Top: "Farm workers and pesticides," web video by Laura Valencia.
Photo Captions (from top to bottom):
A worker shows off his thick callouses, developed during the height of the growing season.
Photo by A. Duncan Pardo.
A farm worker demonstrates the way he and his co-workers clean their work clothes. Photo by A. Duncan Pardo.
The health and safety of farm workers is directly and often severely affected by pesticide use in agriculture. Pesticide exposure is also a serious health risk for farm workers' families - one recent study found the vast majority of young children in Eastern NC farm worker households had metabolites of agricultural pesticides in their urine.*
Some cases of farm worker over-exposure to pesticides become public - such as the still-pending Ag-Mart case - but those are few and far between. Most of the time, the health damage farm workers in NC suffer from pesticides goes un-reported because workers are not familiar with their rights, and when they are, they are scared to come forward and risk losing their jobs.
Workers in most other industries are protected under the law in cases such as these, but by and large, farm workers are not. This unfairness ultimately hurts us all, since input from farm workers - the people on the "front lines," so to speak - is critical to effective regulation of pesticides in our state, regulation that's meant in part to keep pesticides used in agriculture from becoming pollution in our air, water and food.
With our Farm Worker Documentary Project, piloted in 2008, Toxic Free NC is working to bring farm workers' voices into the conversation about pesticides in our state, while protecting their safety and livelihoods. With the help of three interns from Student Action with Farmworkers and several allied organizations, we talked with workers from across Eastern NC in the summer of 2008 about their experiences working with pesticides. We also asked workers to tell us what changes they felt were most important for improving their working and living conditions. Some of the photos from those interviews are at right, and audio clips from the interviews will be posted to this page soon.
Get involved! We are revving up to do more documentary interviews this year. If you speak Spanish and you are interested in getting to know more about farm workers, check out our Farm Worker Documentary Internship. Also, consider becoming an Ambassador for Just & Sustainable Agriculture, and speaking out for the health and safety of farm workers.
