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Political Pesticide

Photo by Kira Corser

Strawberry Fields Forever: Methyl bromide, the Stealth bomber of pesticides, is routinely used on tarped strawberry fields such as this one near Watsonville.

As economically vital as it is deadly, methyl bromide has growers and environmentalists fuming about strawberries versus safety

By Bob Johnson

When PG&E workers Jimmie Lopez and Paul Lamascus pulled up in their truck for a meter inspection at the Mayfair Packing Corporation on South Seventh Street, everything seemed strictly routine. As they concentrated on the meters that summer day five years ago, they may have overlooked the cylinder standing next to them. And they certainly missed the label indicating that the cylinder, five feet tall and a foot in diameter, was filled with toxic gas.

But as they sat in the truck filling out paperwork after the inspection, with the windows rolled down to ease the summer heat, they heard a hissing sound issuing from the cylinder. Lopez hustled to alert the office people at Mayfair to the problem, while Lamascus used his soap bottle to test for leaks. Only after ascertaining the leak did Lamascus see the warning: the cylinder contained 200 pounds of methyl bromide.

Methyl bromide is the Stealth bomber of pesticides: invisible, undetectable and deadly. By the time a person notices exposure to gas, it may be too late. As a California State Department of Health Services fact sheet on methyl bromide explains: "If you can smell it, you are being dangerously overexposed. A harmful or even fatal dose can be inhaled without the victim being aware of it at the time."

Methyl bromide is known to suburbanites as a tool of the exterminator's trade, the deadly gas that kills pets who wander inside tented houses. The gas is also useful for solving problem infestations of hard-to-kill beetles. And it is used routinely in agriculture--especially in California, where millions of pounds are used to fumigate strawberry fields, flower plots, and cherries, walnuts and prunes on their way to market.

The leaking cylinder encountered by the PG&E workers had been discovered earlier by Mayfair worker Sylvia Morales as she was preparing to fumigate a container of prunes. She was advised by her superiors to cart the cylinder over to the repair shop, where a mechanic diagnosed a broken valve that he could not fix. He then asked that the leaking poison be taken outside. When Lamascus and Lopez arrived in their truck to inspect the meters, the cylinder still stood unattended outside: a few hundred yards away from the Mayfair Mobile Home Park, and less than a mile from the Kelly Park children's petting zoo.

"Methyl bromide gas can irritate your eyes and lungs, causing coughing and difficulty in breathing," according to a state health department fact sheet. Laboratory tests also have shown that methyl bromide can cause genetic mutations in bacteria, leading the Department of Health Services to suspect that it may be a carcinogen.

According to the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, methyl bromide has yet to pass all 10 tests required by the March 1996 deadline mandated by the Birth Defects Prevention Act of 1984. One of the tests, conducted on dogs, was waived because they couldn't find an inhalation dosage low enough to keep from killing the test animals. The remaining test is on laboratory rats.

Last week, state Sen. Henry Mello (D-Watsonville) successfully pushed two bills through the Senate Health Committee, which would extend the life of methyl bromide through Dec. 31, 1997. If it passes the appropriations committee, the Senate could vote to allow use of methyl bromide in California in time for the growing season.

But the people involved in the incident at Mayfair had no knowledge of the controversy surrounding methyl bromide. When Sylvia Morales wheeled the leaky cylinder to the repair shop and then carted it over by the meters, she was not wearing any protective gear. Her safety training had not included using a respirator. And the mechanic who inspected the faulty cylinder, Dave Laredo, was not wearing protective gear, either.

Three blocks from the plant, PG&E worker Lamascus began to feel sick and pulled his truck off the road. According to a Santa Clara County Agricultural Commissioner's pesticide incident report obtained by Metro through a California Public Records Act request, the pair reported to the San Jose Medical Center. But because of a privacy law governing public disclosure of pesticide incident reports, a description of their injuries was blacked out. After the incident, Mayfair was fined $1,100 for numerous violations of the California Food and Agricultural Code. The accident, however, escaped media attention.

Because methyl bromide leaves behind no traces in either soil or produce, a decades-old controversy about the chemical within agricultural circles has gone virtually unnoticed by the public. The United Farm Workers, when resurrecting the grape boycott a decade ago, listed methyl bromide at the top of a list of five chemicals to be outlawed. And since 1982, nearly 500 California farm-area workers and residents have been examined at hospitals following exposure to methyl bromide.

But the quiet controversy erupted into the debate of the '90s when internationally conducted studies revealed that methyl bromide affects not just exposed humans but also has destructive effects on the atmosphere's ozone layer.

Chemical pollution and the ensuing ozone damage has been cited as the culprit in a 500 percent increase in the deadliest forms of skin cancer since 1970, and alarming increases in cataracts. The CFCs that are a staple in the refrigeration industry have been outlawed because the chlorine gas is a major contributor to loss of this atmospheric shield against ultraviolet rays. But according to a 1992 United Nations Environment Programme conference, stratospheric bromine--the byproduct of methyl bromide--is 30 to 120 times more efficient than stratospheric chlorine in destroying ozone on a per-atom basis.

The international Montreal Accord, an ongoing conference aimed at preventing destruction of the ozone layer, adopted an agreement in December that calls for developed nations to phase out methyl bromide entirely by the year 2010. Within the U.S. the federal Clean Air Act requires a stronger response to ozone destruction, and the Environmental Protection Agency has ordered methyl bromide outlawed by the year 2001, regardless of economic consequences.

California's agricultural growers have responded to the threat with a skillful campaign to spare the loss of what is arguably their most valued chemical. That campaign has already reached as high as President Clinton, who was quietly but effectively lobbied on methyl bromide in a little-publicized meeting held last September in an airplane hangar. The gathering included such agribusiness heavyweights as Dennis Merwin, chairman of the Agriculture Council of California; John Pucheu, chairman of Calcot Ltd.; and Al Dingle, a Fresno grower who is also president of the Westlands Water District. But the political campaign to spare methyl bromide began with a soft-spoken cattle rancher who represents the state Assembly district that includes east San Jose and south county.

Peter Frusetta's (R-Los Pinos) district includes the orchards and nurseries near Morgan Hill and Gilroy, the strawberry fields outside Watsonville, and much of the great Salinas Valley. The farmers in Frusetta's district have combined sales rivaling those of the Kodak Corporation--$2 billion annually. They employ nearly 50,000 field workers and annually use nearly 3 million pounds of methyl bromide to keep their crops free of pests and diseases.

"The farmers in my district need methyl bromide, but if it's found to be unsafe I would be the first to call for making it illegal," said Frusetta, who likened many of the alleged methyl bromide injuries to the sniffles his wife gets when the trees bloom outside their Los Pinos ranch home. "I don't know of any documented injuries from methyl bromide in agriculture. There have been some deaths from building fumigations, for the most part involving thieves and trespassers."

When Gov. Pete Wilson called a special session of the Legislature to extend the life of methyl bromide, after receiving pleas for help from growers who feared the worst, he turned to Frusetta.

"Governor Wilson asked that I take the lead on this one," said Frusetta, who attempted bills granting an extension on the test for birth defects. The idea for the legislation and many of the particulars originally came from a coalition of agricultural groups headed up by the Fresno-based Grape and Tree Fruit League, according to Frusetta. But the mild-mannered rancher from Los Pinos needed to look no further than his neighbors to comprehend the urgency of saving methyl bromide.

Mitch Mariani farms 75 acres of cherries, and an additional 25 acres of apricots, on land near Anderson Reservoir outside Morgan Hill. The Mariani family has been growing fruit in the Santa Clara Valley since 1935, when Mitch's Croatian immigrant father bought a patch of land in Cupertino with money saved from fishing.

A large majority of Mariani's cherries are exported to the booming market in Japan, which will not accept the product unless it has been fumigated with methyl bromide. After harvest his cherries are trucked down Highway 101 for fumigation at the Churchill Nut Co. in Hollister. Upwards of a million pounds of Santa Clara Valley cherries are hauled to the Hollister plant, where they are carted to the fumigation chamber and treated with methyl bromide. An equal load of cherries is gassed at Churchill's Hollister competition, the Guerra Nut Co., and far more are hauled for treatment in Lodi and Stockton.

A ban on methyl bromide, and with it the loss of the huge Japanese cherry market, would stagger Mariani Orchards. The 25 acres of new cherry trees recently planted will remain productive for three decades, and the remaining 50 acres of cherry trees in the orchard are in full production. The trees already in the ground, at a cost of at least $7,000 an acre, should produce cherries for the next quarter century.

"Frankly speaking, I haven't thought that far ahead," Mariani responded when asked what he will do if methyl bromide is banned. "If we lose the Japanese market," he said, "we will have overproduction and deflated prices."

Hollister Nut fumigates even larger quantities of walnuts, which are routinely treated with methyl bromide before they are shipped for sale in this country. "In San Benito County alone we fumigate between 10,000 and 15,000 tons of nuts a year," said Churchill Nut owner Randy Churchill. Between 10,000 and 15,000 pounds of methyl bromide are used in Hollister alone to fumigate nuts and cherries every year.

"Virtually all of the dried fruit and tree nuts from this state are fumigated with methyl bromide at least once--when they come from the fields they can have bugs in them," says Frank Mosebar, president of the Santa Clara-based California Dried Fruit Association. The main culprits are the Indian meal moth and the navel orange worm, critters which eat holes in the walnuts and leave behind unsightly excretions. "They can make things pretty ugly," observed Mosebar, who fears that the $1.5 billion dried fruit and tree nut industry would be imperiled by the loss of methyl bromide.

But it was the strawberry growers who first alerted Frusetta to the necessity of keeping methyl bromide in the fields: The 28th Assembly District yields nearly $300 million in strawberries annually with the aid, according to state pesticide use reports, of more than 2 million pounds of methyl bromide.

Strawberries love a warm, moist climate. So do some deadly breeds of fungi, including a voracious agricultural relative of athlete's foot. The most vicious of these fungi can cause an entire field to collapse overnight. And once in the soil, the spores of this predator can wait a decade for their next victim.

For the four decades since they escaped the march of urban growth into Cupertino, the Chiala family has worked a 200-acre patch of dirt on the eastern edge of Morgan Hill, harvesting bell peppers, jalapeños, raspberries, sweet corn, seed flowers and strawberries.

George Chiala has struggled to reduce his dependence on chemicals. He no longer has a regular spraying schedule, but instead sprays only when a specific problem threatens to get out of control. And last year he managed to control the most important pest in his strawberry patch without pesticides.

The two-spotted spider mite thrives by sucking the life from strawberry plants. This critter can sap the plants so severely that they are unable to give birth to a viable harvest. But Chiala introduced a predator mite into his 20-acre strawberry patch four years ago, and last year he did not need any pesticides to control his two-spotted adversary.

But no one has yet shown Chiala and the other strawberry farmers of the central coast an alternative that comes close to the economics of methyl bromide. And he already has 300,000 baby strawberry plants waiting for him in a freezer in Watsonville. The plants were harvested in December in the cold clime of Shasta County and shipped south, and are being kept dormant at subfreezing temperatures until this spring's planting. Those plants alone cost Chiala in excess of $11,000 and they are but a small fraction of the $130,000 he will put out months before his first strawberry is harvested.

"Without methyl bromide it would be risky for us to grow them. We probably would not go in for new planting," Chiala said. "Everybody's willing to not use methyl bromide if there's another way. We're very conscious of the materials we put on our fields."

In the great strawberry region extending from Watsonville to Salinas--the richest berry patch on the planet--the fumigants that bring berries to life also send residents to the hospital at least once a year. And the victims are frequently the young children of field workers.

One late October morning in 1990, a group of children from the San Andreas farm labor camp north of Watsonville began feeling eye irritation as they waited for their school bus. Unknown to the children, they were feeling the effects of tear gas that had escaped as the tarps were removed from a fumigation at the strawberry field a quarter-mile from their bus stop.

The tear gas is used as a warning device to drive people away from the far more dangerous methyl bromide used to exterminate destructive fungi in the soil.

The gas was more intense back at the housing camp, where three residents were taken to Watsonville Community Hospital following their exposure.

"People at the labor camp were experiencing tearing of the eyes," Santa Cruz County Assistant Agricultural Commissioner Rick Bergman recalls. It was not the first brush with methyl bromide for residents of the housing camp, which stands above the strawberry field: Three years earlier the entire camp was evacuated after dogs or vandals tore holes in the tarp and gas escaped during a fumigation. "The history of that site," Bergman said, "is one of problems."

But the incident at San Andreas was particularly haunting because strawberry grower John Larse had gone well beyond the legally mandated precautions in his fumigation.

"He was approaching this very conservatively, that's what's so startling about this," Bergman said. "There's no evidence of any wrongdoing on his part."

Larse had cautiously fumigated his field just one acre at a time. The tarps had been left on far longer than the legally mandated 24 hours after the gases were injected into the soil. And there was no evidence of children, vandals or dogs tearing holes in the tarp. The culprit was apparently the weather: The gas was apparently prevented from dispersing at the normal rate by an inversion layer.

Such incidents are commonplace in the strawberry belt of the Salinas and Pajaro valleys. Two weeks after the schoolchildren were exposed to the warning scent of tear gas, seven neighbors of a strawberry field near Highway 152 east of Watsonville were examined at the hospital for chloropicrin exposure after fumigation tarps were torn by children playing in the area. Later that same week, a group of nursery workers in Salinas fled their greenhouse when they found themselves downwind from a strawberry fumigation gone awry. And three times in the last three years tear gas has escaped the fumigation tarps in the strawberry fields near Castroville.

But among strawberry growers such incidents are the price to be paid for maintaining an industry that they fear could be bankrupted without methyl bromide.

One alternative identified by researchers for the Strawberry Advisory Board may please growers, faced with 40 percent losses in production, but hardly seems designed to satisfy environmentalists and field-worker advocates.

The second-best alternative to methyl bromide discovered so far, according to Gubler, is chloropicrin gas. In the clinical language of a California Department of Food and Agriculture pesticide-safety report:

"Chloropicrin is a severe irritant and affects all body surfaces, especially the eyes, nose, and throat. A concentration of 12 parts per million causes a smarting pain in the eyes. ... Fatal amounts can be taken in by inhalation or through the skin. ... Small amounts of this substance dissolved in saliva and swallowed cause nausea and vomiting, giving it its military name of vomiting gas.

"Its primary lethal effect is lung injury leading to pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs). Aftereffects of excessive exposure may include anemia, weak and irregular heart action, and recurring asthma attacks."

As if this weren't enough, the best way to approach the efficacy of methyl bromide, according to Gubler, is to combine chloropicrin with telone.

Telone use was resurrected last year under severe restrictions. It is legal in only 13 counties and may be used annually on only a total of 21,250 acres statewide. No field may be fumigated with telone more often than once every three years, and no more than 12 gallons an acre may be used. There must be a 300-foot buffer between the field and any inhabited structure, no one may reenter the field for a week, and no planting is allowed for two weeks after fumigation.

The major cause for concern about telone is that it is among the chemicals listed under state Proposition 65 as a human carcinogen.

After years of searching for alternatives, industry researchers are predicting that without methyl bromide, strawberry production could be cut in half.

"It looks like there could be anywhere from a 40 percent to a 55 percent drop in production," estimates UC-Davis plant pathologist Doug Gubler, who has spent seven years researching for the industry.

As the sounds of regulatory footsteps became unavoidable in the late 1980s the Strawberry Advisory Board commissioned Gubler and Albert Polis of UC-Riverside to research methyl bromide alternatives. Last year the USDA added its financial support to that search. Gubler's grim numbers have been repeated endlessly by industry representatives in hearings in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., and in conversations with the media.

A more optimistic picture emerged, however, from experiments conducted by the leading strawberry cooperative in the country. For four years growers for Driscoll Strawberries in Watsonville, Salinas and Oxnard experimented by growing strawberries without methyl bromide or any other synthetic chemical. The Driscoll farmers suffered only a fraction of the loss predicted by industry researchers. "Production was off by 20 percent to 30 percent," Driscoll research plant pathologist Rob Webb said.

Most growers believe that the success enjoyed by the most skilled organic growers today likely would not be repeated in a saturated market if methyl bromide is outlawed. The Driscoll experiments were abandoned, according to Webb, because there is not a strong enough market for organic strawberries to recover the added cost of production--costs which rise because of the higher cost of non-chemical fertilizers and more labor-intensive methods of pest and disease control.

Webb continues to research alternatives to methyl bromide, however, and is confident that unless there is a catastrophic disease Driscoll growers will suffer less than a 20 percent drop in production if methyl bromide is outlawed at the turn of the century. He declined to divulge, on the grounds of proprietary interest, the alternative methods that would limit the crop losses in life after methyl bromide.

Another way might be gleaned from organic farmers, like Jim Crawford of Swanton Berry Farms in Davenport. Swanton says that through a combination of crop rotation, hand weeding and solar heating to kill fungi, he has been able to achieve strawberry harvests as high as 65 percent of conventional growers' yield. The added labor brings the cost per berry to roughly double that of conventional growers and, so far, the market for the higher-priced berries has remained small.

Economics have figured heavily in lobbying efforts to extend the life of methyl bromide in California. Even with the widespread use of telone and vomit gas, industry representatives fear that a ban on methyl bromide in this country will lead to an epidemic of imported strawberries from Mexico, which would be allowed under international agreement to maintain its current use of methyl bromide. This fear of below-the-border imports led growers last September to arrange the airport confab with Clinton. According to one of the growers in attendance, the president demonstrated that he had already been briefed on the issue and had already decided to tell the growers what they needed to hear.

"He said he was aware it was due to be banned [by the EPA] in the year 2001," Nisei Farmers' League President Harry Kubo recalled of Clinton's pledge, "but that even then if there was not an economically feasible alternative he would recommend extending the deadline."

According to Kubo, since that meeting Ken Price, an aide to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has written the White House reminding Clinton of his pledge to support an extension of methyl bromide use until a viable alternative is found.

That session in the Fresno hangar signaled that even if methyl bromide is granted a reprieve in California, the scene of the controversy will shift to Washington, D.C., where the words "viable alternative" are sure to be defined.

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