Communicating pesticide safety
information to California's more than 800,000 agricultural workers is a daunting
task. California production agriculture applied an average of 176 million pounds
of pesticide active ingredient each year from 1992–2001, over a vast geographic
area and on hundreds of different crops, livestock and nursery
products.
"We use a greater variety of
pesticides in California, and a greater array of application methods and timing,
than regions such as the Midwest, where growers produce a few major crops within
well-defined seasons," says Patrick O'Connor-Marer, pesticide safety training
coordinator for the UC Statewide IPM Program.
Furthermore, the state's
agricultural workers are drawn from a large and constantly changing pool,
primarily of migrant and seasonal workers from Mexico, as well as Southeast
Asian and Punjabi immigrants and other non-English-speaking
people.
Since 1988, the UC IPM Program has
been responsible for mandated training of California's pesticide applicators.
With a staff of just three educators, one event coordinator, one writer, and one support position, its
Pesticide Safety Education Program (PSEP) has devised innovative methods for
managing a Herculean task.
Hands-on workshops. The program's
initial efforts involved conducting 8-hour seminars for as many as 400
participants. These large seminars were not particularly engaging for
participants nor were they effective in influencing pesticide-handling behavior,
O'Connor-Marer says.
Learning from this experience, PSEP
developed hands-on workshops. Conducted outside in facilities such as
fairgrounds or large parks, the workshops accommodate as many as 420
participants divided into small groups of 15 people or less. The groups rotate
through seven stations, covering topics such as personal protective equipment,
mixing and loading, application equipment, leaks and spills, environmental
protection, first aid, and cleanup and disposal methods. Some sessions are
conducted in Spanish, Punjabi or other languages.
"People feel more comfortable asking
questions in small groups," says Rupali Das of the California Occupational
Health Surveillance and Evaluation Program, who has participated in several UC
workshops. "It's more of a discussion."
Lacking the resources to conduct
these workshops themselves, PSEP staff have offered 197 train-the-trainer
workshops in the last 10 years, with 4,990 individuals receiving certification.
In turn, these individuals have trained more than 820,000 pesticide handlers and
agricultural fieldworkers. In addition, some PSEP workshops have targeted health
care workers, to improve reporting of pesticide illnesses and injuries. PSEP’s
most recent train-the-trainer project is a collaboration with the California
Minor Crops Council in a community-based outreach to trainers of pesticide
applicators at mid-sized farming operations in the Central Coast and northern
Sacramento Valley areas.
Pesticide
label comprehension. In
2000, PSEP conducted a feasibility study among Hispanic farmers in Monterey
County and Hmong farmers in Fresno County to determine if non-English-speaking
individuals could acquire sufficient English skills to understand pesticide
labels. In consultation with ESL (English as a Second Language) experts, program
staff developed a 60-hour course. In an evaluation, individuals were asked 75
questions about a pesticide label before and after taking the course; afterward,
the number of correct answers increased by an average of 81.7%, O'Connor-Marer
says.
Outreach success. PSEP's
train-the-trainer programs illustrate that it is possible to leverage the
efforts of a few staff in order to reach large numbers of people. In 1999, 247
participants were surveyed to assess the effectiveness of the train-the-trainer
workshops; on average, each instructor trained 219 fieldworkers (SD = 670) and
35 pesticide handlers (SD = 8).
The state's Pesticide Illness
Surveillance Program reports that pesticide handlers and agricultural
fieldworkers may be changing their behaviors. From 1989 through 1998, the state
program, which relies on health care worker reports, found that topical
illnesses definitely or probably caused by pesticide exposure dropped by 61% in
agricultural workers and 57% in nonagricultural workers.
International collaboration. In a new effort to coordinate the U.S. and Mexico’s pesticide safety programs and educational materials and to launch new pesticide safety train-the-trainer programs in Mexico, PSEP has entered an international collaboration with the U.S. EPA, the Texas Department of Agriculture, and health, labor, environment, and agriculture officials in Mexico. In 2002 collaborators conducted four pilot train-the-trainer workshops in Mexico, in the states of Morelos, Sinaloa, Nayarit, and Puebla. The project’s long-term goal is to establish an ongoing national pesticide safety education program in Mexico that can be offered to agricultural workers and rural community members throughout the country.