Free Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook Page B

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, theFlorida Consumer Action Network, andFriends 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 theAgency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of theU.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 ConsumerServices 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 theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed establishingbuffer zones one hundred feet to one-quarter mile around fumigated fields, Florida farmers cried foul. “This will kill agriculture,” insistedFritz 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 thedrift problem is to ban fumigants outright.
    Not only ismethyl bromide a potent poison to humans and wildlife, it is also one of the leading causes of the depletion of the atmosphere’sozone 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 theMontreal 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 befinancially 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