The 'Immokalee babies' were born with severe deformities after their mothers were each exposed to pesticides whilst harvesting tomatoes. Barry Estabrook reports on the case that shocked the US
Tower Cabins is a labour camp consisting of about thirty drab wooden shacks and a few deteriorating trailers crammed together behind an unpainted wooden fence just south of Immokalee, a city in the heart of southwest Florida’s tomato-growing region.
When Yaffa knocked on the door, Herrera answered. He was struck by the fact that the petite, round-faced woman was barely older than a child herself. All the men who lived in the trailer were in the fields. Carlitos was propped up in a baby seat. Strips of drying meat hung from a clothesline stretched across the living room, and the humid air was rank and pungent. Flies buzzed everywhere.
When Carlitos began fussing, Herrera took the six-month-old baby out of the seat and laid him on the floor. An orphaned puppy that the trailer’s residents had adopted came bouncing around, and the child watched it, smiling and cooing.
'No arms, no legs'
The puppy yipped, pounced, and started nipping at the baby. Carlitos began to scream, and Herrera rushed to pick him up. Yaffa was powerfully affected. The child, who did not even have the ability to flick away a fly or push back against a puppy, faced a lifetime of need. 'The pesticides got into her system and affected this child that was forming and lo and behold, he ends up being born with no arms and no legs,' he told me.
NOTE: Every time that we buy conventional produce sprayed with several dozen toxic chemicals we enable these tragedies to happen. Vote NO with your dollars!
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