Gregg Macey, Caroline Farrell, Jane Sellen, and Alexis Temkin
A joint report from:
Californians for Pesticide Reform
UC Irvine School of Law Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources
Environmental Working Group
The Environmental Law and Justice Clinic, Golden Gate University
For generations, farmworkers, labor leaders, and scholars of environmental health have singled out pesticide use as among the clearest cases of environmental racism in the United States. Our comprehensive review of publicly available data in California demonstrates this injustice, including first-hand accounts and maps that highlight the elevated harms in communities where pesticide use is greatest.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. farmworkers, the vast majority of whom come from Mexican Indigenous and Latino communities, are poisoned each year. Their families also face an elevated risk of exposure to pesticides, which drift beyond areas of application and can persist in the immediate environment. Together, agricultural communities experience acute and chronic effects of exposure to pesticides.
Exposure to organophosphates results in headaches, respiratory distress, blurred vision, cognitive and psychomotor deficits, seizures, and increased risk of stomach and brain cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Long-term exposure is inevitable. By the end of the 20th century, average life expectancy for a migrant farmworker in the U.S. was 49 years, compared to the national average of 75.
Evidence of environmental racism is particularly stark in California. Californians for Pesticide Reform (CPR), a coalition of over 200 advocacy organizations, has for 30 years monitored state agency practices, pushed for common-sense protections for workers and communities, and gathered their own evidence through pesticide use, air monitoring, personal exposure, and other data. Theirs is painstaking work, which they share across local coalitions that cover agricultural hubs in counties across the San Joaquin Valley and Central Coast. CPR translates the data into dozens of letters and reports as well as proceedings before state agencies such as the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) and county boards and commissions, highlighting risks facing farmworkers.
During the COVID-19 pandemic alone, CPR translated mountains of evidence of environmental racism – all hiding in plain sight from public sources – and shared it with regulators, work groups, and advisory boards. Between 2020 and 2023, CPR and their allies highlighted many striking facts about the injustices of pesticide use in California:
- Roughly one-fifth of the 200 million pounds of pesticides applied per year are carcinogenic.
- At least 138 active ingredients in pesticides applied in the state were banned by at least 1 country.
- The top three counties with the greatest pesticide use are majority-Latino.
- Eleven majority-Latino counties have 900 percent greater pesticide use per person and per square mile than 25 counties with the smallest Latino population.
- More than half of all glyphosate applications occurred in the eight lowest-income counties in California.
- Latino children are 91 percent more likely than white children to attend schools in the top quartile for nearby hazardous pesticide use.
- Pregnancies that occur within 2.5 miles of the application of certain widely used pesticides increases the risk of childhood cancers.
- Restrictions on pesticide use near schools and daycare centers only limit applications within a quarter mile during normal school hours.
- Most county pesticide regulators (known as agricultural commissioners) do not comply with state laws that require services in the languages spoken by people within their jurisdiction. There are 58 county agricultural commissioners in California; 45 do not provide basic language access services such as after-hours voicemail in both English and Spanish.
- Most county agricultural commissioners show little or no capability or commitment to conduct alternatives analysis when granting permit approvals. They do not assess or discuss cumulative impacts with applicants or impose mitigation measures when multiple pesticides are used in the same or adjacent fields.
- County agricultural commissioners have refused to comply with CDPR notification orders; they even targeted farmworkers and a Latino organization for harassment. For example, the Tulare County agricultural commissioner issued an “urgent advisory” about a California Air Resources Board-funded community air monitoring study and called on growers to be on the “lookout for people trespassing onto orchards and farms” and urging them to call the county sheriff’s office and commissioner immediately.
These and dozens of other findings were revealed by culling through and analyzing public data. They are at odds with the state’s legal commitment to environmental justice. State law defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of people of all races, cultures, incomes, and national origins, with respect to the development, adoption, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”
Other organizations are marshaling public data that reveal the extent of environmental racism across agricultural communities.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has focused considerable attention to combining and translating public data into maps and spatial representations to clearly and visually highlight the stark environmental injustice that occurs from pesticide use in California’s Ventura and Stanislaus counties, and from use of the herbicide paraquat in the state.
California has long acknowledged pesticide use as an environmental justice issue. In 2015, the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) identified areas of the state “that disproportionately experience pollution burden,” including pesticide exposure. In 2008, CDPR made ensuring “Californians, regardless of race, age, culture, income, or geographic location, are protected from adverse environmental and health effects of pesticides” one of its major goals, at least on paper. In 2001, CDPR pledged to “regulate the use of pesticides so that no socio-economic group of Californians is disproportionately impacted.” In 1999, CDPR said that it had to resolve ambiguity over its role and that of county agricultural commissioners to prevent disproportionate exposure.
While repeatedly acknowledging the extent of the problem and severity of ongoing harm, CDPR has done little to change the status quo since it was first moved from the Department of Food and Agriculture to a newly formed CalEPA in 1991.
In response, new partnerships – and new uses of public data – are needed.
CPR and UC Irvine School of Law’s Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources, with testimony from EWG, organized a “people’s tribunal” in Lindsay, California in September 2023. We invited the public to meet and give their own testimony of working with and exposure to pesticides, in a forum that was not bound by the strictures of an official proceeding. More than 100 farmworkers attended. We also carried out dozens of interviews, in English and Spanish, with farmworkers, their families, officials, researchers, and regulators. The tribunal was presided over by members of great stature within the community.
The combined work of UC Irvine, CPR, EWG, and the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Golden Gate University, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Environment, breaks new ground in how to gather public data and share it as evidence of environmental racism.
First, we do not focus on claims of “disparate impact,” a contested term of art in civil rights law that historically centered complex statistical analysis to the exclusion of the experience of complainants. We focus instead on pesticide use as “toxic mundane encounters,” where regular, even daily breakdowns of occupational safety, reporting, and complaint processing due to language and other barriers including fear, isolation, misinformation, intimidation, and retaliation, subject Latino and Indigenous farmworkers and their families to dangerous, even illegal, pesticide exposure.
Second, we tie these breakdowns in regulatory programs to civil rights claims in new ways. California Government Code Section 11135 prohibits discriminatory practices that include administering programs so that their objectives with respect to protected classes are impaired or defeated. Federal civil rights practice, including through Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has for too long focused on evidence of disparate impact, rather than new or updated approaches to demonstrating intentional discrimination through doctrines such as deliberate indifference. The evidence that we present in our article cries out for attorneys, scholars, and agency officials to focus on the “slow violence” of everyday experience, rather than cross-sectional, once-in-a-generation pronouncements of whether a program or practice disparately impacts one group over another.
Third, we argue that farmworkers and their communities have unique access to and awareness of the practices that combine to impair and defeat occupational and environmental protections. State and federal civil rights compliance programs must consider the spatial and temporal scales at which “vulnerability to premature death” is produced and intensified within the very groups that the law is meant to protect. The message is simple yet profound – the drivers of environmental racism operate beyond classic distributive causes and procedural challenges. Harms are often difficult to trace to a single act or decision. The root causes of harm are ongoing and spatially extended. They appear gradually and for a time remain out of sight, difficult to identify let alone remedy.
Our research includes a series of maps that provide a rough guide showing where slow violence takes hold across California agricultural communities. We combine five years of pesticide use data, cross-referenced for carcinogenic active ingredients and restricted use, with vulnerability indicators such as race and ethnicity, language barriers, public health insurance rates, and disability. We make the invisible visible, which is a key act of resistance against slow violence. Our maps reveal where the heaviest use of toxic pesticides is concentrated and overlaps with indicators of vulnerability, lending specificity to the state’s vague pronouncements of “disproportionate” burden.
The civil rights violations that we found in this research study are ongoing and severe. They demand urgent and immediate attention by CDPR, county officials across California, the U.S. EPA, and by researchers, attorneys, and the general public.
For more than half a century, the state has been complicit in the use of pesticides as slow violence against vulnerable communities – the time for corrective action is long overdue.