Workers at risk because of failure to enforce pesticide rules

An effect of the extreme pesticide overuse relentlessly promoted by Big Ag. The insect apocalypse is another.

At the core of the lawsuit, filed by attorneys Trent Taylor at Farmworker Justice and Anna Hill Galendez at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, is the claim that Reyes Saucedo and about 200 other farmworkers were exposed to dangerous pesticides because Mastronardi Farms failed to provide the kinds of training, proper protective gear, and ventilation required by federal laws.

And those workers are far from alone. According to several experts and evidence compiled in multiple new reports, those laws are inadequate and there’s very little incentive across the industry to follow them. Furthermore, the EPA is tasked with enforcing the rules while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—the agency usually in charge of protecting workers from on-the-job hazards, including pesticide exposure in other industries—is out of the loop.

“The very fact that the agency in charge of approving pesticides is the same one that’s in charge of establishing and enforcing worker standards is troubling, to say the least,” a team of experts wrote in an analysis on pesticides and environmental injustice published in the journal BMC Public Health in April.

Records show states conduct very few inspections to make sure farms are meeting the requirements; and while the inspections that are completed reveal high rates of violations, farms are rarely penalized for those violations. - Civil Eats