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.
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:
Jeannie Economos
Farmworker Association of Florida
farmworkerassoc@aol.com
(407) 886-5151
Anne Katten
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
akatten@crlaf.org
(916) 446-7904 x110
Related News
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
April 19, 2022
People of color more likely to be harmed by pesticides, study finds
People of color and low-income communities are at disproportionate risk of pesticide exposure, a new study has found. Roughly 90% of pesticide use in the US is in agriculture, making farmworkers – 83% of whom identify as Hispanic – more vulnerable to the synthetic chemicals intended to kill, repel or control pests. Jeannie Economos, pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida, said: “We need to get rid of these pesticides and find alternatives. They’re not only poisoning farmworkers, they are in our groundwater, on our food, and depleting our soil.” Read More
October 14, 2021
As masses of plaintiffs pursue Roundup cancer compensation, migrant farmworkers are left out
In 2018, a California school groundskeeper took Monsanto Company to court, alleging that Roundup, one of America's most popular weed killers, caused his Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer. The jury agreed and ordered Monsanto to pay the man $289 million in damages, concluding the world's first Roundup cancer trial. Since then, more than 100,000 plaintiffs exposed to Roundup have sought retributions in the courts. While Bayer... has agreed to pay billions of dollars to put these cancer lawsuits to rest, legal experts say migrant farmworkers, who are at the forefront of pesticide and herbicide exposures—including Roundup—are expected to be left out.
[Environmental Health News] Read More
October 4, 2021
Latina Farmworkers Speak Out about the Hazards of Life in California’s Fields
Araceli Ruiz has been harvesting fruits and vegetables in California’s Salinas Valley, a region known as “the salad bowl of the world,” since she arrived in California from a small town in central Mexico at 19. While the 43-year-old mother of three is proud of her hard work, the job’s hazards have taken a toll. About six years ago, she decided to share her story with other farmworkers. After linking up with the Greenfield chapter of Líderes Campesinas, a network of about 500 women and girls spread among 14 local chapters in California’s biggest agricultural centers, she began warning the community about the dangers of pesticide exposure.
[NRDC Blog] Read More
Farmworkers in the fields of central Florida