Abstract
In 2015, the EPA (USA) announced its intention to strengthen farmworker protections against pesticide exposure to include information on the hazards of pesticide exposure during pregnancy and how to reduce take-home exposure. While the new Worker Protection Standard is a laudable and long-overdue effort to enhance farmworker safety, we argue that an informational approach is inadequate, particularly for the women farmworkers who are the focus of the expanded training content. It is particularly deficient given new epigenetic knowledge that suggests a greatly expanded temporal and spatial horizon between pesticide exposure and effect. At the same time it puts an additional moral burden on women farmworkers who are made responsible for protecting future populations. The article draws in part on 55 interviews we conducted with farmworkers as part of a larger project on fumigation use in California's strawberry industry. Analysis of these interviews sheds light on the practical fallacies of an information-oriented regulatory program when most farm workers feel that not working is the bigger risk. We found that farmworker men and women already recognized the potential dangers of pesticide exposure without additional notification, yet farmworker women felt even more limited in their ability to protect themselves from exposure at the workplace. Farmworkers who worked during their pregnancies felt particularly at risk. Since these enhanced protections do not address the socio-cultural and eco-biological obstacles farmworker women face in protecting themselves and their future progeny from pesticide exposure, we suggest that they are primarily performative. Keywords: Pesticide exposure, pesticide regulation, political ecology of the body, epigenetics, gender, responsibilization
Highlights
Farmworkers, who disproportionately bear the burdens of pesticide exposure from chemically intensive agricultural production regimes, have long been subject to the inadequacies of the regulatory frameworks designed to protect them
In an effort to rectify the inadequacies of existing pesticide protections for farmworkers, in 2015 the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) released a new Worker Protection Standard (WPS) that would go into effect in January of 2017
The women we interviewed are already aware of the hazards pesticide exposure poses to their pregnancies, experience additional gendered responsibility for protecting future progeny, and yet face additional, gendered obstacles to self-protection that more information about pesticide safety cannot remedy
Summary
Farmworkers, who disproportionately bear the burdens of pesticide exposure from chemically intensive agricultural production regimes, have long been subject to the inadequacies of the regulatory frameworks designed to protect them. Like citizenship and ethnic status, structures the farm labor hierarchy, it is surely a salient dimension of farmworker vulnerability to occupational health and safety violations It is unclear, that the new standard will fundamentally alter the socio-cultural conditions of farmworker pesticide exposure, especially for women. The spatial and temporal relationship between exposure and effect is significantly attenuated, making definitive proof of harm virtually unattainable for a migrant population (Nash 2004) Given these complexities, along with the variety of factors that can induce epigenetic change—stress, levels of early-life nurture and nutrition, and the cumulative interaction of these changes—the ways in which pesticides come to damage farmworker bodies and endanger farmworker women's reproductive health are obscured. The high-risk pregnancies of farmworker women should be understood in this context, as an embodied vulnerability arising from a syndemic of health insults that interact to produce vulnerable bodily ecologies (Gravlee 2009; Horton 2016; Saxton 2015)
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