EPA slow to halt use of deadly pesticide
9th November 2015 · 0 Comments
By Viji Sundaram
Contributing Writer
(Special from New America Media) – On a cool November day in 2009, farmworker Jovita Alfau was transplanting hibiscus as she’d been instructed in a section of Power Bloom Farms and Growers nursery in Homestead, Fla.
As she began pulling up the seedlings from the pots, she began to “feel dizzy and weak, experienced numbness in her mouth and vomited,” according to a complaint she would later file against her employer in federal district court in southern Florida.
Alfau had no idea why she was feeling so ill, but lawyers from the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project representing her in the lawsuit learned through deposition that the area of the nursery where the hibiscus grew had been sprayed with the pesticide endosulfan less than 24 hours earlier, according to the lawsuit. Her employer allegedly failed to warn her about the required elapse time before it was safe to enter. Alfau had been wearing no protective gear.
Alfau alleges in the lawsuit that there were times when the applicators sprayed the nursery even while she and her fellow farmworkers were tending the plants.
The nursery denied wrongdoing, but settled with the then 43-year-old single mother of three in 2012 for $100,000. Asked by New America Media recently whether his nursery was still using endosulfan, Power Bloom president Steve Power said he had no comment.
It was pesticide poisonings like Alfau’s, as well as years of pressure from a broad coalition of environmentalists, health care advocates, farmworkers and scientists, that many believe was responsible for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agen-cy’s announcement of a six-year phase-out of the pesticide in 2010.
The federal agency negotiated an agreement with the compound’s sole manufacturer, Makhteshim Agan, based in Israel at the time, to stop using the pesticide crop-by-crop.
In an email justifying the long phase-out, the agency said that it needed to give growers “time to research and adopt lower risk alternatives,” especially for crops with limited choices.
The EPA acknowledged that even though it had not fully addressed all of the ecological and human health risk concerns regarding endosulfan, it had taken a number of mitigation measures to make its use safer.
Environmentalists and advocates were upset. The chemical’s use would continue for years, even eight years after the federal agency said on its own website that endosulfan “can pose unacceptable neurological and reproductive risks to farmworkers and wildlife, and can persist in the environment.”
“The longer it is used, the longer it can stay in the environment and endanger human life,” said Jeannie Economos, pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator with the Farmworker Association of Florida, a 10,000-strong statewide membership organization. “When the EPA determined it was a dangerous pesticide, its use should have been abruptly terminated.”
Even before the EPA’s taper-off announcement, around 80 countries had either banned the pesticide or put it onto a phase-out track, after determining it was unsafe.
“Endosulfan is a highly, highly, highly toxic insecticide,” said Prof. Syed M. Naqvi, an environmental toxicologist who studied the pesticide’s impact on fresh water animals while a professor at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., in the 1990s. Naqvi published his findings in The Journal of Environmental Health and Science.
“If humans are exposed to it,” he said, “it can cause serious health impacts.”
“At sufficiently high doses, endosulfan may cause seizures, vomiting and convulsions in animals and humans,” said Marilyn Silva, a scientist in the pesticide programs division of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR), noting that her understanding of endosulfan toxicity is “based primarily on animal studies.”
Silva went on to say that even though “the primary target for its toxic effects is the central nervous system,” endosulfan could also be “toxic to other organs and systems in animals and possibly in humans.”
CDPR studies also show that after oral treatment in rats – widely considered as a strong stand-in for humans in toxicological testing – the liver and kidney were the sites of greatest endosulfan concentration.
Dr. B.D. Banerjee, who teaches biochemistry, immunology and environmental toxicology at the University College of Medical Sciences, University of Delhi, found that high levels of the pesticide were responsible for pre-term births in Delhi women. His study was published in 2008 in the peer-reviewed journal Human and Experimental Toxicology. Early birth is linked to many negative health outcomes later in life.
“When pesticides enter the bodies of pregnant women, the pesticides manifest in the babies as illness and disease,” he said.
A 2007 study by scientists with the California Department of Public Health found that babies born to women living near fields where either dicofol or endosulfan had been used during the course of their pregnancy were more likely to develop autism than those who did not.
Endosulfan’s use worldwide has diminished significantly over the last few years. Yet even today, it continues to be used by U.S. farmers. The EPA estimated nationwide use in 2010 to be about 380,000 pounds and the use in 2013 – the most recent data available—to be about 80,000 pounds.
Growers in the United States can still use it on strawberry and pineapple crops under the EPA’s phase-out program. The pesticide is also allowed to be used for seed harvesting on broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, radish, mustard greens, raddish, rutabaga and turnip crops.
Florida is the top user of the pesticide because the state’s humid growing conditions require the pesticide to be reapplied more often.
“High humidity essentially increases the breakdown of pesticides and lessens their effectiveness over time,” explained William Griffin, superintendent of the Fresno County Agricultural Commission’s pesticide division.
In California, the state that grows nearly half of the nation’s agricultural produce, endosulfan use has dropped 98 percent, from 83,302 pounds in 2005 to 1,833 pounds in 2013, the most recent statistics available with the CDPR.
Just how many farmworkers suffer from pesticide exposure like Alfau, the former Florida nursery worker, is hard to know, said attorney Gregory S. Schell of the Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project, which represented Alfau. Schell notes that there is no nationwide mandatory pesticide poisoning reporting system.
This story was funded by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
This article originally published in the November 9, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
