Dear John,
By next year, farmworkers and their families could be in even more danger from Big Ag’s pesticides. The EPA just announced plans to roll back Worker Protection Standards that better protect farmworkers from toxic pesticides.
If the plan is approved, pesticide applicators will be allowed to continue spraying pesticides even if workers are present in the spray zone. This puts workers at risk of being fully doused in these harmful chemicals.
Farmworkers and their families are already being exposed to Big Ag’s poisons every day. The EPA should not make a bad situation worse by taking away these important protections. We need you with us to convince the EPA to abandon its terrible plan.
Tell the EPA: Protect farmworkers and their kids from Big Ag’s poisons!
Make no mistake -- this roll back is the result of an EPA run by pesticide industry cronies like Andrew Wheeler. The EPA’s proposed rollback will make it easier to spray toxic pesticides like chlorpyrifos, Monsanto’s Roundup®, and bee-killing neonics. And workers will be placed in even more danger.
According to the Worker Protection Standards, pesticides can’t be sprayed if another person is within 25-100 feet. The proposed EPA rule would make an exception: if the person within that buffer is on different property.
But no invisible property line is going to keep pesticides from poisoning farmworkers. These products drift and contaminate nearby plants, water, air and our food. Clearly, pesticides often end up where they do not belong.
Some farmworkers live very close to agricultural fields. Removing these protections means the homes of workers and their communities will be directly harmed as well.
We can’t let the EPA remove the most basic protections from farmworkers and their families!
Protect farmworkers from toxic pesticides: Tell the EPA to uphold strong Worker Protection Standards!
Standing with you,
Jason Davidson,
Food and agriculture campaigner,
Friends of the Earth
