RUP Bufferzones - HB254

Bill Description & Background

Requires the department of agriculture to use consistent units of measurement in its summary to the public on the amounts of restricted use pesticides used. Effective 1/1/2024, establishes a one-half mile buffer zone for pesticides around schools and state and county public parks.

Talking Points

An abundance of scientific literature on pesticide drift and the unique susceptibility of children to pesticide exposure provide a sound argument for establishing meaningful buffer zones to ensure even protections for communities, children, elderly and sensitive areas.

California has enacted similar legislation requiring ¼ mile pesticide buffer zones around schools, the farmworkers and communities living near agricultural areas. The measure had originally advocated for 1 mile buffer zones due to the abundance of research documenting pesticide drift and related health impacts up to a mile or further from the fields where they were applied.

Additional Information

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) finds there to be a significantly increased health risk for children exposed to pesticides, and additional precautions must be taken to protect them from unintended exposure. ^[1]

We are very concerned about long-term pesticide exposure at school ^[2], which constitutes a health threat that can lead to cancer, neurological, and respiratory damage, among other medical conditions. Public and scientific research is increasingly raising concerns about the combined effects of pesticide “cocktails,” or exposure to mixtures.  In the last six years, pesticide companies submitted over 140 patents containing multiple active ingredients, 96 of which “had at least one … application that claimed or demonstrated synergy between the active ingredients in the product, a total of 69 percent.”^[3]   Combination effects are the norm not the exception, yet have not been considered in the pesticide regulatory system.

Childhood Cancer Threat

Children who live in areas of high agricultural activity in the US from birth to age 15 experience a significantly increased risk of childhood cancers.^[4]  A 2007 meta-analysis of studies linking pesticide exposure concluded:

A number of epidemiological studies consistently reported increased risks between pesticide exposures and childhood leukemia, brain cancer, neuroblastoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Wilms' tumor, and Ewing's sarcoma. An extensive review of these studies was published in 1998 (Zahm & Ward, 1998 Zahm, S. H. and Ward, M. H. 1998. Pesticides and childhood cancer. Environ. Health. Perspect, 106(suppl. 3): 893–908. ). Fifteen case-control studies, 4 cohort studies, and 2 ecological studies have been published since this review, and 15 of these 21 studies reported statistically significant increased risks between either childhood pesticide exposure or parental occupational exposure and childhood cancer. Therefore, one can confidently state that there is at least some association between pesticide exposure and childhood cancer.^[5] 

Research continues to confirm the pesticide-cancer link with a 2016 Spanish population-based case-control study finding: “[O]ur result points to the same conclusion as many previous studies and suggests that living in the proximity of cultivated land could be associated with many types of cancer in children.”^[6]

Harm to Children’s Brains

The most recent study of the UC Berkeley research team, CHAMACOS, indicates that combined organophosphate (OP) applications near pregnant women have a negative effect on the IQ of their children, where some individual OPs may not.  Every 522 pounds of OPs applied within a 1 kilometer (0.62 mile) radius of a pregnant Salinas Valley woman’s home correlated with a 2 point drop in her children’s IQ compared to a control group.^[7]  Recent evidence also suggests that social adversity exacerbates the adverse effects of prenatal OP exposure on IQ.^[8]

The science connecting pesticide exposure to neurological impairment is not limited to prenatal studies.  Out of the womb, children with higher levels of OP pesticide breakdown products in their urine are more likely to have ADHD.^[9] [10]

A study of pre- and postnatal pesticide exposure and neurodevelopmental impairment, concluded that “postnatal and, to a lesser extent, prenatal exposure to pesticides, are negatively associated with children’s neuropsychological development, regardless of the way of measuring exposure.” In the same study, greater urinary levels of OP breakdown products were associated with poorer performance on IQ and verbal comprehension tests. Increased agricultural acreage around the child’s residence postnatally was used as a proxy for cumulative exposure to pesticides-- and was found to be associated with decreased IQ, processing speed, and verbal comprehension scores. ^[11]

Epidemiological studies have mainly linked prenatal pesticide exposure to effects on children’s neurodevelopment, but we also know that school-age children’s brains are still developing. It should be noted that there are scant data on postnatal exposures of children to pesticides, due in part to research challenges that are separate from our concerns.

Harm to Children’s Lungs

Exposure of children to OP pesticides can also exacerbate asthma symptoms.  A UC Berkeley CHAMACOS Study found that higher levels of OP metabolites in urine were associated with respiratory symptoms and coughing at 5 and 7 years of age.^[12] 

Pesticides are proven to drift much further than the proposed ¼  mile buffer zone

A wealth of data shows that pesticides drift much further than ¼ mile beyond their target application due to wide, dust migration and volatilization.  

For example, one national report^[13] on drift-related pesticide poisonings found that in eleven states, 85 percent of people impacted would have been protected by a one-mile buffer zone, and 76 percent of the cases occurred at distances more than one-quarter mile from the application site

A UC Berkeley CHAMACOS study^[14] documented chlorpyrifos, (now banned in Hawaii, California and New York) in homes up to 1.8 miles from treated fields. Another UC Davis MIND Institute^[15] study documented significantly increased rates of autism in children of mothers who lived up to one mile from treated fields during pregnancy. The California Childhood Leukenia study^[16] found elevated concentrations of several pesticides in dust of homes up to three-quarters of a mile from treated fields.

Despite an abundance of evidence documenting the migration of pesticides well beyond the ¼ mile buffer zones proposed in HB 1530 we recognize that ¼ mile still will provide a significant improvement on the current 100’, and that California’s policy provides a precedent that Hawai`i can readily adopt.