Senate Panel Hears of Pesticide Harm Abroad : Health: Costa Rican farm workers blame their sterility on chemicals banned in the U.S. but exported.

Costa Rican farm workers told a Senate committee Wednesday that they became sterile and suffered emotional trauma from handling U.S.-produced pesticides that are banned in this country.

The testimony by the workers came as the Senate Agriculture Committee continued a two-year inquiry into the alleged dumping abroad of U.S. chemicals that have been deemed too hazardous for use in the United States.

Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said his panel is focusing on the pesticide DBCP, which has been banned from domestic use for several years on grounds that it causes sterility. DBCP, also known as 1,2-dibromo-3-chloro propane, is a highly toxic chlorinated pesticide.

California banned DBCP in 1977, and the EPA adopted a nationwide ban two years later, except for use on pineapples in Hawaii. The ban was extended to that crop in 1985.

The Costa Rican farm workers said Wednesday that they never learned the identity of the pesticide they routinely used in the 1970s, but Leahy’s staff said that DBCP was widely used at the time in banana fields where the Costa Ricans worked. Its use was discontinued there in 1979, and the chemical is no longer manufactured, the staff reported.

However, Leahy said that “the tale of DBCP is an appalling one. In the blind pursuit of corporate profits, U.S. chemical company giants ignored their own scientists, kept studies secret from their own employees, dumped their poisons overseas and devastated the lives of thousands of unsuspecting and innocent people.”

Leahy, who said that some U.S. chemical companies “still export tons of pesticides that the Environmental Protection Agency considers too dangerous for our farmers to use,” is sponsoring legislation called the Circle of Poison Prevention Act of 1991, so named because such pesticides used abroad may return to this country on tainted imported fruits and vegetables. It would outlaw the export of pesticides that are banned or unlicensed in the United States.

Testifying with the help of an interpreter, Mario Zumbado, 40, said that he underwent “difficult trauma and severe depression” and saw his marriage break up when he learned after nine years as a farm worker that he could not father any children.

Zumbado displayed a large plunger-type device to show senators how he sprayed the ground beneath the banana plants, sometimes getting spray in his eyes and face. He said that his field supervisors never demonstrated techniques for handling the pesticide safely.

Victoria Sibaja de Zumbado, his second wife, testified that her husband still has emotional problems and depression as a result of his involuntary sterilization.

Waldemar Loaiza, another field worker, said that the pesticides he used often led to a strong, nauseating odor around the small houses where employees lived.

Dr. Roberto A. Chaves, a Costa Rican toxicologist, said that the people who worked with DBCP generally are “moody . . , with poor sex drive and often impotent.” He added that “among many families with children of working age, the totality of male offspring were sterilized.”

Another witness, Dr. Catharina Wesseling, who has worked for eight years in the pesticides program of the National University in Costa Rica, told the panel that “we have found pesticide use in all the Central American countries to be intensive, extensive and thoroughly out of control.”

Wesseling added: “We have seen or documented many human poisonings. We have seen contaminated waterways, sickened and even dead animals and pesticide-laden foods. This is the price Central America is paying for its efforts to become a major agricultural export region and pull itself out of its terrible debt situation.”

A spokesman for the National Agricultural Chemicals Assn. said that the group favors a ban on chemicals that have been forced off the U.S. market but disputes the need for stopping sales abroad of products that only lack a U.S. license. He said that many of the unlicensed products are waiting for approval from the EPA.