Unions, students debate grapes

A student-proposed University grape boycott doesn't hold much water, according to some national environmental and public-interest organizations.

Mi Gente, a Latino student organization, and Student Action with Farm Workers are demanding that University vendors break their current contracts with distributors of California table grapes to protest the effects of pesticides on farm workers who handle grape crops.

But while Mi Gente and some environmental groups and workers' unions insist that pesticides pose critical health threats, other organizations have countered such claims with data of their own.

Trinity senior Roberto Lopez, president of Mi Gente, said the group is basing its platform on data it received from the United Farm Workers, a labor union which has formally advocated a grape boycott for several years. According to a UFW brochure, 12 million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on table-grape crops in 1988, and the World Resource Institute estimates that 300,000 farm workers are poisoned each year.

Other governmental and special-interest organizations strongly disagree with the UFW's data. The Grape Workers and Farmers Coalition, an independent consortium for farm workers that opposes UFW's boycott and is supported by the California State Environmental Protection Agency, maintains that the boycott is based on outdated and weakly supported facts and is used as a fund-raising vehicle for the union.

"The UFW is very general in its criticism and data and is very reluctant to give out sources or supporting information," said Ricardo Chavez Baiz, director of GWFC and a former UFW supporter who was a farm worker for 14 years. "The last thing farm owners want to do is place a negative image on their industry or spray their fields with dangerous pesticides. They're out in their fields as much as their employees."

Lopez and Trinity freshman Rohit Khanna, a DSG representative who is proposing legislation that would support Mi Gente's stance, said they were unaware of the existence of GWFC. They said that they did not contact any environmental groups to gather additional information.

Baiz asserts that UFW has continued its boycott over the years to recoup financial losses suffered from decreasing membership.

Much of the research conducted on pesticides' adverse effects focuses on consumer rather than worker hazards. Still, debate surrounding health dangers to workers rages on between sides. According to UFW statistics, in Earlimart, CA, a community of about 4,000 located near grape fields, the cancer rate is 1,200 percent higher than the national average. Six cancer cases have been documented there. UFW also claims that farm owners send workers into fields that have recently been treated with pesticides, furthering the chances of health problems.

Baiz, however, said that when he was a field worker picking tomatoes, farm owners would not spray crops until workers had left for the weekend. When they returned to pick crops on Sunday, they worked in fields that were sprayed the previous Friday, nine days before.

A number of EPA regulations were passed in 1992 to increase worker safety, including policies that: created restricted-entry intervals for all pesticides; required employers to notify workers about the date, location and products used in pesticide applications; required employers to provide clean water, soap and towels for field workers; and required safety training for employees. According to the Journal of Pesticide Reform, such regulations "should avert 80 percent of the adverse health effects of pesticides."

UFW officials want to see more concrete actions taken to improve workers' conditions, Sherman said.

"They're great paper laws. There's not enough enforcement," Sherman said.

The California state EPA, however, claims that such laws are sufficiently enforced.

"California has the nation's largest and best-trained field enforcement organization," said James Wells, director of California EPA's department of pesticide regulation, in a letter to a Canadian government official. "California is the only state in the nation with agricultural commissioners in each county with authority to enforce pesticide laws."

The UFW has called for a ban on the use of six pesticides which possibly lead to cancer and birth defects. Of those six, only one, captan, is ranked on a list of the top 18 pesticides in use in California grape fields, according to a 1991 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The report ranked captan second among fungicides commonly used on grape crops.

The National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, a public research group, supports the grape boycott, said Sarah Sullivan, operations director of NCAMP. The group culls much of its supporting data from a book published in 1987 by the NRDC, "Pesticide Alert." According to the book, "28 percent of domestically-grown grapes had detectable levels of pesticides," while 44 percent of imported grape samples did.

An independent testing of 13,203 California table grape specimens conducted by the Health Protection Branch of the Canadian government found that 98 percent of specimens showed no detectable pesticide residue, and only .1 percent of the samples contained residue amounts that exceeded government-imposed maximum residue limits.

Nevertheless, Lopez and Khanna said they believe that UFW's data is accurate and that there is a scientific consensus that current pesticide practices seriously threaten farm workers' health.

"And even aside from pesticide issues, the treatment of the labor is enough to make me not want to eat grapes," Lopez said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the average income of a farm worker's family is less than $5,000 a year, said Trinity junior Arantxa Ascunce, social chair of Mi Gente and a supporter of the boycott.

Lopez also said that the University is bound to by a 1988 administrative resolution to uphold the boycott. According to Lopez, the resolution stipulated that the University would not sell grapes until working conditions in California improved, "not until students felt like eating grapes again. This was never a student issue. It's a clear violation of the previous policy."

Wes Newman, director of dining and special services, said the resolution was a voluntary agreement on the part of auxiliary services administrators and is not binding on future decisions.

Lopez said he is confident that the boycott will win both DSG's and the administration's support.

Lopez also said that he thinks the administration will be receptive to the data student supporters of the boycott present to them.

"I personally don't think the administration is doing research at all or making any effort to do so," Lopez said.

But Charles Putman, executive vice president, said that the administration will not make a fast or "blind" decision about the boycott.

"We'll look at independent facts and we'll look at what other institutions are doing," Putman said. "We are going to make an informed decision based on facts, and not necessarily the facts presented by one group or another."

At least one student opposes the boycott. Engineering freshman Adam Needles said he wishes to offer a counter-argument to Mi Gente's platform at next Wednesday's DSG meeting. Needles said he feels Mi Gente has not provided sufficient data to warrant a University boycott of grapes.

Needles also said the boycott is a student issue as well as a political one.

"I'm concerned about other people restricting the services I get from this University," he said. "If a decision is based only on what Mi Gente says, that would be a serious travesty of justice that I'm sure the administration doesn't want to see."