Angelita C. et al. v. California Department of Pesticide Regulation

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Angelita C. et al. v. California Department of Pesticide Regulation
DecidedApril 22, 2011

Angelita C. et al. v. California Department of Pesticide Regulation is a complaint filed in June 1999 with the United States federal Environmental Protection Agency's Office for Civil Rights. Filed on behalf of children attending schools near where methyl bromide was used on strawberry fields as a pesticide, the complaint said that the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) discriminated against Latino children when it renewed the registration for methyl bromide in January 1999 without considering the potential health effects of the pesticide on children at schools near the application sites.[1]

Background[edit]

Geographical[edit]

Strawberry cultivation is an important agricultural industry in Central California. Ventura County and especially Oxnard, Monterey County and particularly Salinas, as well as southern Santa Cruz County near Watsonville all grow strawberries.

Between 1960 and 2014, acreage more than tripled and production increased tenfold. The value of production, in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, increased by 424% in Monterey County and by 593% in Santa Cruz County, reaching an astonishing combined value of nearly $1 billion in both 2010 and 2014.[2]

This was achieved almost entirely by poorly paid undocumented Mexicans, mostly indigenous Mixtec and Triqui from Oaxaca.[3] The harvests come in through back-breaking[4] stoop labor in toxic[4] working conditions.

But the increase in acres in production may have been due to cheap and available land in southern Monterey County. Agricultural acreage peaked and began to shrink. Migrant farm-workers kept coming, as they had since the bracero program, mostly from the same Mixteco villages in Mexico. Most had a fifth grade educatiion in Spanish let alone English. Wage theft, crippling job production quotas and predatory sharecropping arrangements in extremely toxic work environments were routine and still are. Workers share rooms in squalid and crowded substandard structures with many others, or live outdoors altogether.[citation needed]

A 2008 study using 2005 data by the Institute of Spatial Analysis at Humboldt State and the California Center for Rural Policy found that 593 acres of agricultural land fell within a quarter-mile of Salinas schools. But drift is not the only means of exposure, cautioned a study author: “Everyone living in that region,” is a farm-worker, and thousands of farm-workers carry the chemicals on their clothing into public places.[5]

Legal[edit]

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations prohibit recipients of federal financial assistance from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. Title VI prohibits both intentional discrimination and discriminatory effects from neutral policies.[6] However the US Supreme Court ruling in Alexander v. Sandoval found that individuals had right to sue for discriminatory effects of government actions,[a] so since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for oversight and investigation under Title VI regulations as outlined in 40 C.F.R. Part 7, the plaintiffs filed an administrative complaint that the agency had failed to comply with its own regulations.[7][8]

The complaint was named "Angelita C." after the mother of a student at Ohlone Elementary School in Watsonville, surrounded by strawberry fields.[6] Another three schools were in Monterey County, in Pajaro and Salinas, in Monterey County. Another was in Watsonville, in Santa Cruz County. Two were in Oxnard in Ventura, County, including Rio Mesa High, attended by the son of Maria Garcia, who later sued over the subsequent recertification of methyl bromide as a pesticide as if Angelita C. had never happened.[9] A 2002 literature review found a 91% greater likelihood nationwide for Hispanic than white children to attend schools where the greatest amounts of pesticides that threaten human health were being used nearby.[10] Median urinary pesticide metabolite levels measured in farmworkers in Monterey County that were up to 395 times higher than in a national survey.[10]

Environmental[edit]

Soil fumigation with chloropicrin (CP) was introduced in the 1950s and methyl bromide (MB) in the 1960s to improve productivity. Arthropods, nematodes, weeds, fungi and pathogens like Verticillium dahliae, Fusarium oxysporum, and Macrophomina phaseolina could destroy a planting. Early on, CP and MB were mixed together to allow strawberries to be produced as an annual rather than biennial crop without crop rotation. Fumigants also led to higher and more predictable yields and fruit quality. Strawberry yields statewide increased from two to four tons an acre before fumigants to 16 tons an acre by 1969.[2]

The Montreal Protocol, an international environmental agreement first signed in 1987, included bromomethane among the chemicals to be phased out because IR breaks down in the atmosphere, especially in sunlight, and releases destructive bromine radicals.[11]

Complaint[edit]

Filed by the Center for Race, Poverty & the Environment,[12] the California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.,[12] California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, and the Farmworker Justice Fund, Inc. on behalf of Latino parents and children at six California schools,[1] complaint 16R-99-R9 said that the CDPR renewal of the registration of methyl bromide (MeBr) caused disproportionate harm to Latino school children due to their over-representation in schools near the fields where the pesticide was used and its health impact on them.

Research by the complainants found that all schools near the release of methyl bromide had a non-white majority. Virginia Rocca Barton Elementary School in Salinas and Ohlone Elementary School had a more than 95% ethnic student population.[1] Complainants also said that 35,000 pounds of methyl bromide is released annually[better source needed][1] In 1995 complainants found a total of 75,000 pounds of methyl bromide was released within a 1.5 mile radius of 476 students. [1] Notably, the spraying occurred from mid-August through late May, while school was in session.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) was in charge of these complaints.

Investigation[edit]

To calculate whether or not spraying methyl bromide had an adverse effect on children in the vicinity, the OCR used data from 1995-2001 in the CDPR’s previously-developed model.[8] and found that both short-term and long-term exposure levels exceeded the EPA's threshold of concern[6] (35 ppb and 1.3 ppb, respectively).[8] It also found merit to the claim of a disproportionate adverse effect on Latino schoolchildren between 1995 and 2001.[6] This was, it said, enough evidence of a prima facie violation of Title VI.[6] This was the EPA's first ever and to date only finding of a prima facie violation.[7]

Many limitations of EPA investigation impaired its outcome. An open letter to the OCR signed by a long list of advocates in response to a 2016 proposal to loosen its accountability requirements scathingly noted among many other enforcement failures that the agency had taken "nearly twelve years" to respond to Angelita C.,[13] which by the EPA's own standards should have had preliminary findings within 180 days. [14] "While the complaint languished, Latino schoolchildren were exposed on a daily basis to toxic pesticides," they said.[13] Even then, another author angrily wrote, the EPA essentially "told the CDPR 'Just try to help people stay out of the way.'"[15]

The EPA excluded some complainants from the investigation of their own complaint,[6] then agreed to settle it without giving any relief to Latino schoolchildren from pesticide exposure during mandatory school attendance.[6] Despite changes in agricultural practice due to regulatory changes during the ten-year investigation, the agency never updated its data set. The agency knew that other fumigants had replaced methyl bromide, and had itself approved methyl iodide, yet it continued to investigate a chemical it had almost completely phased out.[16]

Aftermath[edit]

After the EPA issued a preliminary finding against the CDPR on April 22, 2011, it began private settlement discussions with the defendant, to which the complainants were not invited. On August 24, 2011, the EPA and CDPR reached an informal compliance agreement. An appeal of this administrative decision was denied.[6] In 2014 the strawberry growers of California accounted for roughly 90% of the methyl bromide use in the developed world.[17]

Garcia v. McCarthy (2012)[edit]

In Garcia v. McCarthy the plaintiff said that the settlement did not provide recourse to those exposed; the CDPR made no changes to the pesticide registration in 2013 after it re-registered and lawfully certified it as of January 26, 2012.[18] The plaintiffs said that the EPA failed to investigate health effects and “arbitrarily and capriciously” negotiated a voluntary compliance agreement that did not protect school children. The plaintiffs were excluded from the investigation and settlement negotiations.[18][8]

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ "no indidvidual cause of action"

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e United States, Congress, Office of Civil Rights, and Luke W Cole. COMPLAINT UNDER TITLE VI OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964, 42 U.S.C. §2000d AND 40 C.F.R. Part 7, Center on Race, Poverty, and Development, 1999, pp. 1–42
  2. ^ a b Tourte, Bolda & Klonsky 2016.
  3. ^ Bacon 2015.
  4. ^ a b Holmes 2006.
  5. ^ Stahl 2009.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h Rensink 2022, p. 235.
  7. ^ a b Huang 2012.
  8. ^ a b c d United States, Congress, Office of Civil Rights, and Christopher Reardon. Angelita C, 42211, Preliminary Finding, OCR, Title Complaint VI 16R-99-R9, California Department of Pesticide Regulation, 2011.
  9. ^ Buford 2015.
  10. ^ a b Donley, Bullard & Economos 2022.
  11. ^ Parker & Morrissey 2003, p. 23.
  12. ^ a b Rensink 2022, p. 232.
  13. ^ a b ACLU of Wisconsin 2016, p. 7.
  14. ^ ACLU of Wisconsin 2016, p. 5.
  15. ^ Rensink 2022.
  16. ^ Rafiei Asl, Javad. "A Semantic, Syntactic, And Context-Aware Natural Language Adversarial Example Generator_supp1-3359817.pdf". dx.doi.org. doi:10.1109/tdsc.2024.3359817/mm1. Retrieved 2024-04-25.
  17. ^ Yeung, Taggart & Donohue 2014.
  18. ^ a b "Section 7.115 - Postaward compliance, 40 C.F.R. § 7.115 | Casetext Search + Citator". casetext.com. Retrieved 2024-04-18.

Bibliography[edit]

  • Parker, Larry; Morrissey, Wayne A. (2003). Stratospheric Ozone Depletion. Nova Publishers. ISBN 1590337921.

Further Reading[edit]

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