FJ's Deputy Director Wins Lifetime Achievement Award
Written by barb howe Monday, 24 March 2008 15:42
Few people have left a trail of such important and influential accomplishments in the field of farmworkers' rights than our Deputy Director Shelley Davis. That's why one of our partner organizations, Beyond Pesticides presented her with the Dragonfly Lifetime Achievement Award on March 14th at the 26th National Pesticide Forum in Berkeley, California.
Her acceptance speech is inspiring and a moving call to action, reminding us that we all have a calling to continue the fight for farmworkers' rights. It is re-printed below.
Dragonfly Award Acceptance Speech
By Shelley Davis
In 1989, Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, went on a hunger strike, not to demand better wages, although those were needed, but to demand that five pesticides be eliminated from grape orchards and the agricultural workplace in general.
These five products were...
- parathion and phosdrin, highly toxic products that affect the brain and nervous system;
- dinseb, which was shown in animal studies to cause birth defects from a single, low level exposure;
- captan, which in both animal and human epidemiological studies, is associated with increased risk of cancer; and
- methyl bromide, a neurotoxin that is also associated with both birth defects and cancer.
Three of these pesticides were eliminated in the course of the next six years: parathion, phosdrin and dinoseb. I and many other advocates worked on these efforts, and it was my privilege to be one of the lead attorneys in the dinoseb case.
But captan, the probable human carcinogen remains in widespread use. Methyl bromide continues to be extensively used in strawberries and tomatoes, in California and Florida. Nevertheless, it was supposed to be banned worldwide by 2005, under the Montreal treaty due to its ozone depleting properties.
Consequently, Cesar’s fight remains our own.
One reason that these and other highly dangerous products continue to be used in American agriculture today is that the law, the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act or FIFRA, governing pesticide use on farms is extremely weak.
To eliminate the use of hazardous pesticides on farms, farmworkers must prove that the costs outweigh the benefits. This standard is nearly impossible to meet: The “benefits” to growers from using a particular pesticide are easily stated in dollar terms. But the state of scientific knowledge today is insufficient to allow us to quantify the number of people who will suffer cancer or birth defects as a result of the use of a particular product, much less put a dollar value on those harms – even when animal studies show a link between exposure to the product and these chronic health effects. Consequently, w e have been fighting this fight with the scales tipped in favor of the pesticide companies from the outset. This inequity must change.
We owe it to farmworkers and their families today, and the memory of Cesar Chavez, to change the law and change the reality on the ground – so that no one has to work in an environment where they risk neurological damage, cancer or birth defects when they go to work each day.
As activists, we can make a difference!
Finally, it is my great pleasure to accept this award on behalf of the farmworkers I represent, not because of any great accomplishments of the past, but as a commitment to fight this fight until we succeed.
| < Prev |
|---|