Last week, after three years of deliberations (the cynical among us might say foot-dragging), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally enacted some sensible regulations on the way farmers handle and apply five common soil fumigants, among the most highly toxic chemicals in industrial agriculture’s arsenal.
The rogues’ gallery of pesticides includes methyl bromide, chloropicrin, dazomet, metam sodium, and metam potassium. In the best scorched-earth fashion, they are applied to fields—primarily those where potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, carrots, and peppers are to be grown—before planting, releasing gasses that kill virtually every living thing in the soil.
And they can also harm farm workers and residents of areas near poisoned fields. In 1999, metam sodium made 250 citizens of Earlimart, CA violently ill. Methyl bromide not only destroys atmospheric ozone, but can cause birth defects and serious nervous damage in humans.
It makes me glad that I’m able to buy organic produce, which farmers seem to be capable of growing just fine without resorting to chemical warfare.
Under the new rules:
· Fields will have to be encircled by buffer zones of 25 feet to a half mile. Currently, no buffer zones are required.
· Farmers will have to give 48 hours’ notice before applying fumigants.
· Warning signs will have to be posted around fumigated areas.
· Gas levels will be monitored before workers return to fields.
· Some workers will have to wear protective gas masks.
· Methyl bromide (which is being phased out anyway because it is eating away at the ozone layer) will not be allowed to be used on crops for which there are substitutes, such as asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce.
These measures seem more commonsensical than draconian, but barely had the announcement been made than Paul Schlegel, a spokesman for the American Farm Bureau, a trade organization, said his group may well challenge the regulations. “We don’t think there should be buffer zones if they’re not related to clear risk,” he told the Associated Press.
Maybe he ought to try telling that to the good folks of Earlimart.
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