‘Secret Science’ in the Salinas Valley?

The Salinas Valley is known as the “Salad Bowl of the World,” so it’s no surprise that there are a lot of pesticides used in California farm country. The New York Times recently paid a visit to the Chamacos project, run by the University of California, Berkeley, which for nearly two decades has been studying the effects of pesticides on the children of Salinas-area farmworkers. (Chamacos is Spanish for “children.”)

This was the backdrop The Times chose for a story on the Trump administration’s war on what it calls “secret science” at the Environmental Protection Agency. At the urging of agrochemical companies, the administration has proposed forcing studies like the Chamacos project to make public information about its study participants in order to continue to be considered by regulators.

Former EPA officials and academics view the move as a breach of privacy safeguards and said the proposal echoed what the tobacco industry once tried to do in thwarting science that highlighted the dangers of smoking. The industry, which keeps much of its own research secret, says it is a legitimate effort to improve transparency.

Studies like Chamacos — part of a field known as epidemiology — examine disease trends in people. They are often complex, because they require adjusting for the many different chemicals and pollutants people are exposed to. It was only under the Obama administration that the EPA began to more seriously incorporate epidemiology alongside lab tests of how pesticides impact rats and other animals.

California has a $47-billion-a-year agricultural industry producing agricultural goods worth nearly twice as much as any other state. Some 209 million pounds of pesticides were used in the state in 2016.

In Salinas, about an hour’s drive south of San Jose, some of the biggest employers are large-scale farms. But it’s a mix of rural and urban, and there’s so much cropland that it runs right into schoolyards and neighborhoods, underscoring the need to study the human impact of industrial chemicals.

Earlier this year, a new California regulation barred spraying close to schools or day care centers, or during school hours.

“We were asking for a mile buffer zone; they gave us a quarter of a mile,” said José Camacho, who once worked the fields in Salinas but now works for the Chamacos project. "It’s not enough, but it’s a good start.”