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Pesticide laws fail to protect the most vulnerable people in agriculture: children iStock/m-gucci Two new studies highlight the hazardous conditions inherent in farm work, and show the weakness in standards meant to protect kids from developmental disorders and disease. As a child growing up on his family’s subsistence farm in Puebla, Mexico, Abel Luna loved helping to plant corn and other crops. But in 2001, when he turned 13, his enthusiasm quickly evaporated. That’s when Luna began traveling to New York’s black dirt region to “sell his labor,” working alongside his father in commercial vegetable crop fields. Where once he took pride in “growing [our] own food at [our] own pace,” he now began working 14-hour or longer days from February through November. In addition to a grueling schedule and poor living conditions, Luna remembers “pretty much a lack of every kind of equipment that you need”: gloves, glasses, and masks to protect him from contact with agricult

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