Virtual Public Meeting of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC)

This comment is to bring to the attention of NEJAC a couple of relevant Environmental Justice papers regarding EPA's regulation of pesticides. The first is a comprehensive overview of how pesticides disproportionately impact people of color and low income communities. In this paper, we identify the scope of the problem with regards to segregated exposure and harms in the US. Then we identify areas where US law and regulatory practice are perpetuating these disparities. We end with very concrete, achievable ideas for how to prevent this from occurring. The other paper identifies how US pesticide policy is harming the Yaqui indigenous people in Mexico by exporting banned pesticides into that country. This paper also identifies concrete ideas for how to fix this environmental injustice.