Ariadna Rico is a senior investigator and Director of H-2A Communications with the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC), the not-for-profit organization that monitors and enforces the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ groundbreaking agreements with growers and food retail buyers to ensure fundamental human rights for agricultural workers. The Fair Food Program has been recognized by US State Department, the Department of Labor, the United Nations, Harvard Business Review, CNN International’s Freedom Project and other numerous national and international human rights organizations, as one of the most successful programs in the world today to uncover, eliminate and prevent modern-day slavery, sexual violence, wage theft and other systemic abuses.

 At the Fair Food Standards Council Ariadna has worked on all aspects of Fair Food Program monitoring including conducting in-person audits at participating farms and receiving, investigating and resolving complaints received on the FFSC hotline. Currently, she oversees communication between Participating Growers and the Mexican National Employment Service (SNE), which is the federal agency designated to provide a clean-recruitment channel for all H-2A workers at participating farms.  Before coming to the Fair Food Standards Council, Ariadna worked across the United States and internationally in France and South Korea as a teacher and advocate. She has a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts from the University of Texas at El Paso, and graduate coursework in sustainable food systems from the University of South Florida. She also holds an English as a Second Language teaching certificate and speaks English, Spanish and French.