Jose and Luis are only 10-and 11-years
old, but they are already expert cherry pickers. After three
summers working in the orchards with their father, they know how to
pluck cherries without harming the tree bud. They know how to avoid
the tractors that speed through the slender rows of trees. They
know that long days in the sun equal food for their family in
Yakima, Wash., a town that teems with Mexican immigrants.
“I’m sort of tired, but it’s not so bad,” says Luis,
with a weary grin, as he drops a handful of cherries into the white
bucket strapped to his chest.
Jose and Luis
shouldn’t be here. It is illegal for children under 12 to
work in the fields, though it happens all the time. Thousands of
children throughout the West join their parents to work in the
fields.
They are part of a national workforce of 300,000
to 500,000 children in agriculture, reports the Oregonian. In
addition, 7 percent of farmworkers with children 5 years old or
younger bring their kids to work, according to a 2000 Government
Accounting Office Report.
As the children pick fruit and
vegetables, they may also harvest diseases. Pesticides, sprayed
routinely on traditional farms to kill insects, cause a range of
human illnesses such as cancer, brain tumors, sterility and birth
defects. For children, the potential damage is magnified since they
breathe and eat more than adults per unit of body weight, and their
bodies and internal organs are especially sensitive as they grow
up. But these illegal child workers, hidden beneath the radar
screen of the law, are offered no special protection. They need
it.
Five-year-old children in Mexico who were exposed to
pesticides suffer lags in development. They can’t catch a
ball or perform simple tasks involving memory and neuromuscular
skills, according to a study by Elizabeth Guillette, an
anthropologist with the University of Florida. Their drawings of
people are scribbles on the page; children of the same age and of
the same region who weren’t exposed to pesticides are able to
draw people with legs and arms and smiling faces. Other studies
conducted in the United States find that frequent exposure to
pesticides is strongly associated with both childhood leukemia and
brain cancer.
Despite such findings, the Environmental
Protection Agency offers no protection for children.
“We
can’t deny the possibility that children are working in the
fields, but they’re not supposed to be there,” says Kevin
Keaney, a branch chief for worker protection with the EPA. “We
can’t change the regulations unless the Department of Labor
sets the legal age at an absurdly young age. There’s not
really anything we can do about it.”
It’s a
Catch-22: The Department of Labor won’t acknowledge the
presence of child farmworkers because that would create an
appearance of condoning the situation. Farmer groups such as the
Farm Bureau say they are unaware that such a problem exists within
its membership.
This unwillingness to confront reality
seems to have soaked through the membrane of mainstream society. In
September, a coalition of 10 public- interest groups sued the EPA
to lower pesticide standards to levels that protect the most
vulnerable or exposed children. Few Western newspapers reported on
the suit. It’s a safe bet that most Americans have no idea
what goes on in the fields.
But as consumers, if we buy
food picked by children like Jose or Luis, we are in part
responsible for them. The good news is that there are things we can
do.
Helping migrant workers harness more political clout
would enable them to demand better legal protection from
pesticides, say worker advocates. The majority of farmworkers are
poor, undocumented Spanish-speakers; many are afraid to stick up
for themselves because they can’t afford to lose their job or
get deported. Hope for change could lie in immigration-policy
reform.
This fall, Sens. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Larry
Craig, R-Idaho, proposed legislation that would give agricultural
immigrants some rights in federal court and better access to labor
unions. It would also allow those who have been working in this
country for over 10 years without documentation to apply for
permanent status for themselves and their families.
This
is immigration reform that makes sense, just as protecting children
from pesticide poisoning also makes sense. This winter, as you buy
fresh fruit and vegetables, consider the small hands that worked to
bring them to you.
Rebecca Clarren is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She writes about rural Western
issues from Portland, Oregon.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
