The restaurant where we were having lunch had emptied, and on the jukebox Tammy Wynette was getting her second D-I-V-O-R-C-E in a little over an hour. After losing her job at Ag-Mart, Cisneros was offered bus-driving gigs by several crew bosses, but she had lost interest in agricultural work. Eventually she sold her bus and other farm equipment, recouping just enough to pay off her debts. At the time we met, she was unemployed. One of her three grown daughters had been diagnosed with cancer, and helping out with doctors’ bills had further strained her budget. She had fallen behind on rental payments, and her landlord knew that Cisneros was facing more medical expenses. He evicted them.
Outside the restaurant, she turned to me. “I agreed to be a witness because I wanted to help that poor little boy. I thought that if Andy could get them money, then at least Carlitos could have a comfortable life.”
Donald Long had only recently been appointed president of Ag-Mart when reports about the births of the deformed babies to women who had worked for his company began circulating. Long’s career path was similar to that of many executives in the tomato business. Shortly after graduating from the University of Florida with a BS degree in vegetable crops production in 1976, Long began working for a grower in the southwestern part of the state, and stayed at that company for twenty years. When Ag-Mart decided to begin producing tomatoes in addition to its traditional strawberry crop in the mid-1990s, Long was hired. His first title was simply “farmer.” Later he rose to vice-president of production and ultimately was promoted to president. When word reached him about the birth defects, he drove to Immokalee and met with the parents at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church. He offered to help find the fathers work in the area during the off season so that the families would not have to move or split up. He told them he would assist them with immigration issues. He told them that if there was anything that they needed, whatever it was, to let him know. He expressed his regrets for the situation they were in. Subsequently, he ordered that Ag-Mart stop using five chemicals that had been linked to reproductive problems in laboratory tests: metribuzin, methamidophos, mancozeb, oxamyl, and avermectin. What he did not do was admit that his company was in any way responsible for causing the children to be born the way they were.
Yaffa’s five-hour deposition of Long started out on a casual note. Where do you live? What do you do for work? How long have you been there? Where’d you grow up? What college did you go to? Yaffa assured Long that he would be given every opportunity to explain himself and that Yaffa was not there to cut him off or to trick him. “I just want to find out what you know,” Yaffa said. But the exchange soon became adversarial and, on occasion, argumentative, with Long’s lawyer issuing objections and forbidding his client to respond to Yaffa’s queries.
After establishing that Long had been a licensed pesticide applier before he left the fields for a desk in the executive offices, Yaffa zeroed in on Ag-Mart’s continued use of the pesticide methyl bromide. “Is that a product that if you would expose workers to it they might be at risk?” Yaffa asked.
“Risk of what?”
“Harm, long-term physical effects?”
“I don’t know about long-term physical effects. They might be—if they were exposed to it, there might be some instant harm or something involved with that, but long term risks, I’m not—I’m not an expert on what the long-term risk would be.”
“Pesticide-related illnesses, workers exposed to methyl bromide are certainly at risk for pesticide-related illnesses?”
“I’m not aware exactly what that risk would be.”
“You’ve used methyl bromide over the course of your career?”
“Yes.”
“You and your company continue to use it today?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a deadly product?”
“Correct.”
“It’s a restricted-use pesticide?”
“Correct.”
“You need to have a license to purchase it?”
“That is correct.”
“There are certain limitations and restrictions on how you use it?”
“Correct.”
“The reason there are such limitations and restrictions is why?”
“So that it is not in the hands of someone that has no training of how to use that product.”
“And?”
“And that—I don’t know—I mean, it’s a restricted-use pesticide which means it could have some harmful effect on a person.”
“It carries a warning with a skull and crossbones, doesn’t it?”
“That’s correct.”
“It is a Class I pesticide. Isn’t that right?”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Do you know what a Class I pesticide is?”
“It’s a very harmful pesticide.”
“One that is likely to cause death or serious injury if one is exposed?”
“Correct.”
“And your company, over the course of doing business, has and continues to use Class I pesticides in its business, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Each and every one of those Class I pesticides carries with it the warning of likely death or serious bodily injury if exposure occurs?”
“Correct.”
“And for that reason, these workers who are going to be working with it and around it need protection?”
“Correct.”
“If in fact the protections, as set forth in the Worker Protection Standard, are not followed, all these workers are at risk, correct?”
“If all the procedures are not followed, yes.”
“Each and every one is mandatory, correct?”
“Correct.”
“And if each and every one is not followed, your workers are at risk of exposure?”
“Not necessarily to a risk of exposure.”
“What do you mean? Do you think it’s okay to cut corners?”
“No.”
“Do you think you’re obligated to follow each and every mandate as set forth in the Worker Protection Standard?”
“Without a doubt.”
“All right. Do you agree that it would be wrong to violate and cut corners?”
“Yes. It would be wrong to violate and cut corners.”
“You agree that to cut corners would be in violation of both federal and state law?”
“That’s correct.”
“You would agree that to cut corners would put your employees at risk. And when I say ‘at risk’ I mean for serious bodily injury or harm from the pesticides?”
“Um, let me see how to answer this. If—I don’t know how to answer this. I think that anything that would expose the worker directly to the pesticide illegally, or by cutting a corner—which I don’t believe—we did not do, and we do not have the practice of doing that—would put someone at risk, if we were to cut that corner and put someone at risk.”
“And when you make that statement you’ll agree that if in fact corners are being cut and the Worker Protection Standard is not being followed, these employees are at risk for developing the long-term sequels and effects of these pesticides?”
“I don’t know whether they are developing long-term effects. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know that.”
“You and I can get beyond that right here at the outset, okay? You’re not a scientist, but you know that there is a question about the long-term effects of pesticide exposure to everybody that works with them in and out—correct?”
“I don’t know that there is a long-term effect to pesticide exposure.”
“Have you done any research on this topic?”
“Have I?”
“Yeah, you. Mr. Long. Don Long.”
“Yes, I have looked at what is out there.”
“And have you looked to see whether there are animal studies which relate to long-term exposure and birth defects?”
“But they haven’t related—they have for animal studies.”
“Are you
telling me that you think they are going to do that kind of study for humans?”
“No, no, I don’t think they are going to do that kind of study for humans.”
“So in regards to the pesticides that you use day in and day out, as you sit here today you are aware that there are, in fact, studies linking animals who are exposed to these pesticides to birth defects?”
“Yes, there are studies.”
“This isn’t new to you?”
“No, no, this is not new.”
“You’ve known about this for a long time?”
“Yes.”
“Years?”
“Correct.”
“Long before these babies were born to your employees with birth defects?”
“That’s correct.”
Having established that Long knew that studies existed linking pesticides to birth defects in animals, Yaffa turned to the company’s policy about allowing pregnant women to work in its fields. “Tell me about restrictions, limitations, rules, if any, that Ag-Mart has to keep pregnant women from working with methyl bromide when it’s being injected into the soil.”
“We don’t have any rules to keep pregnant women from working with that.”
“Why not?”
“We do not have any rules to keep anybody from working with it there. We do not discriminate against people for being pregnant.”
“Do you call that discrimination or protection?”
Long went on to make the point that employees were aware that risks were involved in agricultural work and took those risks into consideration before coming to work.
“Do you tell these people what is being sprayed when?” asked Yaffa.
“Yes. There is a list of what’s—what applications have been out there. There’s a central posting for that.”
“How many of these people don’t read?”
“Probably quite a few of them.”
“Okay, so in regard to your central posting that means nothing to those people, correct?”
“Probably not.”
Another heated exchange erupted when Yaffa questioned the reasons and the timing for Ag-Mart’s withdrawal of the five pesticides after the Immokalee deformities became public.
“Why did it take that for Ag-Mart to be proactive and take that step?”
“Because at Ag-Mart, Santa Sweets, that—I think that the products that we were involved with were consumer-based products, and I think that there was a misconception between the consumer and people that maybe believed that if they ate the product it might create a birth defect.”
“So I want to make sure I get this crystal clear. The change in pesticide policy was made out of concern that there was a misconception on the consumer’s side?”
“Yeah, and that if we needed to create a—a safe working environment for employees is to whatever changes we needed to do that.”
“If, in fact, there was a misconception on the consumer end that would directly affect Ag-Mart’s profits?”
“It could affect our business, yes.”
“So Ag-Mart’s concern about their profits came directly into play in their decision to stop using pesticides known to be linked to cancer in lab animals?”
“No, and the perception of the business within—within the ad community and the worker community, it was a whole round situation of what was—what was going to be better for our workers and what was going to be better for our product.”
“Yes, but profit came directly—”
“No.”
“Let me get the whole question out. You knew for years that these pesticides were linked to birth defects in lab animals. We talked about that… Knowing the risk was there, why not be proactive and take that step before you have three women bearing children with such horrific defects?”
“Well, the three women were not all—I don’t believe that –this is my belief, so I—I—don’t believe that the pesticides caused the birth defects. I believe that the pesticides have been tested to cause birth defects in animals, but I don’t believe pesticides caused birth defects in those three women.”
To Yaffa’s disappointment, Long’s belief was given official legitimacy ten months after Carlitos’s birth when the Collier County Health Department issued the results of its investigation into the Immokalee deformities. After consulting with a leading Florida geneticist, department officials said that pesticides were unlikely to have been the cause of the cluster of birth defects. “We were unable to make the link between the pesticide usage and the birth defects in these particular women,” Joan Colfer, the director of the department, told the Naples News. “That doesn’t totally rule it out. It’s just that we were unable to make the link.” Which was the very link that Yaffa, who contended that the Collier investigation amounted to nothing more than a noninvestigation, needed to make in the minds of a jury.
A critical break in the suit came when Yaffa found out that Maria Meza, the woman who had given birth to Violetta, the Tower Cabin baby who died a few days after being born, had aborted an earlier pregnancy at the suggestion of doctors. That pregnancy had also begun while she was working in the Immokalee fields. Like Carlitos, the aborted fetus had neither arms nor legs. The odds of finding two cases of tetra-amelia in a small community were extremely remote. Then an investigator who was interviewing former Florida farmworkers in Mexico reported that he had found a woman in an isolated village who had been working in Immokalee several years earlier and had given birth to a stillborn child. That baby was also limbless. Although the statute of limitations had passed and she had nothing to gain, the woman agreed to testify. A member of Yaffa’s legal team traveled to the village and deposed the woman. It was the legal equivalent of lightning striking in the same place three times. A trial date in the case of Francisca Herrera and Abraham Candelario as parents and natural guardians of Carlos Herrera-Candelario v. Ag-Mart Produce, Inc. was set.
On Friday, March 21, 2008, nearly three years after Yaffa took on the case, he and Ag-Mart’s legal team met to try to reach a settlement. Negotiations lasted into the night, and when the two parties emerged, they had a deal in hand. Ag-Mart admitted no guilt but agreed to pay a substantial sum. Both sides agreed that the exact terms of the settlement would remain sealed. “The amount assures that Carlitos will have all the care he needs for the rest of his life,” Yaffa said. At the request of Candelario and Herrera, the money was placed in a life-care plan, overseen by a trustee who is charged with making sure that any funds that are spent directly benefit the boy. The family was able to purchase a small bungalow in Immokalee. Carlitos moves about in a custom-designed wheelchair and is enrolled in school. He is an intelligent, out-going little boy who is well liked by his classmates. Candelario still works in the fields, but Herrera was able to stop picking tomatoes and devote all her time to her boy. Two years after the settlement, she discovered that she was pregnant with a second child. Carlitos’s little sister was born in 2010, “a beautiful baby” according to Yaffa. “Carlitos’s birth stands for a whole lot more than a child born without arms and legs,” Yaffa said. “This child has changed the system.”
Or part of the system. Sadly, pesticide exposure is only one of a long list of abuses that the men and women who pick our winter tomatoes have to endure.
FROM THE HANDS
OF A SLAVE
Should you want to experience culture shock in one of its starkest forms, take the drive from Naples, Florida, to Immokalee. Your journey will begin in a city of handsome boulevards lined with stately palms and bordered by well-trimmed street-side planting strips of tropical shrubs. Visitors and winter residents alike dine at outdoor cafes and shop at expensive boutiques, antique stores, art galleries, and high-end chains like Cartier, De Beers, Saks Fifth Avenue, Gucci, Tiffany, and Hermès. Hundreds of yachts create traffic-jam conditions in the blue waters of the harbor, and squadrons of private jets whistle in and out of the municipal airport. “Ultra high-end luxury homes” in town listed for as high as $24.9 million even after the
Florida real estate crash. Beachfront condos can fetch $14 million. In 2008 Moody’s rated greater Naples as the country’s wealthiest metropolitan area, with an average net worth of $1.7 million.
As you head east on State Road 846, the gated golf course communities become sparser and less grand. The highway dwindles from six lanes, to four, to two. The mansions and shopping plazas give way to more humble developments of bungalows and plain strip malls, and eventually to cypress swamps and dry stands of pine, cabbage palm, and scrubby palmetto. Occasionally, you pass a clearing occupied by a low ranch-style home, its property lines demarcated by a rusty chain-link fence and a padlocked metal gate. Yards are cluttered with faded sport utility vehicles, fat-wheeled pickup trucks with tinted windows, and outboard boats that look like they have been sitting immobile on their trailers for several seasons. Farther inland, human habitations disappear, and the occasional citrus grove abuts the road, its neatly rounded, deep-green trees marching off in straight ranks. What you don’t see is tomato fields. But they are there, hidden behind ten-feet-tall berms covered in scruffy vegetation and broken sporadically by access roads festooned with “No Trespassing” signs and guarded by private security men.
Less than an hour after leaving Naples, you round a long curve and enter the city of Immokalee (pronounced like broccoli). A few years ago, county officials attempted to bring a veneer of vaguely Latino urbanity to the main drag by laying down a paving-stone median and crosswalks, planting some small palms, and erecting fake antique streetlights. Maybe the hope was that tourists passing through would not notice conditions a block or so away. Downtown Immokalee is a warren of potholed lanes leading past boarded-up bars and abandoned bodegas, moldering trailers, and sagging, decrepit shacks. The area is populated mostly by Hispanic men, although you will see the occasional Haitian woman (a holdover of an earlier wave of ethnic farm laborers) walking along the sandy paths that pass for sidewalks with a loaded basket of groceries balanced on her head. Scrawny chickens peck in the sandy yards, and packs of mongrels patrol the gaps between dwellings, sniffing at the contents of overturned garbage cans. Vultures squabble over a run-over cat lying in the middle of a street. Immokalee’s per capita income is only $9,700 a year, about one-quarter of the national average. Half of the people in the city of fifteen thousand live below the federal poverty line. Two-thirds of the children who enter kindergarten drop out of school without high school diplomas. Your chances of becoming a victim of violent crime in Immokalee are six times greater than they are in the average American municipality. On the crime index, where zero is the rating given to the most dangerous areas in the United States and one hundred is the rating given to the safest, Immokalee comes in at one. Even the police there are sometimes criminals. Glendell Edison, a deputy sheriff who patrolled Immokalee for fifteen years, was sentenced to ten years in prison after being convicted for extorting money from drug pushers and possessing cocaine and crack. Florida’s largest farmworker community, Immokalee is the town that tomatoes built.
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Page 9