Farmworker Health and Justice Team
We campaign for better working conditions, stronger health and safety regulations, and reduced toxic chemical exposures for farmworkers. Our collaborative working group- which includes farmworker advocates, healthcare professionals, health experts, scientists, and attorneys- is guided by the priorities and needs of farmworkers.
As we purchase food, Americans need to consider the harsh reality farmworkers face. Working outside, often in extreme heat for long hours, sometimes without access to shade, water, or restrooms—farmworkers labor in difficult and dangerous conditions.
Farmworkers routinely come in contact with pesticides and other poisonous agricultural chemicals. In California alone, several hundred reports of farmworkers poisoned by pesticides are logged each year—and the illnesses reported nationwide are thought to be the tip of the iceberg. Nationally, there is no system to track reports of farmworkers poisoned by pesticides—but the number is thought to be in the tens of thousands.
In addition to immediate poisonings, farmworkers face long-term health impacts, such as elevated risks of cancer, birth defects, infertility, and neurological disorders as a result of exposure to hazardous pesticides. Farmworkers also “take home” pesticides on their clothing, footwear, and skin, exposing their families to these hazardous chemicals and their associated risk of causing sickness and other health impacts. Farmworkers are also exposed to many of the same toxic chemicals as the rest of us: in household products, in the food we eat, in drinking water, and pollution from chemical plants.
Our grassroots, frontline leadership has won substantial victories:
- We championed a regulation prohibiting dangerous pesticide applications by people under 18 years of age—who are at the greatest risk of suffering learning and developmental problems related to pesticide exposure.
- We helped develop policies to ensure workers who apply pesticides are properly trained to protect health and safety.
- We also played a key role in convincing the EPA to commit to banning chlorpyrifos, a widely used neurodevelopmental pesticide, which is linked to neurological damage in young children.
- We have successfully lobbied for pesticide labels to be printed in both English and Spanish via an accessible QR code, via the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act.
Key resources from experts and organizations in our network:
Exposed and at Risk: Opportunities to Strengthen Enforcement of Pesticide Regulations for Farmworker Safety (Report by the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, in partnership with Farmworker Justice, September 2022)
Pesticide Exposure and Childhood Cancer (Factsheet by Cancer Free Economy Network and Childhood Cancer Prevention Initiative, July 2022)
The Climate Crisis and Its Impacts on Farmworkers (Issue Brief by Farmworker Justice, May 2022)
Pesticides and Environmental Injustice in the USA: root causes, regulatory reinforcement and a path forward (Open access published study in BMC Public Health, by Nathan Donley, Robert Bullard, Jeannie Economos, Iris Figueroa, Jovita Lee, Amy K. Liebman, Dominica Navarro Martinez, and Fatemeh Shafiei, April 2022)
Farmworkers at Risk: The Growing Dangers of Pesticides and Heat (Report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, November 2019)
Videos
Spotlights and Testimonials
“We fed America all our lives,” said Geraldean Matthew, former Lake Apopka, Florida farmworker and a social and environmental justice leader. Geraldean passed away on September 3, 2016 after years of debilitating illnesses, including kidney failure and Lupus, and she felt these diseases were related to a lifetime of pesticide exposures. Geraldean was my hero. I can still hear her whispering in my ear; “I got your back.” I keep fighting for farmworkers because I must, for Geraldean’s sake and for the sake of other people in our communities, who risk themselves and their families’ health every day to feed all of us." Read more from Co-Coordinator of the FHJW team, Jeannie Economos.
The Farmworker Health and Justice Team is coordinated by:
Gabrielle Gonzales
Clean + Healthy
[email protected]
Anne Katten
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
[email protected]
Related News
February 22, 2024
Justice40 tools must ensure that farmworkers are recognized as Environmental Justice communities and receive benefits.
Today members of Coming Clean’s Farmworker Health and Justice Team submitted a comment urging the Council on Economic Quality (CEQ) to improve its Environmental Justice (EJ) Scorecard to ensure that federal agencies are providing Justice40 benefits to farmworkers. Phase One of the EJ Scorecard was launched in 2023, as mandated by President Biden’s Executive Order 14008 on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. It is intended to track the progress of federal agencies in ensuring that 40% of climate, housing, energy, pollution remediation, and related federal benefits flow to “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution,” as part of the implementation of the Justice40 Initiative. Farmworkers are “a particularly important EJ community,” states the comment, because they often live in remote, rural areas, are disproportionately exposed to toxic pesticides, intense heat and high humidity, and wildfire smoke and pollution, and experience other health stressors such as substandard housing, harsh working conditions, and lack of access to affordable healthcare.
Read More
April 17, 2023
Battle lines being draw as Farm Bill looms
Some environmental advocates are pushing for more support for small farms that practice regenerative agriculture, said Jessica Swan, the community outreach organizer for the Agri-Cultura Network, a farmer cooperative in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She and her colleagues want the new Farm Bill to include new rules that not only cut chemically intensive farming practices nationwide and protect workers from pesticide-related illnesses, but also make farmer conservation programs more accessible to people who own small or urban farms. They also want to see crop insurance and commodity programs reward more farmers for organic and regenerative practices. In a letter to House Agriculture Committee Chairman David Scott, Agri-Cultura and 49 other food and agriculture organizations called for these measures and also called on Congress to block funds that support large, polluting animal agriculture operations.
Read More
March 23, 2023
Coming Clean lobbies for a Farm Bill that centers human health by reducing reliance on toxic chemicals
Today, Coming Clean hosted a lobby day for members to meet with Congressional leaders to urge them to prioritize community food sovereignty and farmworker protections in the upcoming farm bill reauthorization, while incentivizing reductions in pesticide use. Members from across the country, including small farmers and farmworkers, scheduled visits throughout the day with lawmakers from their districts to highlight reforms that are most important to them and their communities.
Read More
November 16, 2022
The next Farm Bill can only be “climate-smart” if it reduces agricultural reliance on pesticides, says diverse coalition
Today, 50 organizations sent a public letter to the House Agriculture Committee and the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, calling for a transformative 2023 Farm Bill. They urged the legislators to incentivize reductions in pesticide use, include provisions to protect farmworker health, and increase funding and research for organic and regenerative farming, representing fenceline communities, food system workers and farmworkers, family farmers, businesses, scientists, and environmental health and justice organizations.The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that global agriculture contributes 34% of the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, but the Farm Bill has not explicitly addressed climate change since 1990. An estimated 1 billion pounds of pesticides, manufactured from fossil fuel feedstocks, are used on United States farms each year. The next Farm Bill could decrease agricultural carbon emissions by incentivizing farmers to reduce reliance on pesticides, in favor of regenerative, climate-resilient practices such as certified organic farming, the letter states.
Read More
September 29, 2022
Hurricane Ian damages undocumented migrant communities in Florida
Neza Xiuhtecutli spent most of Thursday calling and texting and retexting colleagues along Florida's storm-battered southwest coast, hoping to reach someone who can shed light on damage there. Xiuhtecutli, executive director of the Farmworker Association of Florida, was particularly worried about the scores of migrant farmworkers who live and work in Hurricane Ian's destructive path. Undocumented workers, many of whom work the area's citrus, strawberry and sugarcane fields, are particularly vulnerable during natural disasters and in their aftermath, he said. There are an estimated 700,000 farm workers in Florida, about half of them undocumented. "My biggest fear is they don’t have access to food, don’t have power and don’t have information that helps them stay safe," Xiuhtecutli said. "They're vulnerable." Read More
September 7, 2022
Why Aren’t Federal Agencies Enforcing Pesticide Rules That Protect Farmworkers?
At the core of the lawsuit, filed by attorneys Trent Taylor at Farmworker Justice and Anna Hill Galendez at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, is the claim that Reyes Saucedo and about 200 other farmworkers were exposed to dangerous pesticides because Mastronardi Farms failed to provide the kinds of training, proper protective gear, and ventilation required by federal laws. And those workers are far from alone. According to several experts and evidence compiled in multiple new reports, those laws are inadequate and there’s very little incentive across the industry to follow them. Furthermore, the EPA is tasked with enforcing the rules while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—the agency usually in charge of protecting workers from on-the-job hazards, including pesticide exposure in other industries—is out of the loop. Read More
Most Farmworkers Speak Spanish, but Pesticide Safety Labels Are Often Only Printed in English
Pesticide labels are more like long technical manuals, sometimes totaling 30-plus pages. The intent of all that information is to minimize the risk of handling the highly toxic chemicals. And there are a lot of risks: Depending on the strength of the pesticide and exposure, farmworkers who come into contact with pesticides can land in a hospital with headaches, rashes, vomiting, and nausea, not to mention the potential for serious long-term health consequences like cancer. While Spanish is the dominant language for 62 percent of farmworkers in the U.S., pesticide labels are typically only printed in English. “We’ve been fighting for bilingual pesticide labels for 15 or 20 years,” says Jeannie Economos, pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator with the Farmworker Association of Florida. “It’s very frustrating.”
Read More
April 20, 2022
EPA Bans Chlorpyrifos On Food Crops
Chlorpyrifos is now banned from use on any food sold in the U.S. (see Final Rule here and EPA summary here). This is a victory of science and the law over the poisonous profits of big agrochemical companies, and certainly there is much to celebrate. Food will be safer for our families. Farmworkers will be safer when working in the fields. Our rivers, lakes, and drinking water will be safer without chlorpyrifos running off fields into waterways. Even wildlife will be safer – birds, fish, and bees – without chlorpyrifos.But this victory for health and safety has been delayed by over 20 years – decades of poisoned wildlife and people, especially children, could have been avoided with prudent early action. Read More
Farmworkers in the fields of central Florida