Mexico’s Seasonal Laborers Part of Widening Free-Trade Debate : Agriculture: U.S. growers say they are already disadvantaged by low pay and lax environmental laws south of the border. If trade pact is ratified, they say, the situation will worsen.

The small single-engine biplane banked steeply and leveled out. Then, swooping down over a field of ripening tomatoes, it released a swirling mist of chemicals.

The spray drenched not only the plants but about two dozen workers who have been in the western Mexican field since dawn, filling buckets of tomatoes like those that have made Mexico a major winter vegetable supplier to the United States.

Halfway down one of the rows, a woman carrying a month-old baby huddled over the small form to protect it from the droplets. In another row, a worker shook his fist and yelled in frustration at the plane as it screamed into a tight bank for another pass.

The workers, mostly non-Spanish-speaking ethnic Indians who earn about $5 a day, are among an estimated 180,000 seasonal laborers who suddenly have become part of the widening debate in the United States over the North American Free Trade Agreement.

If trade barriers come down as envisioned under the agreement, which has yet to be ratified by Congress, U.S. growers and farm worker unions fear that Mexican growers will have the competitive edge because of their cheaper work force.

“U.S. tariffs now keep the playing field from tilting completely in favor of Mexico,” said Reggie Brown, director of marketing and membership for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Assn.

“They pay workers $5 for an 8- to 10-hour day. We pay nearly $5 an hour. We have to meet worker safety standards, pay insurance and workmen’s compensation and meet worker housing and environmental standards,” he said. “They don’t.”

Even under the existing tariff system, Mexico already supplies nearly $1.1 billion in vegetables annually to the United States. About two-thirds of this bounty consists of five vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash and eggplant. One of every two tomatoes that reached U.S. tables last winter came from Mexico.

Visits to nearly a dozen fields and four migrant camps near Culiacan in January and March revealed a pattern of poor living and working conditions, including repeated exposure of laborers to pesticides.

In one field near Culiacan, a city in Mexico’s agricultural powerhouse, the state of Sinaloa, workers mixed pesticides in an old barrel using a long stick to stir the frothy solution.

In another field, workers carrying spray tanks called “bombas” soaked the plants and often themselves in chemicals. The workers’ only means of protection were thin bandannas covering their mouths and noses.

Chemicals typically included the fungicide Benomyl, used in backpack sprayers, and the insecticides Malathion and Endosulfan, used in aerial spray operations.

In two fields, workers applying pesticides were followed immediately by others who picked vegetables while the chemicals still dripped from the stalks. In one two-week period in the Culiacan area, three of four crop-dusters sprayed either directly over, or within yards, of workers.

A Mexican government doctor sympathetic to the plight of the workers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said spraying of pickers is not uncommon.

“When a plane comes by often the workers do not get out of the way,” he said. “They do not know how pesticides can damage their bodies. You see skin problems, rashes, problems with the throat and lungs, and even cases where the person has to be hospitalized because of working in pesticide-covered fields.”

The doctor added that sanitation is a major problem in the camps: “The lack of safe drinking water leads to much sickness, especially with the children.”

Few fields have on-site toilet facilities for workers, who include youngsters under age 10 and some as young as 4.

In the camps, housing is typically a 3-by-3-yard shelter with three walls of tin and a dirt floor. Often an entire family of six or eight occupies one of these structures.

Of four camps visited, two had no sanitation facilities, safe drinking water or running water for bathing. A camp worker said that approximately 1,000 people live in each of these two locations.

Growers generally deny that their workers are so ill-housed or work in such hazardous conditions as critics on both sides of the border have charged. Asked about such complaints, Fausto Riveros of the Sinaloa growers association maintained that the growers are victims of poor press.

“We feel that most of the newspaper reports on the labor and living conditions of our seasonal workers in agriculture are biased and prejudiced,” Riveros said. “They normally emphasize and exaggerate the problem issues, but do not convey the whole outlook of the situation--the positive sides and improvements reached so far.”

Conditions for some workers have, in fact, improved in recent years.

In 1989 the government established a giant social agency, Solidaridad, whose main function is to help meet the needs of the poor. For field workers this has meant some improvement in camp life. Social workers help migrants find medical care, and help with the schooling of their children. However, alleged Mexican labor abuses and lax enforcement of environmental laws have led U.S. labor and environmental groups to demand these issues be addressed by Congress in the continuing NAFTA debate--and not only out of concern for Mexican laborers.

Some U.S. labor leaders predict that lower wages in Mexico could pull down U.S. wages. They also warn that the cheap work force could lure U.S. companies to that country--a trend that has already begun.

Joe Fahey, president of Watsonville, Calif., Teamsters Local 912 of Packers and Food Processors, said his local lost more than 1,000 jobs as one major corporation moved its frozen-food operations in recent years to Mexico.

Said Fahey: “I don’t think prosperity should come on the backs of the Mexican workers.”