Farm workers are exposed to dangerous pesticides daily, often the most severe class – highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs). While men often do the spraying, women farmworkers are also vulnerable to pesticide exposure, which occurs in multiple ways, including when pesticides are applied while they are working without proper protective clothing and when they are forced to re-enter vineyards soon after pesticides have been sprayed.
In spraying season, those living on and adjacent to farms experience the familiar symptoms of exposure to cocktails of toxic pesticides drifting in the air – causing asthma, sinus, streaming eyes, mood swings, headaches – and many will know the long-term impacts in their bodies in years to come.
Farm bosses often ignore regulations regarding training, access to information, protective gear, wash stations, etc., and no one is monitoring them. Thus, farm workers are not guaranteed the proper pesticide protection equipment when handling pesticides. Basic safety protocols such as when to spray, ensuring the correct environmental conditions, maintaining adequate distance from pesticide spraying, and maintaining correct re-entry times are consistently disregarded.
For women farm workers and dwellers, pesticide exposure is greater and graver. The precarious nature of their seasonal employment and her insecure land tenure leaves them with very little bargaining power. In an attempt to feed their families, farmwomen accept the worst conditions of employment, which often includes pesticide exposure coupled with no access to toilets or drinking water during the work day.
The secondary effects of pesticide exposure include the disruption of the women’s endocrine system which reduces a women’s fertility and can produce birth defects in unborn children. Growing children are also at high risk as their bodies are still developing. Pesticides in women make both mother and child suspectable to intergenerational and transgenerational effects.
Local clinics lack knowledge of pesticides in use in their vicinity, how to diagnose and treat poisoning, or their obligations to report pesticide poisoning.
The injustices that farm workers face are made worse by their isolated living conditions in rural areas and on private property, where human rights violations can easily go “unseen, unreported and unpunished”.
Farm workers live under extremely vulnerable and precarious working conditions where they have little to no bargaining power. They receive the barest minimum wage, with little access to health services.
HHPs have particularly devastating consequences for children
In 2023, experts published a paper showing that in one Cape Town mortuary, out of 50 children whose cause of death was suspected to be due to pesticides and for whom toxicological tests were conducted, 29 had died from Terbufos poisoning. Four others had died from the organophosphates methamidophos and diazinon. Of these deaths, 42.6% were children under five years and 40.7% were adolescents between 15 and 18. It is not only death by poisoning that is of concern, but also the long-term consequences of organophosphate poisoning for child development. There is increasing evidence that children surviving organophosphate poisoning suffer significant adverse neurodevelopmental impacts that will be lifelong.
Professor Leslie London from the University of Cape Town’s School of Public Health stressed that “the Minister of Agriculture must note the Constitutional imperative that the child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child.”
No amount of traceability and labelling will make a substance designed to kill safe, and there is no ideal real-life situation where these toxins can be deployed safely. Thus we continue to advocate on the phasing out of HHPs.
