Grist just tweeted this story and it made me pause because I have been following the Methyl Iodide issue for a while now.
California grows a huge number of the Strawberries Americans eat and Methyl Iodide is legal to use here as a fumigant in the ground prior to planting strawberries. MI is not only questionable as to its safety, it is absolutely not safe. Laboratories use it to reliably give lab mice cancer in order to figure out how to treat or cure it. It is just that great at giving living things cancer.
Mother Jones did a piece on this pesticide earlier last month, Methyl Iodide: A Nasty Pesticide Explained.
When the state of California convened an independent scientific advisory panel to assess its risks, the finding (PDF) was blunt: Methyl iodide is a "highly toxic chemical" and its use in farm fields "would result in exposures to a large number of the public and thus would have a significant adverse impact on the public health." Preventing exposure to it would be "difficult, if not impossible," the panel concluded.
But what happened years prior, this pesticide was approved because of profit, because of money over human health, because it was more important than protecting farm workers and those who live near strawberry fields.
More than 50 scientists and doctors, including five Nobel laureates in chemistry, wrote an "urgent" letter (PDF) to the EPA warning the agency about the dangers of methyl iodide, but to no avail: In October 2007, the EPA approved its use. This remains one of the agency's most controversial decisions ever.
"We are concerned that pregnant women and the fetus, children, the elderly, farmworkers, and other people living near application sites would be at serious risk if methyl iodide is permitted for use in agriculture," they wrote. The EPA brushed aside their concerns, and the decision remains in effect today. Weeks after the EPA's decision, Arysta—suddenly poised to take over the lucrative US fruit fumigation market—was sold for a cool $2.2 billion.
The frustration for someone like me? When I purchase "organic" strawberries, I assume that they are grown in pristine ground that is not treated with chemicals like Methyl Iodide, but that simply may not be the case.
While there are a number of farms using organic practices to raise the berries (most keep them in the ground from one to two years), they must rely on commercial-scale plant nurseries for young plants. By the time those plants, or "starts" as they're called, make it to the farm, they have usually gone through an entire year's growing cycle in the nursery.
If it's a conventional nursery, that means the soil they're grown in has been fumigated with a whole array of chemicals, including methyl bromide, a soil sterilizer and pesticide known to be depleting the ozone layer.
(As an aside, what The Bay Citizen didn't mention is that methyl bromide is thankfully being phased out -- but the EPA and the state of California are allowing the use of an even more toxic chemical, methyl iodide, instead. We're saving the climate at the expense of farmworkers' and their families' health.)
Source
Now, Grist makes an important point that these chemicals can wind up being of little harm to those who ingest the Strawberries but who winds up paying the highest cost? Farm workers and those who live near the fields.
So where does the strawberry situation fall? In a grey area, unfortunately: The fumigants aren't particularly a risk to consumers -- there's no evidence of residue on the plants, and certainly not on the fruit that's grown organically. They are, however, very dangerous to the people who use them, as well as to the communities in which they are used.
For me, there is no gray when it comes to chemicals like methyl iodide, it's either organic or it is not. And more than likely, the people who work in these fields are people of color who make minimum wage, have no health care or benefits and put their lives at risk so I can eat strawberries?
What is wrong with this?
And then the communities that live around these large areas of crops are also usually lower economically, people of color, you name it, they are not the ones who are actually going to be able to afford the organic strawberries but merely get to live with the side effects of living so close to such a field.
Going organic and wanting less pesticides and fertilizers used in our food production is meant not only to minimize the risk to our families, but to minimize the risk to those who work to provide us with the food we eat and to the impact the growing of that food has on our environment, from the health of the soil to water pollution.
This should mean we all benefit, not just some of us. I hope something can change so that there is no loop hole, I myself have found it very difficult to find organic strawberry starts when planting in the spring and who doesn't love strawberries? But there is just no excuse to explain away such loopholes or to say that such a pesticide like this is okay because it doesn't directly affect the consumer.