Children In the Fields Campaign
OUR STORY
Since 1997, AFOP’s Children in the Fields Campaign (CIFC) has been dedicated to ensuring that farmworker children are protected and given an opportunity to succeed in life. By educating the public, advocating for educational programs for farmworker children, and supporting fair living wages for all farmworkers.
Children In the Fields Campaign’s mission is to show America the realities our farmworker families face through the eyes of their children and to spur action to provide better educational support for our farmworker children, and prevent health hazards from working in the fields.
CIFC has partnered with the Child Labor Coalition, the National Consumers League, and other concerned parties to protect farmworker children. Together, they work to publicize the plight of this hidden population and advocate for federal policies that would strengthen the child labor safeguards in agriculture so that they are just as protective as those in other industries.
However, kids even younger than 12 often accompany their parents to work on American farms and fields. This means that farmworker children are being put at risk from a very young age – even before birth – from the pesticides, dangerous equipment, and other hazards populating those environments. Teenagers are permitted to operate various equipment from a young age, which corresponds to an increase in the rate of tragic accidents involving youth. Though children are at the height of vulnerability when they are still in the womb, there are inadequate protections for farmworkers who are expecting a child. Children also interact with their environment in fundamentally different ways than adults, yet this is not in regulators’ minds when setting standards for things such as pesticide use.
Children are at greater health risk from pesticide exposure than adults. Pesticides have been linked to numerous health problems, including asthma, dermatitis, learning disabilities, leukemia, brain tumors and certain childhood cancers. Several factors contribute to this vulnerability. We may think of children as “little adults”, but in fact, their bodies are not fully prepared to handle toxic chemicals.
