Farm Labor

A Los Angeles judge has wiped out most of a jury verdict awarding millions of dollars to Nicaraguan field hands who applied pesticides to Dole Food Co. crops and who are now sterile. Although the decision leaves four workers with $1.58 million, it will undercut claims of an estimated 6,000 others who have sued in the United States for similar injuries suffered outside of this country. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria G. Chaney overturned jury verdicts in the first U.S.

State officials are shutting down a San Joaquin Valley farm labor contractor that hired a pregnant teen who died while pruning grapes last month. Authorities suspect 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez died because Merced Farm Labor denied her proper access to shade and water even as she worked in 100-degree heat. The California Department of Industrial Relations issued the stop-work order Thursday.

For as far as the eye can see, stalks of sugar cane march across the hillsides here like giant praying mantises. This is ground zero for ethanol production in Brazil -- "the Saudi Arabia of biofuels," as some have already labeled this vast South American country.

At least eight people were presumed dead Tuesday after a septic truck collided with a sport utility vehicle carrying farmworkers and both vehicles plunged into an irrigation canal in a rural area of Central California near Modesto. Divers helped recover the truck and the body of its driver at 6 p.m. after working for three hours in choppy, fast-moving waters, authorities said. The cause of the crash remains under investigation, according to California Highway Patrol Officer Mayolo Banuelos.

On a recent day, Maria Velasquez led 25 women in outdoor aerobics at a park in this city's rough southeast district, home to a large farmworker community. Nearby, young children played noisily on well-clipped grass. Wiping sweat from her brow, Velasquez announced she'd lost 80 pounds and, with it, a high risk of diabetes. Elena Marin, who picks grapes and lemons, said she came to Stiern Park three times a week and had lost 20 pounds, with 80 to go.

Nearly 700 Ivory Coast farmworkers alleging that they became sterile from exposure to a U.S.-made pesticide can't claim to be victims of genocide because the producers didn't intend harm, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The pesticide, known as DBCP for dibromochloropropane, has been banned in the United States since 1979. The Africans' suit against Amvac Chemical Corp. of Newport Beach, Dole Food Co. of Westlake Village, Dow Chemical Co. and Shell Oil Co.

Six farm employees in Iowa were charged with animal abuse and neglect Wednesday in connection with a video obtained by an animal-rights group that showed workers abusing pigs. Authorities in Greene County northwest of Des Moines began investigating about a month ago after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released a video of workers at a farm in BayardIowa, hitting sows with metal rods, slamming piglets on a concrete floor and bragging about sodomizing sows with rods.

As it prepares to leave office, the Bush administration is moving to make it easier for U.S. farming companies to hire foreign workers, which farmworker groups say will worsen wages and working conditions. The farmworker groups said changes to the H2A visa program, used by the agriculture industry to hire temporary workers, were posted on the Labor Department's website at midnight Tuesday but later taken down.

Aiming to ease farm labor shortages, the Bush administration issued sweeping changes to the nation's agricultural guest worker program Thursday, but California growers said the action would have only a minimal effect on their needs. The controversial rules, many months in the making by U.S.

California's Democratic senators introduced legislation Wednesday that would put some illegal immigrant farmworkers on a path to citizenship and revamp a little-used agricultural guest worker program. Flanked by Republican colleagues, immigrant advocates and a California pear grower, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer presented the bill as matter of survival for labor-strapped farmers across the country. "Today, many farmers are on a precipice," Feinstein said.