farmworkers to receive pesticide safety training from their employers—whether
growers or farmers. The training sessions, however, don’t stress the law and are seen
by environmentalists and public health advocates as inadequate.
The California Study
A study by the University of California, Davis Health and Safety Center was con-
ducted to determine whether farmworkers are aware of new regulations mandating
safeguards designed to protect them from illness or injury caused by occupational
pesticide exposure. It also sought to determine whether and how they had received
the required safety training, and whether they believed they were at risk of pesticide
illness in their workplaces. Nearly 500 interviews were conducted in Spanish in two
California counties in the summer of 1997. Fewer than one in five workers had ever
heard of the WPS containing a basic ‘‘right to know,’’ or even the EPA. Most of those
who claimed to know something about either could not provide anything substantive
upon closer questioning. Residents of two farm labor camps in Yolo County were the
most likely to have received some training (66 percent), but in most cases it was pro-
vided by nonprofit agencies, not their employers. Only a relatively few farmworkers
living at private camps had received training. Overall, only about 16 percent of farm-
workers said that they had received on-the-job pesticide safety training. Clearly, these
results suggest that news about the WPS and the ‘‘right to know’’ had not yet reached
most farmworkers in California.^15
Personal Protective Equipment Use
A series of National Cancer Institute–funded studies began in 1995 to assess pesticide-
related safety practices of independent dairy farmers in Wisconsin and to identify ways
to reduce their exposures. The first study surveyed a small focus group of farmers about
both their perceptions of health risks and their use of protective gear such as gloves,
goggles, and chemical-resistant aprons. Thesecond investigation measured compliance
with pesticide-specific protective gear requirements among 220 randomly selected dairy
farmers.
Farmers were very aware of being exposed but fewer than 10 percent of them fully
complied with the protective gear requirements the last time they had applied pesti-
cides to their crops.
Seeking an educational solution, the investigators launched a third study in which
data was collected on the exposures and safety practices of 400 farmers, and 100 ran-
domly selected participants took part in a three-hour pesticide safety educational
workshop. While those in the intervention group reported an increase of protective
gear use and a decrease in number of pesticides used after six months, they reported
no significant reduction in exposures or increase in full compliance with gear require-
ments. The researchers concluded that more intensive educational programs are nec-
essary to achieve these goals.^16
Pesticides in Agriculture | 33