SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Farmworkers, advocates and coalition members of Californians for Pesticide Reform rallied at the California State Capitol on Tuesday, demanding that the California Department of Pesticide Regulation enforce pesticide laws to protect agricultural communities from toxic exposure, according to statements released during an Aug. 12 news conference.
Certain substances, such as paraquat, have been found in DPR’s preliminary reports to cause “thyroid impacts,” “birth defects” and “risks to … the environment.”
California State Director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, Jacob Sandoval added that pesticides primarily affect those “who [work] those fields, and who [live] next to them,” many of whom are Latino individuals. Sandoval said counties with the largest Latino populations “bear a dramatically higher pesticide burden” than other counties.
Director Sandra Garcia of Campesinas Unidas del Valle de San Joaquín said she “witnessed loved ones and fellow farmworkers become ill” due to farmwork, and she noted that workers are the “last to be protected” from the risks of the “state’s food system.”
“We are actually causing many, many people to have these horrible cancers that come from the pesticides, and this has been going on for decades,” Dolores Huerta, renowned civil rights leader and founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation for Community Organizing, said. “The only way we can put a stop to it is [to] make sure we can get people to say to the Department of Pesticide Regulation, ‘Do your job!’”
Organized by CPR, the rally numbered around “100 farmworkers, nurses, scientists, civil rights advocates and residents of California’s agricultural communities.” Speakers at the rally criticized a “structural conflict of interest,” as DPR’s budget is tied to pesticide sales fees, such as mill fees.
Speakers also discussed how the department profits from the “continued sale and use of the very chemicals it regulates.”
According to the press release, the rally took place before a state legislative hearing to “evaluate DPR’s performance.” Led by the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee and the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, the hearing adhered to the terms of California Assembly Bill 2113, which requires that “DPR [must] appear before the Legislature for oversight at least once every two years.”
During the news conference, Garcia said many county agricultural commissioners “remain unresponsive to community concerns and inconsistently enforce pesticide laws,” while DPR “fails to fully use its existing authority” to prevent those problems.
The press release included “documented cases of delayed pesticide reevaluations” for substances such as “chloropicrin, paraquat and 1,3-dichloropropene.” Chloropicrin and other pesticides “have often been in reevaluation for 10+ years,” according to the press release.
Furthermore, product registrations for paraquat — an herbicide associated with an “increased risk of Parkinson’s disease” — were announced by DPR to be voluntarily canceled by pesticide dealers, which permits them to “possess and sell paraquat for another two years.”
Nick Schultz, a state assemblymember, said dealers choose voluntary cancellation instead of “providing the data … regarding their impact on human health and the environment.” Schultz added that DPR was slow to put paraquat “into the reevaluation process” despite its status as a “high-priority pesticide for human-health risk assessment.”
CPR also called for Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials and Environmental Quality legislators to help individuals “avoid fields during active pesticide applications” through “exact field location information” in a notification system called SprayDays. In addition, CPR urged legislation to adopt “ambitious goals to phase out pesticides” and provide “technical assistance and resources” for growers to reduce their use of pesticides.
“We’re not asking DPR to invent new science — the scientific evidence already exists,” Alfaro said. “We’re asking DPR to take an environmental justice approach and to follow the precautionary principle to use this science to prevent harm.”
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