California’s $43 billion agricultural industry and pesticide regulators have long argued that Latino children attending schools near intensively farmed plots face no undue risks from pesticides. To test the state’s claims, I collected use data for 66 pesticides identified by state health officials as most likely to drift and cause harm for all 58 California counties over six years and mapped the pesticides (with help from geographic information system experts at UC Davis) to ZIP code. Then I overlaid the pesticide data with demographic data. My analysis showed that while applications of many of these pesticides had fallen statewide since 2007, a handful of communities saw a dramatic increase. By 2012, then the most recent year for which data was available, more than 29 million pounds of these chemicals–more than half the total used in the state–were applied in just 5 percent of California’s 1,769 census ZIP codes. In two ZIP codes applications of these toxic pesticides, which were already among the highest in the state, rose between 61 percent and 84 percent from 2007 to 2012. These two areas–among ten ZIP codes with the highest use of these pesticides in California–are 70 percent Latino, mostly due to the large number of farm jobs in the area. Latino families knew since the 1990s that their children faced nearly twice the risk as white children of attending schools near fields with heavy pesticide use. They filed a complaint in 1999, asking the EPA to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by requiring state pesticide regulators (who receive federal EPA funds) to reduce use of the toxic fumigant methyl bromide. Although the CRA requires that EPA ensures its grantees do not engage in discriminatory practices, the agency “settled” the complaint with pesticide regulators–12 years after the families filed–without requiring reduced applications near the schools. By that time, growers had switched from methyl bromide, an ozone pollutant, to other fumigants. I showed that in the year following the settlement, Oxnard growers applied over four times the amount of toxic fumigants–nearly half a million pounds–near Latino children’s schools than they had when the families first filed the complaint.
