No Honour in UNESCO Designation Built on Farmworker Exploitation

On International Migrants’ Day, migrant justice collective Rama Okanagan responds to Kelowna’s designation as UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy: “Where is the honour in the rampant abuse of farmworkers’ human rights?”

On October 31, 2025, Kelowna became the first city in Canada to be named a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Creative City of Gastronomy. With this designation, it joins San Antonio, Texas, and Merida, Mexico, to become North America’s third city with such a recognition. 

This isn’t the first time a United Nations body has cast a spotlight on Canada’s agricultural sector and food production in recent years. Rather, this celebratory endorsement from UNESCO comes on the tails of another, far less popular headline: a scathing assessment of Canada’s treatment of migrant farmworkers.

In a searing 22-page report prepared by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery in July, 2024, researchers slammed Canada’s temporary foreign worker program for “serving as a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery, as it institutionalizes asymmetries of power that favour employers and prevent workers from exercising their rights”. Across the country, workers face poor housing conditions, barriers to unionization and healthcare access, and fear of retribution and deportation for exercising their basic rights.

Kelowna is not exempt from these criticisms, and not only because the workers employed here labour under the same federal program taking heat. 

The Okanagan Valley is home to approximately 8,000 seasonal farmworkers from Latin America and the Caribbean each year, with many living in and around Kelowna. For more than two decades, migrant farmworkers in the valley have reported persistent abuse by supervisors, including the denial of basic workplace rights and retaliation when they are injured or no longer deemed “useful” by employers. “We are very poor but hard working people and they take advantage of that. We have no protections”, said a Guatemalan farmworker employed on a Kelowna orchard in 2025. Along with his coworkers, he described being subjected to “constant harassment and constant intimidation” by supervisors. When workers were injured on the job, they said their injuries were ignored and untreated. “The bosses didn’t care about us at all,” he stated. “Here, the fruit is more important than anything else.” 

“This designation from UNESCO celebrates access to and abundance of food for only some people in Kelowna,” said Laura Prada, longtime Rama volunteer and grassroots activist. “But our food system is built on the backs of migrant farmworkers, whose undignified and unjust experiences have been documented for decades through public research, worker testimonies, and activists’ corroboration. This is a homegrown and deeply rooted problem.”

In addition to the troubling conditions of their employment, farmworkers in the Okanagan Valley face significant barriers in accessing sufficient quality food for their personal consumption – an injustice that flies in the face of any ‘honour’ bestowed by Kelowna’s UNESCO designation.

“Farmworkers regularly reach out to us to ask for food support, whether because they can’t physically get to a grocery store or because they don’t have money to buy food,” added Elise Hjalmarson, Rama’s cofounder and a longtime migration researcher. “What does it say about our city if we are celebrated for gastronomic creativity and do nothing to ensure that the people who cultivate our fresh fruits and vegetables aren’t going hungry?”

If Kelowna is to claim any pride in its designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, it must confront the reality that no amount of culinary creativity can coexist with a labour system built on fear and disposability. Rama calls on local governments, agricultural, gastronomic and culinary communities to use the UNESCO designation as a platform to demand full and permanent immigration status for migrant farmworkers — the only meaningful and viable way to end the coercion, silence, and abuse embedded in Canada’s food system.