A few days ago, I wrote about a new Southern Poverty Law Center study that found that women who work in fields are often subject to sexual harassment. The woman who spoke at the press conference, Carina Davis also mentioned that the supervisors who harassed workers sometimes sprayed them with pesticides. She and her co-workers were always getting sick, she said.
It turns out that this is true even when you don't work in the fields. In December, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University reported on a study of 600 pregnant women in the Salinas Valley, a highly agricultural area. The researchers measured pesticide levels in the women's bodies, and what they found was bad:
[Researcher Brenda Eskenazi] and her colleagues have found that at age 2 the children of mothers who had the highest levels of organophosphate pesticide metabolites in their blood had the worst mental development in the group. They also had the most cases of pervasive developmental disorder based on their mother's report.
At age 5, the children whose mothers were most exposed during pregnancy had poorer attention spans compared to those born to mothers who had lower levels of pesticide metabolites in their urine. Metabolites, as referred to here, are compounds that are formed as a chemical breaks down in the body. They are evidence that someone was exposed to a chemical.
The author of that story, Sheila Kaplan also found that a company that does research on the safety of pesticides was working to refute evidence that a particular pesticide was linked to Parkinson's disease.
As Tom Philpott says in Grist, all of the abuses, of which we only occasionally hear, come from a desire for the cheapest food possible. If our cheap food system were actually feeding the hungry, then we could talk about how best to maximize availability while protecting the workers. But we're not. Instead we're content with a system in which increasingly powerful companies reap all the rewards, and we're all worse off.
