Safe Strawberry Group Asks School Board Candidates To Support Fumigant-Free Future

School board candidates are likely to debate school funding and class sizes this election season. Anti-pesticide activists are hoping they also talk about fumigants.

School boards don’t regulate fumigants, but that’s where activists in the Safe Strawberry Working Group believe they can get leverage. Next month, the group plans to finalize a draft resolution urging Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation to phase out fumigants by 2020 – and to ask candidates to pledge their support for such a resolution if they get elected.

“There’s a little more leverage when people are running for election,” working group member Gary Karnes says.

In 2011, opponents of methyl iodide formed the working group and got the Monterey County Board of Education to sign a resolution asking Brown to pull the fumigant; the county Board of Supervisors followed.

That’s what they aim to replicate, this time asking for a sweeping change “to transition California agriculture to effective, least-toxic and affordable non-fumigant replacements by 2020.”

Nice idea, but not necessarily practical, says California Strawberry Commission spokesperson Carolyn O’Donnell.

“We may have a solution for fumigants by 2020, but we may not,” she says. “Some of the research that started out looking very promising is now looking very mixed.”

Karnes wants the focus on additional research. “We’re not trying to drive growers out of business or anything,” he says. “They’re generally not the bad guys. It’s fumigant manufacturers we really want to deal with.”