Thank you very much for having me and for the opportunity to speak to the review of the Pest Control Products Act.
Since I began working at West Coast Environmental Law in 2001, I've had the privilege, among other projects, of working with groups of farm workers and the organizations that work with them and speaking with them about their exposure to pesticides. It's been said that the measure of a society is how well we treat the most vulnerable among us. With that in mind, I'd like to focus my presentation on what the Pest Control Products Act says about farm workers and how we protect them.
I should emphasize that I think many aspects of the act in general are sound, but I will be touching on some specific concerns around how the act and the implementation of the act have perhaps not protected farm workers as well as they should. I'm going to make four points.
First of all, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency makes unrealistic assumptions that the pesticide labels are fully complied with when it evaluates the impact of pesticides on farm workers. Second, there are some cases where there's been undue delay in putting in place protective measures for farm workers during the review process. Third, the PMRA does not currently consider the combined exposure from occupational exposure and non-workplace exposures when it evaluates the risks of pesticides for farm workers. Fourth, farm workers and others would benefit from increased public disclosure of data related to pesticide use in Canada.
On the first point, the assumption of 100% compliance, the PMRA relies very heavily on pesticide labels as a means of controlling exposure to otherwise dangerous products. Subsection 2(2) of the act allows them to take into account the conditions or proposed conditions of registration, but as I understand it, the PMRA interprets that section as allowing it to assume that all the requirements of the pesticide label will be fully complied with, which is perhaps an unrealistic assumption, and certainly, we believe it is an unusual assumption.
The Pest Control Products Act was developed after extensive consultations by the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, resulting in their “Pesticides: Making the Right Choice” report. At that time, the committee wrote:
The use of pesticides should be investigated to determine whether end-users comply with label instructions. This will enable the PMRA (and indeed the government in general) to determine whether they can continue to rely on product labels as a key risk management tool.
That research has not occurred. The PMRA still does not know what level of compliance actually occurs on the ground in terms of those labels, yet they rely on them very heavily, assuming full compliance with them in determining whether there is a risk to workers' health and to the environment. It's our view that likely there is non-compliance occurring. The conditions that appear on pesticide labels are often fairly complicated, even for Canadians who actually read French and English.
A 2008 report, “Health Literacy in Canada”, highlighted that about 48% of Canadians have trouble understanding complicated written instructions such as those that appear on pesticide labels. Given that the pesticide labels are available only in English and French, there's even less basis for assuming compliance when we're talking about farm worker communities that may be predominately Spanish, such as the Mexican workers, or who may be Punjabi-speaking, such as occurs in much of the Fraser Valley.
Second, we know from talking with farm workers that they believe they're being exposed to pesticides, and there is some evidence from those conversations that label conditions are not always being complied with. Our own research was done around 2005 and involved two focus groups—relatively small groups—and a survey of 73 Punjabi-speaking farm workers.
We didn't have a lot of information about which specific pesticides were being used, so it was not possible to say conclusively whether the labels were or weren't being followed. However, there were some very suggestive results. Of the workers who reported applying pesticides, 30% reported that their employers had never provided them with any type of safety gear, and 64% of all the farm workers we surveyed reported having experienced some type of symptoms that were consistent with some level of pesticide poisoning. We gave them the various symptoms and asked them to rank whether they associated them with their use of pesticides.
Even when farm workers were provided with safety gear, they reported that they often did not use it. A more recent academic report involving surveys and a series of interviews with farm workers in the Fraser Valley in 2010 found very similar results.
In general, the PMRA has no actual evidence about what level of compliance is occurring in these communities. Therefore, this type of anecdotal evidence I think needs to be given some weight. The PMRA can, of course, take into account what's on the pesticide labels, but they certainly should not be assuming that they will always be followed.
Second, with regard to re-evaluations and farm workers, we know that the re-evaluations that occur can be very slow and that they can fail to provide interim protections for farm workers during that long many-year process, even where health risks are identified. A startling example of that is the review that was done of endosulfan. The re-evaluation started in 2002, and it wasn't until eight years later, in 2010, that the PMRA recommended the phase-out of the pesticide because of identified health concerns to the environment and to human health. Their recommendation came roughly two months after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had announced that it would be phasing out the pesticide.
The important thing here is that in 2004, two years into the process, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency proposed interim measures that were specifically intended to protect farm workers, because they had already identified that there were some health issues in play, but those interim measures were not implemented until five years later, in November 2009. Obviously a five-year delay in implementing protection for farm workers is troubling, but it doesn't appear to be completely atypical, even though the PMRA emphasizes that the endosulfan review was unusually complex. We're told that of 15 reviews where they proposed this type of interim measure, it took on average three years from when the measures were proposed to when they were actually implemented. In one case it took as long as seven years.
In our submission, where there is a potential risk to the health of farm workers, the PMRA must act with all haste to either confirm the risk or to implement protective measures that will actually ensure farm worker health.
Third, in terms of the risk assessment, the PMRA does not currently consider the workplace exposure of workers in combination with the non-workplace exposure. They interpret this as being the result of sections of the Pest Control Products Act that require them to consider aggregate exposure from non-occupational sources. But if you don't consider the two together, you're not adequately modelling and assessing the risk to one farm worker who does of course experience these exposures in both the workplace and when they're home, and who usually lives in an area subject to higher non-occupational exposure through drift, through contamination of water, and through other measures that are associated with living near or on farms. So we recommend that the word “non-occupational” be removed from the relevant sections of the Pest Control Products Act.
Finally, since 2006 the pest control products sales and information reporting regulations have required their registrants to report how much of each pesticide they've sold by province. The PMRA generates some general reports about trends and aggregate amounts of pesticides used in Canada, but the data itself is not available to Canadians. By contrast, several U.S. states provide full disclosure of what pesticides are used where, and often down to the county level. This allows groups working with farm workers and other vulnerable groups to have better information to inform and better protect farm workers.
In conclusion, the Pest Control Products Act was meant to take a precautionary approach and adopt strong protection for the environment and human health. As for farm workers, it has not yet lived up to its potential.
Thank you.