It is the first part of a project designed to assess the environmental health impacts associated with pesticide use in California. This report focuses on pesticide-related illnesses for agricultural workers. Future reports will focus on how pesticides affect community health and California's ecosystem. The goal of this project is to identify high-risk pesticides and pesticide use patterns. Information that ranks various pesticides on the basis of their impacts on worker health, community health and the ecosystem can then help inform policies that develop improved risk management and prevention strategies, including the development of nontoxic alternatives.
Pesticides pose significant health risks to the people who harvest our food.
Although California leads the nation in its regulatory program to protect agricultural workers, effective use of these controls has been severely limited. Each year, the application of over 160 million pounds of pesticides in California has led to approximately 1,000 cases of acute occupational illnesses and contributed to chronic health concerns such as cancer, adverse reproductive outcomes, respiratory and neurological diseases. Farmworkers frequently lack the training to understand the risks they face or to act effectively in the political sphere to affect changes in the system. The farm economy perpetuates worker risks through its seasonal nature, its reliance on farm labor contractors and the fact that it is now exempt from much of the social legislation that protects worker' interests in other employment sectors. The ranking also reveals that acute toxicity, a common measure of health risk, is not always the best predictor of high human illness burdens.