DPR needs to do more to protect ag communities - by jennifer khan

Originally published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Access online at www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20171117/LOCAL1/171119782

I gave a sigh of relief that the pesticide poisoning incident last summer, as awful as it was for the farm workers, did not occur during the school year when hundreds of children at MacQuiddy Elementary across the street from the farm might also have been harmed. However, despite the fact that school wasn’t in session, there might have been children playing on the playground. I work at the school a lot on weekends and during vacations, and often there are many children playing there. Last summer there were also various construction workers and painters working at the school.

As a teacher at MacQuiddy, it’s comforting to know the new Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) quarter-mile buffer zones around schools will make sure that no highly drift-prone applications will occur on that field during school hours in the future.
However, as my Amesti Elementary colleagues Margaret Rosa and Julie Vallens revealed in your pages last week, the new buffer zone policy may do little to reduce the harm of long-term exposure to pesticides. The DPR has much more to do to protect agricultural communities like ours from chronic pesticide harm.

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