Wikipedia

Angelita C. et al. v. California Department of Pesticide Regulation

Angelita C. et al. v. California Department of Pesticide Regulation is a complaint filed in June 1999 with the United States federal Environmental Protection Agency's Office for Civil Rights. Filed on behalf of children attending schools near where methyl bromide was used on strawberry fields as a pesticide, the complaint said that the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) discriminated against Latino children when it renewed the registration for methyl bromide in January 1999 without considering the potential health effects of the pesticide on children at schools near the application sites.[1]

Angelita C. et al. v. California Department of Pesticide Regulation
Strawberry fields
Strawberry fields near Watsonville
DecidedApril 22, 2011
Case history
Prior action(s)Filed in 1999
Appealed to9th Circuit Court of Appeals
Subsequent action(s)Dismissed
Case opinions
Decision byOffice of Civil Rights, US Environmental Protection Agency
Keywords
Pesticide regulation, Migrant workers

Background edit

Geographical edit

Strawberry cultivation is an important agricultural industry in Central California. Ventura County and especially Oxnard, Monterey County and particularly Salinas, as well as southern Santa Cruz County near Watsonville all grow strawberries.

Between 1960 and 2014, acreage more than tripled and production increased tenfold. The value of production, in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, increased by 424% in Monterey County and by 593% in Santa Cruz County, reaching an astonishing combined value of nearly $1 billion in both 2010 and 2014.[2]

This was achieved almost entirely by poorly paid undocumented Mexicans, mostly indigenous Mixtec and Triqui from Oaxaca.[3] The harvests come in through back-breaking[4] stoop labor in toxic[4] working conditions. California grows 90% of the strawberries produced in the United States, almost all of them on the Central Coast.[5] By 2022 strawberry production for Monterey County alone had reached $958.7 million.[6]

But the increase in acres in production may have been due to cheap and available land in southern Monterey County. Agricultural acreage peaked and began to shrink. Migrant farm-workers kept coming, as they had since the bracero program began in 1942[7], mostly from the same Mixteco villages in Mexico. Most had a fifth grade education in Spanish let alone English.[8] Wage theft, crippling job production quotas and predatory sharecropping[8] arrangements in extremely toxic work environments have historically been routine. Workers share rooms in squalid and crowded substandard structures with many others,[4] or live outdoors altogether.[8]

A 2008 study using 2005 data by the Institute of Spatial Analysis at Humboldt State and the California Center for Rural Policy found that 593 acres of agricultural land fell within a quarter-mile of Salinas schools. But drift is not the only means of exposure, cautioned a study author: “Everyone living in that region,” is a farm-worker, and thousands of farm-workers carry the chemicals on their clothing into public places.[9]

Legal edit

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations prohibit recipients of federal financial assistance from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. Title VI prohibits both intentional discrimination and discriminatory effects from neutral policies.[10] However the US Supreme Court ruling in Alexander v. Sandoval found that individuals had right to sue for discriminatory effects of government actions,[a] so since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for oversight and investigation under Title VI regulations as outlined in 40 C.F.R. Part 7, the plaintiffs filed an administrative complaint that the agency had failed to comply with its own regulations.[11][12]

The complaint was named "Angelita C." after the mother of a student at Ohlone Elementary School in Watsonville, surrounded by strawberry fields.[10] Another three schools were in Monterey County, in Pajaro and Salinas, in Monterey County. Another was in Watsonville, in Santa Cruz County. Two were in Oxnard in Ventura, County, including Rio Mesa High, attended by the son of Maria Garcia, who later sued over the subsequent recertification of methyl bromide as a pesticide as if Angelita C. had never happened.[7] A 2002 literature review found a 91% greater likelihood nationwide for Hispanic than white children to attend schools where the greatest amounts of pesticides that threaten human health were being used nearby.[13] Median urinary pesticide metabolite levels measured in farmworkers in Monterey County that were up to 395 times higher than in a national survey.[13]

A review by the Center for Public Integrity of 265 complaints submitted to the civil-rights office found that "settlements are rare, investigations often cursory and findings of discrimination all but non-existent."[7]

Environmental edit

Soil fumigation with chloropicrin (CP) was introduced in the 1950s and methyl bromide (MB) in the 1960s to improve productivity. Arthropods, nematodes, weeds, fungi and pathogens like Verticillium dahliae, Fusarium oxysporum, and Macrophomina phaseolina could destroy a planting. Early on, CP and MB were mixed together to allow strawberries to be produced as an annual rather than biennial crop without crop rotation. Fumigants also led to higher and more predictable yields and fruit quality. Strawberry yields statewide increased from two to four tons an acre before fumigants to 16 tons an acre by 1969.[2]

The Montreal Protocol, an international environmental agreement first signed in 1987, included bromomethane among the chemicals to be phased out because IR breaks down in the atmosphere, especially in sunlight, and releases destructive bromine radicals.[14]

Complaint edit

Filed by the Center for Race, Poverty & the Environment,[15] the California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.,[15] California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, and the Farmworker Justice Fund, Inc. on behalf of Latino parents and children at six California schools,[1] complaint 16R-99-R9 said that the CDPR renewal of the registration of methyl bromide (MeBr) caused disproportionate harm to Latino school children due to their over-representation in schools near the fields where the pesticide was used and its health impact on them.

Research by the complainants found that all schools near the release of methyl bromide had a non-white majority. Virginia Rocca Barton Elementary School in Salinas and Ohlone Elementary School had a more than 95% ethnic student population.[1] In 1995 complainants found a total of 75,000 pounds of methyl bromide was released within a 1.5 mile radius of 476 students.[1] Notably, the spraying occurred from mid-August through late May, while school was in session.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) was in charge of these complaints.

Investigation edit

To calculate whether or not spraying methyl bromide had an adverse effect on children in the vicinity, the OCR used data from 1995-2001 in the CDPR’s previously-developed model.[12] and found that both short-term and long-term exposure levels exceeded the EPA's threshold of concern[10] (35 ppb and 1.3 ppb, respectively).[12] It also found merit to the claim of a disproportionate adverse effect on Latino schoolchildren between 1995 and 2001.[10] This was, it said, enough evidence of a prima facie violation of Title VI.[10] This was the EPA's first ever and to date only finding of a prima facie violation.[11]

Many limitations of the EPA investigation impaired its outcome. An open letter to the OCR signed by a long list of advocates in response to a 2016 proposal to loosen its accountability requirements scathingly noted among many other enforcement failures that the agency had taken "nearly twelve years" to respond to Angelita C.,[16] which by the EPA's own standards should have had preliminary findings within 180 days. [17] "While the complaint languished, Latino schoolchildren were exposed on a daily basis to toxic pesticides," they said.[16] Even then, another author angrily wrote, the EPA essentially "told the CDPR 'Just try to help people stay out of the way.'"[18] The EPA excluded complainants from the investigation,[10] and did not notify the plaintiffs of its finding of discrimination until it announced the settlement agreement,[7] without giving any relief to Latino schoolchildren from pesticide exposure during mandatory school attendance.[10]

Methyl iodide edit

In 2011 when the settlement was reached, the plan was to replace methyl bromide with methyl iodide, which does not deplete the ozone layer.[7] A plaintiffs' attorney said

“I still do not know why EPA did not include the fumigants that were replacing methyl bromide. They know about the Montreal Protocol. They administer the Montreal Protocol. They know what the pattern of use had to be. Now, if they didn’t do it because they’re incompetent, that’s a problem. If they knew about it and they decided to deliberately restrict their investigation to only methyl bromide, then that’s an even bigger problem. They would be ignoring evidence that’s material to the investigation.[7]

As a "carcinogen, neurotoxin, and endocrine disruptor"[19][20] the adverse health effects of methyl iodide on farmworkers and others in the vicinity of its use turned out to be if anything worse than methyl bromide's, and its manufacturer withdrew from the US market ahead of a decision in litigation brought by EarthJustice.[21][22] Methyl iodide was approved for use in the United States after EPA director Stephen Johnson appointed as a regulator Elin Miller, previously the CEO of the North American branch of Arysta, the Japanese manufacturer of methyl iodide.[23] Arysta was then sold for $2.2 billion.[23]

In 2006, the Japanese chemical giant Arysta presented it to the EPA as the perfect candidate to replace methyl bromide. The pitch: It works just as well on nematodes, but it doesn’t harm the ozone layer. As for farmworkers, well…[23]

Aftermath edit

After the EPA issued a preliminary finding against the CDPR on April 22, 2011, it began private settlement discussions with the defendant, to which the complainants were not invited. On August 24, 2011, the EPA and CDPR reached an informal compliance agreement. An appeal of this administrative decision was denied.[10] In 2014 the strawberry growers of California still accounted for roughly 90% of the methyl bromide use in the developed world.[24]

Garcia v. McCarthy (2012) edit

In Garcia v. McCarthy the plaintiff filed at the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals[5] to say that the settlement did not provide recourse to those exposed; the CDPR made no changes to the pesticide's registration in 2013 and re-registered and lawfully certified it as of January 26, 2012.[25] The plaintiffs said that the EPA failed to investigate health effects and “arbitrarily and capriciously” negotiated a voluntary compliance agreement that did not protect schoolchildren and that plaintiffs were excluded from the investigation and the settlement negotiations.[25][12] The court granted a motion to dismiss, saying that the agency was empowered to settle the matter as it saw fit.

See also edit

External links edit

  • IARC Working Group on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans. Re-evaluation of Some Organic Chemicals, Hydrazine and Hydrogen Peroxide. Lyon (FR): International Agency for Research on Cancer; 1999. (IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, No. 71.) Methyl iodide. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK498987/

Notes edit

  1. ^ "no individual cause of action"

References edit

  1. ^ a b c d United States, Congress, Office of Civil Rights, and Luke W Cole. COMPLAINT UNDER TITLE VI OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964, 42 U.S.C. §2000d AND 40 C.F.R. Part 7, Center on Race, Poverty, and Development, 1999, pp. 1–42
  2. ^ a b Tourte, Bolda & Klonsky 2016.
  3. ^ Bacon 2015.
  4. ^ a b c Holmes 2006.
  5. ^ a b Dayton 2015.
  6. ^ Jiménez 2023.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Buford 2015.
  8. ^ a b c Schlosser 1995.
  9. ^ Stahl 2009.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h Rensink 2022, p. 235.
  11. ^ a b Huang 2012.
  12. ^ a b c d United States, Congress, Office of Civil Rights, and Christopher Reardon. Angelita C, 42211, Preliminary Finding, OCR, Title Complaint VI 16R-99-R9, California Department of Pesticide Regulation, 2011.
  13. ^ a b Donley, Bullard & Economos 2022.
  14. ^ Parker & Morrissey 2003, p. 23.
  15. ^ a b Rensink 2022, p. 232.
  16. ^ a b ACLU of Wisconsin 2016, p. 7.
  17. ^ ACLU of Wisconsin 2016, p. 5.
  18. ^ Rensink 2022.
  19. ^ Pelley 2009.
  20. ^ Bolt & Gansewendt 1993.
  21. ^ Rubin 2012.
  22. ^ Earthjustice 2012.
  23. ^ a b c Philpott 2011.
  24. ^ Yeung, Taggart & Donohue 2014.
  25. ^ a b "Section 7.115 - Postaward compliance, 40 C.F.R. § 7.115 | Casetext Search + Citator". casetext.com. Retrieved 2024-04-18.

Bibliography edit

  • Parker, Larry; Morrissey, Wayne A. (2003). Stratospheric Ozone Depletion. Nova Publishers. ISBN 1590337921.
  • Pelley, Janet (4 August 2009). "Methyl iodide, a fumigant under fire: The Bush administration's approval of the pesticide is on trial in California's external scientific review". Environ. Sci. Technol. 43 (18). American Chemical Society. doi:10.1021/es9023095.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

Further reading edit

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