Former EPA Analyst Op-ED

[Guest guest]

Interesting Op-Ed from the Baltimore Sun, 02.22.2007

America's farm workers still toil in fields of

danger

By E. G. Vallianatos

Originally published February 22, 2007

The tale is familiar by now, but that

makes it no less horrifying: Migrant men and women, most of them from Mexico

and Central America - along with some poor blacks and whites from the United

States - following the growing and harvest seasons, working hard for pitiful

wages while enduring dangerous lives.

In 1979, I was a new Environmental Protection Agency employee

attending a government-funded seminar about the plight of farm workers. Expert

after expert described conditions of horror. The threat came from farm sprays -

the farm workers' worst enemy. Many farm workers didn't understand the

instructions on the pesticide can or the advice of the farmers on when to enter

sprayed fields. Sometimes workers were sprayed while harvesting crops, but most

often the workers harvested crops with the toxin still on the leaves and fruit.

More than 25 years later, little has changed.

EPA regulations address wearing proper clothing and masks to avoid

coming in contact with the toxins, some of which are nerve poisons. But how

would one be able to wear protective clothing and masks in high temperatures?

Also, many workers carry their children in the fields, leaving them to drink

contaminated water and play in ditches drenched with sprays.

I wrote more than one memo to senior EPA managers explaining that

the toxic exposure of farm workers during harvest put the EPA in an awful

predicament. The agency had the responsibility to side with farm workers,

forbidding the use of the known toxins. But the managers never responded to my

reports - and with good reason. They knew things I did not. They knew that the

EPA was sinking into a moral abyss.

Scientists at Colorado

State University,

funded by the EPA, confirmed in the late 1970s what knowledgeable scientists

had suspected all along: Nerve-poison pesticides known as organophosphates were

affecting the central nervous systems of humans. These products of World War II

chemical warfare research, very popular with farmers, were causing immediate

and long-term crippling effects on those coming in contact with them. Even one

serious exposure could cause lasting brain and nerve damage.

In 1981, Clarence B. Owens, an agronomy professor at Florida A & M University,

reported to the EPA and the National Science Foundation, which had funded his

research on the effects of pesticides on migrant farm workers, that these

workers were risking their lives. " Migrant workers are young

workers, " he said, " but their health statistics resemble those of

middle-age Americans. ... Some 56 percent of the workers had abnormal kidney

and liver functions; 78 percent had severe chronic skin rash; and 54 percent,

abnormalities in chest cavities. "

By 1980, EPA managers had to do something about the effects of the

nerve poisons, documented by the Colorado

study and, indirectly, by the Owens study. They knew farm workers were in

constant contact with those killer sprays. But because they dared not ban the

warfare chemicals from agriculture, they set up a fake " farm worker

protection program " to take the steam off the pressure cooker. The EPA

rejected the damning findings of Mr. Owens without any follow-up on the

deleterious effects of sprays on the migrants.

Unfortunately, farm workers continue to face physical harassment

and violence. Their wages have not changed much from the 1970s. With rare

exception, they make no money for overtime and have no right to organize. In Florida, the Coalition

of Immokalee Workers boycotted Taco Bell for four years before they were

granted, in 2005, a penny more per pound for the tomatoes they harvest.

Farm workers, of course, deserve protection from nerve poisons.

But they are far from the only victims in this tale.

The fact is, neurotoxins on the farm or in the home are wounding

all living things. A 2006 study by Columbia

University scientists made the

connection between one of those neurotoxins, chlorpyrifos, and learning

disorders in children living in New

York City.

EPA banned chlorpyrifos from home use in 2001, but not from farms.

What about the children in rural America?

E. G. Vallianatos is a

former EPA analyst and author of " This Land Is Their Land. " His

e-mail is evaggelos@....

Amy K. Liebman, MPA

Migrant Clinicians Network

5210 River Circle

Quantico, MD 21856

410.860.9850

aliebman@...

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