may be posted immediately before a pesticide application, and required location of
the signs is intended to target the workers on the farm being sprayed. However, there
is no mechanism to ensure that workers in the field will be warned prior to the spray-
ing of an adjacent field. If even a slight breeze is blowing in their direction, those
workers will be subjected to potentially injurious exposures, despite the fact that all
relevant laws have been obeyed. A survey of children working on farms in New York
state revealed that nearly half had worked in fields still wet with pesticides, and over
one-third had been sprayed directly or indirectly. Studies in Texas, Washington, and
Florida indicated similar effects. In these states, 40 percent of all farmworkers had
been sprayed directly or by pesticide drift. Further investigations demonstrate that
fewer than 10 percent of farmworkers knew the symptoms of pesticide poisoning,
understood the concept of pesticide entry intervals, or had received any training on
how to protect themselves from pesticides. Therefore, it should come as no surprise
that an estimated 80 percent of pesticide illnesses go unreported nationwide.^11
Hopefully, the following comments of a Washington state fruit farmer are atypical,
but if not, such violations undercut the intent of the WPS. He admits that occasion-
ally he bends the rules on pesticide application and expects workers to reenter fields
prematurely after spraying has taken place:
‘‘The regulations are killing us. If we stuck to every rule there was, we could not
do it,’’ he says, frowning as he takes a long pull on a cigarette. ‘‘My workers, they go
in and pick, and they’re well aware of the pesticides we’ve sprayed; they know the
damn stuff won’t hurt ’em.’’^12
No Protection for Children
Unfortunately, the current WPS does not consider pesticide exposures to children.
No separate pesticide reentry intervals specifically for children have been established
as yet even though recommendations have been submitted to the Department of
Labor regarding minimum reentry times for ten- and eleven-year-olds working in
fields of potatoes and strawberries. These intervals ranged from two to 120 days.
They were adopted into regulations but ruled illegal by the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980 inNational Association of Farmworkers
Organizations v. Marshall, 628 F.2d 604. Although children as young as ten can
legally work in the fields, reentry intervals are calculated based on a theoretical 150-
pound male. Specifically, the EPA uses a body weight of 154 pounds, except in the
case of pesticides that have potential fetal developmental effects, in which case the
body weight is 132 pounds to account for women of child-bearing years. There is no
clear evidence that the REIs would protect farm-working children who weigh less
than these amounts or are younger than twelve years of age.^13
This is a deeply disturbing fact. The failure to make this issue the highest priority
speaks volumes about the dedication, or rather the lack thereof, of the U.S. govern-
ment to the health of working children. Moreover, the EPA has few guarantees that
the protections afforded by the standards are actually being provided for farmworkers
Pesticides in Agriculture | 31