{"id":34561,"date":"2024-02-16T00:01:48","date_gmt":"2024-02-16T05:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beyondpesticides.org\/dailynewsblog\/?p=34561"},"modified":"2024-02-16T09:56:05","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T14:56:05","slug":"disproportionate-pesticide-hazards-to-farmworkers-and-people-of-color-documented-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondpesticides.org\/dailynewsblog\/2024\/02\/disproportionate-pesticide-hazards-to-farmworkers-and-people-of-color-documented-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Disproportionate Pesticide Hazards to Farmworkers and People of Color Documented. . .Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

(Beyond Pesticides<\/em>, February 16, 2024)\u00a0A report released in January, US pesticide regulation is failing the hardest-hit communities. It\u2019s time to fix it<\/a><\/em>, finds \u201cpeople of color and low-income communities in the United States and around the world continue to shoulder the societal burden of harmful pollution.\u201d More specifically, the authors state that \u201congoing environmental injustice is the disproportionate impact these communities suffer from pesticides, among the most widespread environmental pollutants.\u201d The report follows an earlier article<\/a> by the same lead authors and others (see earlier coverage<\/a>) on the long history of documented hazards and government failure to protect farmworkers from pesticide use in agriculture. In a piece posted by Beyond Pesticides earlier this week, the serious weaknesses in the worker protection standard<\/a> for farmworkers are documented. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n

The latest report was led by Nathan Donley<\/a>, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity and Robert Bullard<\/a>, known as the \u201cFather of Environmental Justice\u201d and executive director of the Robert D. Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University in Houston. In addition to these authors, the 2022 review was coauthored by Jeannie Economos of the Farmworker Association of Florida, Iris Figueroa of Farmworker Justice, Jovita Lee of Advance Carolina, Amy K. Liebman of Migrant Clinicians Network, Dominica Navarro Martinez of the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides and Fatemeh Shafiei of Spelman College.<\/p>\r\n

Today 83 percent of farmworkers consider themselves Hispanic\/Latino, which makes them the ethnic group most affected by agricultural chemicals. They usually earn less than $20,000 per year. It\u2019s difficult for them to find jobs other than field labor, as there is almost no upward mobility in agriculture and many of their skills are not transferable to other occupations. Since the Bracero Program<\/a> (1942-1964) which provided some 4.6 million temporary Mexican workers to American agriculture, farmworkers have been excluded from labor and occupational safety protections. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) defers all policy on pesticide protections to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then fails to follow through on promises to require more protection for agricultural workers by employers.<\/p>\r\n

Farmworkers and other poor people also take the brunt of pollution from industrial facilities, including pesticide manufacturing plants, because the cheapest real estate is near those facilities, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) people are often \u201credlined\u201d out of other neighborhoods. The review authors found that African Americans and Latinos are \u201cmore than twice as likely [as whites] to live within a mile of a hazardous chemical facility.\u201d And they may live in substandard housing subject to pests and resulting in frequent \u00a0use of pesticides in their homes. Additionally, farmworkers, some of whom can be pesticide applicators, often live very near the fields and orchards where pesticides are applied and drift or volatilize and move off the target drift.<\/p>\r\n

A 2015 study <\/a>by University of California Berkeley scientists found that pesticides threaten users\u2019 health more than exposure to air pollution, contaminated drinking water, and traffic (although all these impacts are also harmful). The scientists found that \u201cthe 60% of zip codes with the highest proportion of residents of color host [more than]\u200995% of agricultural pesticide use in the state.\u201d And while there is overlap between race or ethnicity and poverty, the former are more predictive of pollution burdens than poverty is.<\/p>\r\n

It is well established that children of farmworkers, children who live near fields, and children who work in fields are exposed to multiple pesticides, including organophosphates, organochlorines, and pyrethroids. These exposures can result in cancers, developmental problems, autism, and learning disabilities, among other consequences. The Bullard-Donley team reports that, \u201cIn 2019, more than eight million pounds of pesticides linked to childhood cancers were used in the 11 California counties that had a majority Latinx population (greater than 50%), resulting in 4.2 pounds of these pesticides per person\u201d compared with 0.35 pounds \u201cin the 25 California counties with the fewest Latinx residents (less than 24%).\u201d The two groups of counties had similar land area and population size.<\/p>\r\n

There are numerous structural reinforcements for the exposure and health disparities suffered by farmworkers. The lack of equitable intent by both EPA and OSHA is a major one. OSHA has essentially abandoned responsibility for occupational protection and redirected it to EPA. Bullard and Donley point out that the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 <\/em>(FQPA), which revised the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act<\/em> (FIFRA) and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act<\/em>, set a new safety standard of \u201c\u2019reasonable certainty that no harm will result\u2019 to people exposed to pesticides through food and all other non-occupational exposure routes,\u201d explicitly excluding occupational exposure. [Note that this is a risk assessment standard with a large range of acceptable hazards.] The advancement in FQPA is the requirement to evaluate for cumulative exposure to pesticides that have a common mechanism of toxicity, aggregating exposure through residues in air, water, land, and food. But, this cumulative risk review is not required to, and EPA does not, include occupational exposures, so the old FIFRA standard still applies, under which an exposure should not result in \u201c\u2018unreasonable risk to man or the environment, taking into account the economic, social and environmental costs and benefits of the use of any pesticide.\u2019\u201d Without consideration of cumulative exposure, the toxic body burden for farmworkers and others occupationally exposed causes disproportionate harm.<\/p>\r\n

This creates what has long been called an unconscionable double standard. According to the Bullard-Donley team, it allows EPA to take a risk-only approach for the general population and at least claim that it approves a pesticide only if it finds the pesticide will not result in significant harm; but for farmworkers, EPA applies a cost-benefit analysis and allows worker exposures \u201cas long as the purported benefit of the pesticide, presumably to the grower, sufficiently offsets those harms.\u201d Profits for one set of participants in an activity do not justify physical and mental harm to other participants, although this has been the American standard for centuries.<\/p>\r\n

The authors show that EPA proposed applying the same standard to judge the risk of exposures whether they are from \u201cregular\u201d life activities or from occupational activities in 2009, but \u201cfierce opposition\u201d from the American Chemistry Council and the pesticide industry has kept the proposal suspended in draft form.<\/p>\r\n

OSHA has set exposure standards<\/a> for more than 25 industrial chemicals such as formaldehyde, vinyl chloride, and acrylonitrile, but according to the Bullard-Donley team, \u201c[T]here is no national requirement for employers to provide medical monitoring for farmworkers seeking to prevent chronic, harmful pesticide exposures.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

EPA and OSHA do not meaningfully enforce even their rules, which critics have called weak. EPA\u2019s Worker Protection Standard has an average compliance inspection rate for the years 2015-2019 of 1.2 percent, according to the Bullard-Donley review. Almost half of that tiny number of inspections resulted in violations, but approximately 81 percent of those resulted in warnings only.<\/p>\r\n

The failings of U.S. pesticide policy are also distributed globally. For example, U.S. manufacturers exported some 28 million pounds of pesticides from 2001 to 2003. These included pesticides banned in the US and pesticides regulated by international treaties. Under FIFRA, EPA is supposed to require exports not registered in the US to be labeled, but in 2007 only 3 percent of such pesticides were labeled as harmful to human health. Most such exports go to the developing areas of south and southeast Asia and east Africa, reproducing the ethnic and racial injustices present in the U.S.<\/p>\r\n

Beyond Pesticides has covered environmental justice issues numerous times, such as last June\u2019s \u201cThis Juneteenth, We Highlight the Ongoing Fight for Environmental Justice<\/a>\u201d and sponsorship of the National Forum<\/a>, which is designed to \u201cmagnify voices with the knowledge and agency to advance solutions\u2014or alternative strategies\u2014in the form of changes in practices and policies.\u201d See talks<\/a> on the issue from last year\u2019s 40th<\/sup> anniversary<\/a> Forum.<\/p>\r\n

The Bullard-Donley team stresses that society must apply the Precautionary Principle. The 1998 Wingspread Statement<\/a> expresses it as follows: \u201cWhen an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.\u201d But adopting this principle, the Bullard-Donley authors concede, is \u201cunattainable in the near term.\u201d They suggest the following in the meantime:<\/p>\r\n