Quick Take
Pesticide reform activists and legal experts say they're preparing to file a lawsuit against California's Department of Pesticide Regulation for civil rights violations against farmworkers. They held a news conference in Watsonville on Thursday outlining their mounting evidence.
A coalition of statewide organizations advocating for pesticide reform say they are planning to file a federal lawsuit against the state of California for failing to protect farmworkers from exposure to potentially harmful pesticides and diagnoses of chronic conditions like cancer.
During a Thursday news conference in Watsonville hosted by Californians for Pesticide Reform, the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council and the UC Irvine School of Law Center for Land, Environment and Natural Resources, representatives from those groups said they’re preparing to file a complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency alleging civil rights violations against the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR).
The director of the UC Irvine center, Gregg Macey, said pesticide exposures in California disproportionately affect Latino and immigrant communities. He called the treatment of farmworkers, who are 97% Latino and 90.8% immigrants, by the state an ongoing tragedy.
The organizations base their findings on testimonies from farmworkers from counties across California where they say pesticide use is highest. The counties include Santa Cruz, Monterey, Tulare, Kern, Fresno and Ventura.
Macey said the testimonies from farmworkers show how the DPR fails to manage its systems for receiving complaints about pesticide exposures and for notifying nearby communities and workers of when harmful pesticides will be applied.
“They told us not just about a breakdown of notification reporting and complaint processing due to language barriers, but also of a culture of fear, isolation, misinformation, intimidation and retaliation,” he said during the news conference.
Macey said he and the UC Irvine center, as well as Caroline Farrell, an associate professor and director of the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at San Francisco’s Golden Gate University, have been collaborating with the pesticide reform groups for about a year to investigate the enforcement of pesticide use.
In September, they co-hosted a forum inviting farmworkers to speak about their experiences with pesticide exposure. They spoke with 34 farmworkers from the six different counties.
In addition to the farmworkers’ testimonies, UC Irvine’s natural resources center, under Macey, also conducted interviews with DPR officials, scientists who focus on pesticides and exposure and former pesticide regulators to inform their findings.
Based on the forum interviews and research, Macey and Farrell, as well as Center for Farmworker Families Executive Director Ann Lopez and Monterey Bay Central Labor Council President Robert Chacanaca issued a report this week laying out what they describe as “ongoing” and “severe” civil rights violations.
They write that the Department of Pesticide Regulation and county agricultural commissioners regularly miss opportunities to find common health hazards that would trigger inspections and canceled permits. They say the department hasn’t enforced requirements that a “restricted material be used only where it is reasonably certain that no injury will result,” and that agricultural commissioners don’t sufficiently evaluate how the department enforces this.
Several people spoke Thursday about their firsthand experience of pesticide exposure, including Watsonville High School senior Anail Rivera, who said she started working in the fields when she was just 12.
She recalled the first time she was exposed to pesticides. She sat down to eat during a break and “my eyes started to burn and get watery,” she said. When she got home she told her mother, who told her it was because of pesticides. “That is when I started to wonder, ‘Are there any safer alternatives for pesticides? Why harm those that provide for us?’”
In their report’s summary, the authors demand that the California Department of Justice Office of the Attorney General’s Bureau of Environmental Justice conduct an investigation into the six counties’ agriculture departments’ enforcement of civil rights law.
Lopez of the Center for Farmworker Families said she’s “cautiously optimistic” about the organizations’ work toward changing farmworkers’ circumstances. She recalled how a farmworker about one month ago sent her a photo of her 13-year-old daughter just before she died from bone cancer.
“How many people have to die?” Lopez said. “How many children have to live their lives with autism? This is reprehensible.”
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