A progressive lawmaker in the Legislature is pushing for a ban on use of the herbicide paraquat to protect farmworkers and neighboring communities. Standing against the measure, a coalition of agricultural interests is refuting the claims and trying to rapidly educate lawmakers on the complex and robust regulatory process for approving and applying pesticides.
Similar debates over paraquat have played out in U.S. EPA hearings and in federal courtrooms. The pesticide is one of several under scrutiny at the state level, as the Newsom administration embarks on a strategy to eliminate the use of certain controversial pesticides by 2050.
Decades of battles over the pesticide led to a policy committee hearing last week that was crammed with combat science, rapid-fire policy explainers, impassioned pleas for help and resounding applause for a farmworker labor icon—in just 30 minutes.
According to Assemblymember Laura Friedman of Glendale, the dangers that paraquat poses to public health and the environment are undeniable. The Los Angeles area lawmaker claimed that spray drift is hurting communities and that the chemical remains in the soil years after application, to be transported later in dust. She pointed to a 2019 metanalysis linking paraquat exposures to Parkinson’s disease and suggested that more than 60 countries have banned the herbicide as a result.
Friedman echoed many of the talking points of the Environmental Working Group, which sponsored her Assembly Bill 1963. The advocacy group has targeted Kern County, one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions, and calls it a hot spot for impacts to low-income Latino communities.
Alexis Temkin, a toxicologist at the group, told lawmakers that the U.S. EPA has ignored the harms and refuted 35 years of apparent evidence. She highlighted a study published in February by UCLA epidemiologists that correlates higher rates of use in the Central Valley to documented cases of Parkinson’s disease.
“The agency openly acknowledges that risk to farmworkers persist, despite the safety measures,” said Temkin. “Violations of mishandling have been reported.”
Defending the workers was Dolores Huerta, the 94-year-old labor icon who co-founded United Farm Workers in 1962 alongside Cesar Chavez.
“Paraquat is one of the greatest continuing threats to the health of farmworkers today,” said Huerta. “It's time for it to go.”
The presence of one of the state’s top labor leaders drew immediate support from Asm. Eloise Gómez Reyes of Colton, who has separately proposed a ban on an ingredient in decaffeinated coffee.
“I don't think there's anybody who has ever looked at and lived to the experiences of our farmworkers as you have,” Reyes said to Huerta. “I don't think farm workers have anybody who has a stronger voice than your voice.”
Despite pushback from industry, Reyes called it the duty of the Legislature to ban pesticides like paraquat, regardless of how expensive the alternative products and practices may be.
“When we don't know better, then we can't do better,” she said. “But once we know better, we've got to do better.”
Taylor Roschen, Kahn, Soares & Conway Like Friedman, Taylor Roschen, a lobbyist for the firm Kahn, Soares & Conway representing Western Plant Health and a coalition of agricultural associations, noted that paraquat has been widely used for decades and is well studied, with more than 1,200 safety studies reviewed by regulatory authorities around the world.
That research led EPA to put significant new restrictions on its use in 2020 to address concerns about accidental ingestion when it is illegally transferred from the container. Roschen went on to explain the many other safety steps involved with handling the pesticide. Only certified applicators can use it, after undergoing safety training every three years and donning personal protective equipment. Paraquat is a restricted material, meaning county agricultural commissioners must approve prescriptive permits prior to application, and fields are off limits for reentry for a certain period of time afterward.
Roschen countered the epidemiological studies cited by the bill’s proponents by referring to an EPA review in January concluding that exposure to paraquat does not lead to Parkinson’s disease. The same was true with a 25-year study of 66,000 pesticide applicators and their spouses by the National Institutes of Health. Just a week before the committee hearing, a federal appeals court judge ruled that no peer-reviewed scientific analysis has shown that paraquat causes Parkinson’s and he criticized the methodology environmental groups deployed in the lawsuit, calling it “unclear, inconsistently applied, not replicable, and at times transparently reverse engineered.”
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Roschen added that the countries that have banned the pesticide did so to prevent deliberate ingestion for self-harm.
“AB 1963 is, from our perspective, an unscientific ban that puts the Legislature in the driver's seat in making decisions about product safety,” she said.
Chris McGlothlin, who directs technical services for the Western Agricultural Processors Association and the California Cotton Ginners and Growers Association, described paraquat as a necessary and effective chemistry. Growers use it as a broad-spectrum herbicide to knock down weeds in almonds, grapes, pistachios, walnuts, soybean, corn and more. Cotton growers use it to defoliate mature plants to ensure efficiency when harvesting and processing, according to McGlothlin.
Similar chemistries require long delays for reentering the field for harvesting or planting and can lead to more harmful health impacts for any spray drift exposures, while plants are liable to develop a resistance to the products.
“The list of nonchemical control alternatives provides a rather ironic perspective on farming practices and the regulatory objectives made by the state,” said McGlothlin.
Steam is one alternative, but it requires a large combustion engine, uses a significant amount of water and indiscriminately kills beneficial soil microbes. Livestock grazing, on the other hand, would violate federal food safety standards. Farmers could disk fields to remove weeds, but that goes against state efforts to encourage low- and no-till practices to reduce dust pollution and boost soil health, explained McGlothlin.
Roschen described how such pesticide bans in the past have led to greater complications.
“Especially this last five years, we've been seeing more and more legislative removals of the type of alternative products that we need,” she said.
The most noteworthy ban during that time was Gov. Gavin Newsom’s prohibition on the use and sale of the insecticide chlorpyrifos in 2019, just months after taking office. The governor and CalEPA took the action as lawmakers were debating a chlorpyrifos ban, with arguments falling along similar lines to last week’s hearing on Friedman’s AB 1963.
Chris McGlothlin, WAPAEnacting an immediate ban, however, led to other problems, with agricultural organizations blasting the hasty decision and pleading with DPR to help with alternatives. The department hosted a working group, which also struggled to find options that were just as safe, effective and affordable. That effort evolved into a second working group—with Roschen as an active member—to craft a general strategy for developing alternatives to conventional pesticides before the state imposes such bans.
One of the pillars recommended in the report—dubbed the Sustainable Pest Management Roadmap—was to improve DPR’s registration process. The department has been notoriously slow to complete evaluations, taking up to five years for approval after the U.S. EPA has already given the greenlight and regardless of whether the product is organic, biological or synthetic.
“California farmers are already five years behind, when every other state has access to these products,” said Roschen, “which is why you hear such a reactionary response when this committee hears one-off bans.”
She shared that manufacturers have heard the call to action and have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year in research and development to identify reformulations or new active ingredients to use in place of legacy products.
“It is in the industry's best interest to diversify and improve the safety experience,” she said.
The frustrations over DPR’s sluggish pace and its outdated paper-based system resonated with Asm. Eduardo Garcia of Coachella, who chairs the committee and noted that the Legislature is considering a budget proposal by the governor to raise the mill assessment on pesticide sales, in part to cover the cost of improving the registration process.
The industry criticism, however, did not deter Friedman, who maintained that paraquat is causing a Parkinson’s epidemic. She argued that the many safety steps involved with handling the pesticide demonstrate that “there's so much potential for injury and for death” and that it is too toxic for safe use.
Friedman toned down the language in her bill slightly, amending it from an outright ban to a moratorium until DPR has reevaluated paraquat. Yet she insisted that it is the role of the Legislature to take action and borrowed arguments her supporters made during an earlier debate on a rodenticide ban she has authored.
“The opponents would much rather say, let's just keep things as they are until we have more of that data,” she said. “But I don't believe it's worth risking people's lives and safety to do that for the next number of years.”
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