About 40 people gathered outside the CineLux Green Valley Cinema in Watsonville Friday to protest new regulations by the Department of Pesticide Regulation regarding 1,3-dichloropropene, also called Telone, a pesticide widely used in California.
The event, sponsored by Safe Ag Safe Schools (SASS) and Future Leaders of Change, set the stage for the showing of the documentary film, “Leading Change,” which is by and about farm working communities protecting each other and the environment and is part of the Watsonville Film Festival.
During the event, residents of farmworker communities, labor unions, teachers and health professionals heard from four speakers.
This included SASS organizer Yanely Martinez and Jacob Martinez, State Director for California League for United Latin American Citizens.
Martinez said that DPR adopted the new regulation despite evidence by the Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment—DPRs own sister department—that shows how hazardous it is.
“DPR has chosen to protect DOW Chemical’s profits over the health of our community, our farm working communities that are disproportionately Latino and indigenous,” she said. “With the new president coming in, this is a fight we must all be a part of.”
Mark Weller of SASS said Telone is a cancer-causing fumigant pesticide and toxic air contaminant that is banned in 34 countries, but is the 3rd most used pesticide in California and the Monterey Bay region by pounds.
The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has said that the maximum safe exposure for Telone in the air is 0.04 parts per billion.
But the concentration of Telone at the six active state pesticide air-monitors, including one at Ohlone Elementary School near Watsonville, has exceeded OEHHA’s lifetime cancer risk level, since testing started in 2011.
“At the beginning of this year, DPR implemented a regulation for 1,3-D that applies only to children and residents, not field workers or campesinos,” Sandoval said. “DPR completely ignores OEHHA’s legal limit of 4 and chooses 56 parts per billion instead. How did they get away with this? They chose bureaucracy over science. And what does that mean? It means that our communities are not being considered when they are making and drafting these regulations.”
The Department of Pesticide Regulation announced a rule Friday that maintains a cancer risk level 14 times more lenient than the level recommended by OEHHA scientists that is the same level called for by Telone’s manufacturer Dow Chemical, SASS said.
Weller added that while the regulation is designed to address “occupational bystanders,” farmworkers who work in nearby fields, “the new rule will not protect them from cancer-causing 1,3-D and is an example of systemic environmental racism.”
The documentary film, “Leading Change,” featured seven short films that touched on a graduate of UC Berkeley School of Journalism who covered how a high school student got a bill through legislature that dealt with the creation of buffer regulations near schools. Another film showed how a Monterey County Arts Grant was put to use by a film crew from SASS to make five short student-made films on farm workers and their families in the Salinas Valley. The film, “The American Dream,” dealt with how that dream failed many people due to chemical exposure in the farming world.
