Let’s Take Action on Pesticides – Raleigh Could Use the Help

Back in July, I posted about how advocacy organizations were seeking new legislation to protect farmworkers, and how some of the things they wanted – anonymity for whistleblowers, for example – were not going to show up in the new law, mostly thanks to the presence of Steve Troxler (who is still North Carolina’s secretary of agriculture) on the task force set up to make recommendations to the general assembly.

Fortunately for farmworkers and their families, much that these organizations sought did make it into law – after a fashion. Having received from a task force on pesticide exposure some watered-down recommendations for protecting vulnerable workers, the General Assembly has now entrusted the writing of the rules that growers will actually have to follow to that other august body, the NC Pesticide Board.

So now the pesticide board has laid out its proposed rules (pdf), and one of the key things that farmworker advocates sought has – wait for it – gone missing. Somehow the board has managed not to require growers to record how long they wait after a field has been sprayed before they send in their workers.

That’s odd, because the absence of that single piece of data gave one negligent company an out in a lawsuit brought by workers and families whose health had been destroyed by pesticides. Actually, it’s more complicated than that: the company in question did have records that showed how long they kept their workers out of pesticide-soaked fields – but the judge in the suit agreed with them that these records were inadmissable as evidence because the company wasn’t legally required to keep them.

So, to recap: a task force set up in response to a notorious miscarriage of justice sends a set of recommendations to the general assembly. The house and senate take these recommendations and write them into a law. That law, however, is vague enough to allow the regulators in charge of implementing it to avoid writing rules that would prevent similar miscarriages of justice in the future.

Lovely.

Want to do something about it? The folks at Toxic Free NC are asking people to send a letter to the pesticide board before December 15 (the end of the comment period for the proposed rules). Their site includes points to cover in the letter and e-mail and U.S. mail addresses for the board. It’s easy enough to do, and won’t take much time, so do it right now.

Chances are good that this is a big enough deal that the board will do the right thing and include this one requirement (even Steve Troxler is on record with a version of “something must be done”). But by writing in, you’ll improve those chances.

And what to do about a system that moves in these sorts of vicious circles? Good question.