When Food Workers Rebel | Historic Farm Worker Lawsuit Filed Against Monsanto

Image courtesy of True
Activist

Monsanto has known for decades that
it falsely advertises the safety of Roundup®

PLAINTIFFS
CLAIM HERBICIDE CAUSED THEIR CANCERS

Devon G.
Peña | Viejo San Acacio, CO | October 2, 2015

In a nation
cursed and spooked by incessant surveillance of the population – including
constant monitoring of worker productivity and social activity – it can seem
surprising that we really do not know how many farm workers get sick or die as
a result of pesticide poisoning each year.

The
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that anywhere between 10 and 20
thousand farm workers are poisoned by pesticides every year. The problem of
figuring out how many is exacerbated by the fact that, as of 2015, only 30
states require health professionals to report suspected pesticide poisoning.

Despite the fact that the EPA administers a
so-called Worker Protection
Standard – which establishes a framework
to assist with the regulation of pesticide use and to protect workers and
handlers – the agency, amazingly enough, maintains no comprehensive database to
track pesticide exposure incidents nationwide; see Public
Integrity 2012.

According to Farmworker Justice, a Washington
D.C.-based advocacy group, and the Center
for Public Integrity, a non-profit dedicated to critical investigative
reporting, a 2006 EPA slideshow opened with a question: How many occupational
pesticide incidents are there each year in the United States? The slide listed
multiple possibilities, from 1,300 to 300,000.

Photo courtesy of Popular
Resistance

This is not a joke and this sort of imprecision
cannot be defended or justified. It would not be allowed in a primary school
mathematics exam. This statistical erasure of the pesticide-farm worker health
nexus can and should be seen as part of how corporate agribusiness and government
officials maintain a system of labor control that usually spells ‘slow death’
for farm workers. The unfolding politics of biomonitoring notwithstanding, this
statistical blindspot functions to suppress and disrupt more effective use of
pesticide related data by social movements to challenge the current
agro-industrial model of chemical-intensive monocultures; read the recent and
brilliant dissertation by Bhavna Shamasunder, Body
Burden Politics: How Biomonitoring Data is Influencing Chemicals Governance in
the U.S. who concludes:

Over
the coming years, as biomonitoring data becomes more routine, it remains to be
seen whether its uses will narrow, as has been the case with chemical risk
assessment, or whether it will actually be a tool that can help usher in more
precautionary regulation and policies. In the meantime, it is clear that
biomonitoring data, leveraged by social movements, has made strides, slowly but
surely, in pushing for changes to chemicals governance. (2011: 91)

Farmworker
Justice reports that many pesticide poisoning incidents go unreported due
to a number of factors, including workers’ reluctance or inability to seek
medical care, workers waiting to seek medical care in Mexico, the occurrence of
medical misdiagnosis, and health provider failure to report. Factors deterring
farmworkers and their families from seeking medical care for pesticide illness
include lack of health insurance, language barriers, immigration status,
cultural factors, lack of transportation, lack of awareness of or exclusion
from workers’ compensation benefits, and fear of job loss.

Indeed,
according to Gregory Schell, a managing attorney with
the Migrant
Farmworker Justice Project a
mere fraction of the pesticide incidents are reported: “One-tenth of 1 percent,
in Florida.”

Molokai protest against Monsanto.

Photo courtesy of Occupy Monsanto

Farm workers sue Monsanto over
roundup herbicide

A historic
lawsuit by two farm workers against the Monsanto Corporation may very well
change this travesty by making both corporate and governmental forces
accountable for the systematic and deliberate failure to reveal the existence
of cautionary scientific evidence before approval of the agro-chemical and to
adopt a comprehensive, clear, and accurate database to inform regulatory and
precautionary polices and practices.

The plaintiffs claim that Monsanto has
sold the herbicide, Roundup, knowing well the scientific evidence that it can cause
the cancer that is afflicting these two workers. The farm workers’ claims come
on the heels of the earth-shaking decision earlier this year (March) by the
World Health Organization (WHO) to list glyphosate (the generic name for
Roundup) as a carcinogen; the findings are reported by the International Agency
for Research on Cancer and can be found here, IARC-Glyphosate.
Earlier this month, California’s Environmental
Protection Agency also issued plans to list glyphosate as a confirmed carcinogen.

According to a brief
but excellent report filed by Lorraine Chow for EcoWatch,
the first suit, Enrique Rubio v.
Monsanto Company, comes from Enrique Rubio, a 58-year-old
former field worker who worked in California, Texas and Oregon. According
to the original source, Reuters,
Rubio was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1995, and believes it stemmed from
exposure to Monsanto’s widely popular weedkiller and other pesticides that he
sprayed on cucumber, onion and other vegetable crops. Rubio’s case was
filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Sept. 22. The Rubio brief can
be found here at the Legal Reader website: Rubio v.
Monsanto Company.

The second lawsuit,
according to Chow’s report, which was filed that same day is Fitzgerald v. Monsanto Company.
This was filed in federal court in New York by 64-year-old Judi Fitzgerald, who
was diagnosed with leukemia in 2012. She claims that her exposure to
Roundup at the horticultural products company she worked for in
the 1990s led to her diagnosis.

Chow’s summary of the filing is that the
plaintiffs have accused the company of falsifying the safety of the
product and putting people at risk.

Fitzgerald’s suit states:

Monsanto assured the public that
Roundup was harmless. In order to prove this, Monsanto championed
falsified data and attacked legitimate studies that revealed its dangers.
Monsanto led a prolonged campaign of misinformation to convince government
agencies, farmers and the general population that Roundup was safe.

Chow’s report notes
how an appeals court in Lyon, France upheld a 2012 ruling against Monsanto,
in which the company was found guilty of the chemical poisoning of a farmer
named Paul François. Monsanto plans to appeal the decision to a higher court.

Artwork courtesy of Portland Underground

What this means for the non-GMO movement

It seems reasonable to
expect that there will be additional product liability lawsuits in the
aftermath of the WHO and California classifications of glyphosate as a
carcinogen. It may very well turn out that the demise of Monsanto’s herbicide
resistant line of transgenic crops will be in large part the result of farm
workers use of existing product liability laws rather than just the mass
mobilizations occurring under the burgeoning non-GMO and food justice/food
democracy social movements.

The non-GMO movement
is satisfactorily diverse but it has had a paucity of farm worker and diaspora food
chain worker representation at official gatherings and conferences. The links
between the farm worker and food justice movements on the one hand and the
non-GMO activists networks on the other are likely to grow stronger as a result
of these lawsuits but we must all actively encourage these linkages so as to
circulate our struggles across the still extant divides of class, race, gender,
and national origin.