the labor shortage problem exists in northern Mexico as well.
Insert title at 1:06-1:11 Jim Libbin NMSU professor of agricultural economics	"A few years ago we thought that the, the real question was whether we could justify a mechanical harvester relative to hand harvesting on both red chile and jalapeños. Now the question is really whether we're going to have a mechanically harvested crop or no crop at all."
	In 1995, about 500 acres of chile were machine harvested in the Southwest growing region. That number grew to 75-hundred acres in 2001. For N-M-S-U's College of Agriculture and Home Economics, I'm Anna María Pérez-Wright.