Prominent farmworker activist and organizer Dolores Huerta joined several other speakers at a public meeting in Watsonville Saturday to raise awareness about the dangers of agricultural pesticide use on farmworkers, children, consumers and residents throughout Santa Cruz County.
Childhood cancer rates in the county are more than 38% above the nationwide childhood cancer rate of 16.3%. This makes the cancer rate for children up to age 14 the second highest of all California counties, according to Dr. Ann López, the director of the Center for Farmworker Families.
The meeting was organized by the Campaign for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA).
CORA’s website states that more than 1 million pounds of pesticides are used in Santa Cruz County each year. The majority of this usage is concentrated in the Pajaro Valley, often near houses and schools.
López said that “98.5% of the pesticides associated with childhood leukemia and 95.2% of pesticides tied to childhood brain cancer were applied in 2019 in this zip code 95076 alone.”
The ZIP code encompasses all of Watsonville.
Huerta urged the community to stop buying berries grown by Driscoll’s because much of their produce is sprayed with toxic pesticides.
She also said that Driscoll’s won’t let its farm workers unionize, and as a result, they aren’t able to improve their working conditions.
“The one thing about having a union contract is [that] when you sit down at the table to negotiate, you can say to them, ‘We don’t want you to use pesticides.’ You can make that a condition of the work.”
Among the speakers was Marciela Cruz, who was diagnosed with stomach cancer after working in strawberry fields in Salinas. She said she had undergone eight chemotherapy sessions and had to have her entire stomach removed. Her doctor told her the cancer may have been caused by her exposure to toxic pesticides sprayed in the fields.
Mireya Gómez-Contreras, the administrative co-leader of Esperanza Community Farms, interpreted for Cruz.
Regarding the non-organic field behind MacQuiddy Elementary, Gómez-Contreras, on Cruz’s behalf, said that if Cruz could speak to the rancher who owned that farm, she’d tell them “to get rid of the ranch or to turn it organic because the pesticides are affecting all of the farmworkers.”
According to López, Monterey County—compared to every other county in the state—has a higher percentage of schools and students in areas with the greatest pesticide use, affecting 29 schools and 18,525 students.
She said that the lifetime cancer risk at Ohlone Elementary school in Royal Oaks is twice the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment’s threshold.
“In general, Latino schoolchildren are 3.2 times more likely than white students to attend schools with the highest use of the most hazardous pesticides.” López said.
“The disparity is most notable in the Pajaro Valley area. “You would not find this in north [Santa Cruz] county,” she said.
The meeting drew a crowd of over 100 people, who gathered on a dirt road between MacQuiddy Elementary and two agricultural fields. The location reflected the importance of organizations like the Center for Farmworker Families and the United Farm Workers (cofounded by Huerta) as grassroots movements.
At the end of her speech, Huerta led the crowd through her famous “Sí, se puede” chant to encourage them to continue fighting against pesticide use.
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Delores’s priority in opposing pesticides?
Specifically, the health of Mexican farmworkers.
Ecological sustainability?
Not so much, as evidenced by her having 11 kids.
Fortunately, Mexico (along with a wide variety of countries around the world) has now reached replacement-level fertility — in other words, they’ve stopped or even reversed human population growth.
If you’re looking for good news in today’s world, that is it!
If you’re looking for bad news — most of those countries’ governments absurdly want their populations to grow endlessly.
DOLORES HUERTA is a hero, as she speaks the truth that some farm owners do NOT want to hear.
the fact that the cancer rate for Latino children is more than 3 times the number of the non Latino child population should tell you: GENOCIDE BY PESTICIDE!
I live in Watsonville. the fact that our entire city is considered one entire spray zone should tell you something: our residents are children of a lesser god. it is time for Mr. Driscoll to get a damn clue about organic farming. our city of Watsonville is NOT a test zone for the pesticide and herbicide industry. our residents are NOT collateral damage for the farming industry. and all of us need to provide for the best health care for children, and not allow trumpdump and the RETHUGLICANS to cut Medi-Cal funding.