Tomatoland (9 page)

Later that day, Grimaldi had to stand in a ditch full of what he assumed was water to reach a row of plants with the sprayer. That night, when he went to wash his feet, his toenails fell off, just like flakes of soap. Grimaldi saw that when workers complained, they lost their jobs. The primary lesson on how to handle pesticides was not to utter a word about them.

Although the short-term symptoms of pesticide poisoning often pass quickly,
virtually no hard scientific research
has been done on the long-term effects. One of the difficulties in observing these effects is that fruit and vegetable pickers are migratory. The turnover in Florida can be as high as 40 percent every year as Hispanic workers leave to go home after earning enough money or simply give up trying to make a go of it in the United States. But plenty of surveys and anecdotal observations raise red flags about the health problems that await today’s workers in the decades to come.

Hispanics are relatively recent arrivals on the migrant scene. Decades ago, local
African Americans usually performed the same low-paying, excruciating work. In some areas, they stayed after the
agricultural jobs moved away. Many are now retired. One such community can be found near
Lake Apopka, just north of Orlando. Some farmworker advocates are convinced that the chemicals applied to the produce that these workers picked decades ago are responsible for the litany of medical horrors the community struggles with today.

Leaning on her cane
in the scorching midday June sun,
Linda Lee matter-of-factly listed her medical conditions: diabetes, lupus, high blood pressure, emphysema, and arthritis. Her hip had to be replaced and her gall bladder removed. Her kidneys failed, so she had a transplant. She also had two corneal implants. Asked what caused her woes, the fifty-seven-year-old African American resident of Apopka didn’t hesitate: For nearly a decade as a farm laborer on the shores of Lake Apopka in the 1970s and 1980s, she was routinely exposed to agricultural chemicals as she worked in the fields. “Plenty of my old friends and neighbors got what I got, and a lot of them got stuff I don’t want to get,” she told me.

In a survey of workers conducted
in 2006, eight years after the Apopka farms were closed for good, the Farmworker Association of Florida found that 92 percent of the roughly twenty-five hundred African Americans, Haitians, and Mexicans with whom Lee toiled had been exposed to pesticides through a combination of aerial spraying, wind drifting from applications on adjacent fields, touching plants still wet with pesticides, and inhaling pesticides. Fully 83 percent of those queried reported that their health was only “fair” or “poor.” They complained about arthritis, throat problems, diabetes, persistent coughing, recurring rashes, miscarriages, birth defects, and childhood developmental difficulties—all conditions that research studies have linked to the agricultural chemicals that were applied in the area. In a state where the average incidence of birth defects is 3 percent, 13 percent of the Apopka workers had a child born with a defect.

I came to the shores of Lake Apopka at the insistence of
Jeannie Economos, the pesticide safety and environmental health project
coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida. She is in her late fifties but still wears her mane of curly hair in the free-flowing fashion of the hippie era, and she still holds the innocent belief that caring people can make constructive changes to the system. Economos, who signs her e-mails “Yours in solidarity,” wanted to give me the “pesticide tour,” a firsthand look at one of the country’s most extreme examples of what happens when agribusiness shows utter disregard for the environment and workers.

Located fifteen miles northwest of Orlando
, almost in the shadow of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Lake Apopka has had many claims to fame. Roughly circular and measuring about ten miles in diameter, it is the state’s fourth largest lake. For a time in the first half of the twentieth century, it was nationally famous for its trophy largemouth bass, and twenty-one lodges sprang up on its shores to cater to anglers from around the world. But by the 1980s, Apopka had earned yet another distinction: It was the Sunshine State’s most polluted large lake. By then the fabled bass were extinct. Blame for the declining
water
quality was not hard to assign. In 1941, as part of the wartime effort to produce more fruits and vegetables, nineteen thousand acres of swamp on the lake’s north shore were drained to make way for “
muck farms” in the rich soil. During the growing season, farmers pumped water in and out of the lake depending on irrigation requirements and rainfall amounts. In the off season, they allowed the lake to flood the fields to replenish the soil and prevent wind erosion and weed growth. With each cycle, the water not only picked up the chemical fertilizers but also the pesticides. Nourished by nitrogen and phosphorus from the fields, the water in the lake turned pea green. The only surviving fish were tough, trashy, minnowlike gizzard shad.

By 1996, the situation had become so dire that the Florida government bought out the big landowners and closed down the farms. The fourteen landowners were paid $103 million for property and equipment. (
In one sweet deal
, a farmer sold the government a vegetable cooler for $1.4 million and then bought it back at auction for
$35,000.) The twenty-five hundred workers, who often had families that lived with them on the land, got nothing other than the order to clear out. They were not retrained for new jobs because the powerful farmers feared that educated workers would abandon the fields before the last carrot or tomato was picked.

In the winter of 1998, the
St. John’s River Water Management District decided to reverse the usual pattern of water flow and flood the recently acquired land in the winter to attract waterfowl. Sure enough, that year the
Audubon Society tallied the largest Christmas count of migrating birds ever recorded for an inland location. The joy was short-lived. By the end of the winter, more than one thousand fish-eating birds had died—blue herons, white pelicans, bald eagles. It was one of the worst bird-death disasters in U.S. history. A $1.5-million scientific investigation was launched. After a few years,
researchers determined that the cause of the deaths was pesticide poisoning
. Investigations into the health of
alligators also revealed disturbing signs. Males had stunted penises and high levels of estrogen; females had high levels of testosterone. Reproductive rates were far below normal. Again, pesticide poisoning was the cause. But while the research money flowed into looking into the causes of reptile and bird illnesses, not a nickel was spent on examining the laborers who spent their lives working, eating, and sleeping on the contaminated land.

“It’s painful trying to get up in the morning and get from one day to the next,” said Lee, as we walked along a sandy track through the now-overgrown fields. Even though a dozen seasons had come and gone since the last pesticide-spraying tractor, signs read, “Warning. Visitors must stay on roads. No fishing allowed on this property. These lands were former agricultural land that were subject to regular use of agricultural chemicals, some of which, such as DDT, are persistent in the environment and may present a risk to human health.” Lee received no such warnings when she went into the fields to pick corn, cabbages, carrots, greens, and tomatoes, receiving twelve cents to pack a box of corn, fifteen cents for a box of greens.

We finally reached a small park by the lakeshore and took shelter in the shade of a live oak, welcome respite from the scorching sun and unbearable humidity. Cicadas trilled from the scrubby brush that has replaced the rows of vegetables. There was no wind. The water, while not pea green, was khaki colored and opaque. It was high noon on a sunny summer day in the middle of a metropolitan area of two million people, and there was not a soul on the entire fifty-square-mile lake.

The effects of pesticides can travel far beyond the boundaries of Florida’s tomato fields, reaching people who have never touched a crop.
One Sunday morning
, the Reverend
Gladys Herrera had to stop midway through service and evacuate all ninety members of her congregation at
El Calvario Fuente de Vida, a church in Naranja, a town in an agricultural area just south of Miami. “Sister, I feel sick. I feel bad,” said one worshipper. Others reported dizziness, tickling in their throats, and itchiness in their ears and eyes. Kids started coughing. Some vomited. Although no one had warned Herrera, a nearby farm had applied methyl bromide to its tomato fields, the same chemical that felled Guadalupe Gonzales. Odorless and colorless in its natural state, it is often mixed with small amounts of tear gas so that it can be detected. Easily dispersed into the air, the fumigant had drifted in through the open windows of the church.

Subsequent air tests
near El Calvario conducted by the Farmworker Association, the
Florida Consumer Action Network, and
Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, showed that levels of the toxic gas drifting off nearby fields had risen as high as 625 parts per billion, three times the maximum allowable amount set by the government of California (Florida has no standards) and more than ten times the minimal risk level set by the
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

What happened on that Sunday morning in Naranja is far from rare. In 2009 the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer
Services
initiated thirty-nine investigations
in response to allegations of pesticide drift similar to that experienced by Herrera’s congregation. Worshippers at a Baptist church in Homestead, not far from Naranja, were exposed to chemical drift. A schoolteacher in Sarasota was forced to take medical leave after pesticides drifted into the building in which she taught, where five hundred elementary students attended classes. Throughout the state, labor camps, recreational vehicle parks, and retirement communities have sprung up adjacent to, or even within, fields where pesticides are routinely sprayed. In 2007, when the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed establishing
buffer zones one hundred feet to one-quarter mile around fumigated fields, Florida farmers cried foul.
“This will kill agriculture,”
insisted
Fritz Stauffacher, compliance safety director for West Coast Tomato, which was farming four thousand acres in Florida. Another West Coast executive explained that “growers use land right up to the boundaries.” Despite the protests, the new rules went into effect in 2008, but Economos and other antipesticide advocates contend that the only sure solution to the
drift problem is to ban fumigants outright.

Not only is
methyl bromide a potent poison to humans and wildlife, it is also one of the leading causes of the depletion of the atmosphere’s
ozone layer, the part of the stratosphere that absorbs ultraviolet radiation from the sun, radiation that causes skin cancer. The bromine in methyl bromide is fifty times more destructive to the ozone layer than the chlorine found in chlorofluorocarbons, which have been banned from production since 1996. Under the terms of the
Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, the use of methyl bromide was also supposed to have been phased out completely in the United States by 2005. But because of a loophole in the treaty, Florida tomato growers have been granted a “critical use exemption” that not only allows them to use stockpiled methyl bromide but even purchase newly manufactured supplies. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claims that otherwise it would be
financially impossible for farmers in the state to raise tomatoes. Without the tomato growers’ favorite fumigant—which,
according to a 2009 report
by University of Florida researchers, is still applied to 80 percent of Florida’s tomatoes—the agency claimed that there would be a 20 to 40 percent drop in yields. Five years after the so-called “ban,” millions of pounds of methyl bromide are still injected into Florida’s farmland every planting season. Ag-Mart, the company that operated the fields where the mothers of the three deformed Immokalee babies worked, voluntarily stopped using five of six chemicals that had been connected to birth defects in animal experiments. But it continued to use one of those mutagens because there was no cost-effective replacement. That chemical was methyl bromide.

Antipesticide advocates claim that the exemption is unnecessary. They note that there are several alternatives to the ozone-destroying fumigant, both chemical and nonchemical, and they dispute the claims that not applying it would result in catastrophic crop loss. In one study on processing tomatoes,
a team led by Karen Klonsky
of the University of California, Davis found that organic production did provide significantly lower yields, but it also cost growers less money to get those yields. When everything was netted out, the
profit from organic tomatoes was only 10 percent less than the profit made on the chemically treated ones. More to the point, the study showed that both methods could be profitable.

In Florida, nematodes
are one of the main excuses given for application of methyl bromide. But the University of Florida’s
Vegetable Production Handbook for Florida 2010–2011
describes several
nonchemical alternatives. These practices include rotating tomatoes with crops that are not prone to nematode infestation or simply letting fields lie fallow. Both approaches deprive nematodes of food. Adding animal manure and poultry litter to soil or disking in certain cover crops not only increases fertility but raises levels of ammonia compounds that suppress nematodes while benefiting populations of microbes that compete with the pests without harming crops. Nematodes can
also be killed by flooding fields between crops. “Soil
solarization” is a promising new technology that involves spreading clear plastic over rows during fallow periods between crops to heat the soil to levels that kill potential pests.

Unfortunately, it appears that Florida growers are showing more interest in an alternative to methyl bromide that many scientists view as one of the most toxic compounds employed in chemical manufacturing—so carcinogenic it has been used to induce cancers in laboratory cell cultures. Called
methyl iodide, or
iodomethane,
the fumigant was approved
in 2008 by the
George W. Bush–era U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
despite a letter of warning
signed by fifty-four of the world’s most prominent chemists and physicians, including five Nobel Prize–winning researchers. In their letter, the scientists noted that agents like methyl iodide are “extremely well-known cancer hazards” and that “their high-volatility and water solubility” would “guarantee substantial releases to air, surface waters, and groundwater.” Although methyl iodide does not punch gaping holes in the ozone layer, the scientists reminded the agency that its own research had shown methyl iodide to cause “thyroid toxicity, permanent neurological damage, and fetal losses in experimental animals.”