Two Pesticides in Agriculture
The Pesticide Dilemma
Twenty-two years that I have been working in the fields, I’ve seen more ill-
nesses, more children being born ill, more families that miss work because
every day they have more problems, headaches. Sometimes their children are
sick and they have to miss work.... We live in a depression. We don’t know
if it’s because of the chemicals.
—Laura Caballero^1The major source of workplace exposure to pesticides is in agriculture. The most
heavily exposed are workers who mix, load, apply, or otherwise handle the concen-
trated technical formulations. Farmworkers are exposed when cultivating and harvest-
ing crops in fields, nurseries, and greenhouses, as well as transporting and handling
agricultural commodities in packing houses and storage facilities. Children living on
or near farms are exposed to disproportionately high amounts of dangerous pesti-
cides, putting them at serious risk for adverse health effects. These children are likely
to have the highest exposure to pesticides of any group of people in the country.
Many of the children with the greatest pesticide exposure are from migrant farm-
worker families who are poor and usually people of color or recent immigrants.
There are approximately 17,000 pesticides on the market in the United States,
with about 800 in wide use. Pesticide use in this country alone amounts to 2.2 billion
pounds annually, or roughly 8.8 pounds per person. Virtually all of these pesticides
in use have undergone inadequate analysis of their safety. Most testing that has been
done has concentrated on acute toxicity and cancer-causing potential, ignoring possi-
ble endocrine-disrupting effects or damage to human immune systems.
Of the twenty-five most heavily used agricultural pesticides, five are toxic to the
nervous system; eighteen are skin, eye, or lung irritants; eleven have been classified by
the EPA as carcinogenic; seventeen cause genetic damage; and ten cause reproductive
problems in tests of laboratory animals. Annual use of pesticides causing each of these
types of health problems totals between 100 million and 400 million pounds.^2