Paraquat Is Banned in the EU. It's Still Being Sprayed on US Farms.

For most farmers, paraquat is just a tool. A cheap, fast-acting herbicide that kills weeds on contact. It’s been registered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1964. It’s on the shelf at farm supply stores across the country.

For farmworkers, the picture looks different.

The Environmental Working Group has documented paraquat’s ties to Parkinson’s disease, childhood leukemia, and other serious health harms — and EWG is not alone. In early June 2026, representatives from the Parkinson’s Foundation and the American Bird Conservancy joined EWG advocates at a virtual briefing to push New York state lawmakers to ban the chemical before the Legislature adjourned on June 4.

That New York is fighting this battle at the state level — while the federal government holds the line — tells you where the power in this fight actually sits.

What Paraquat Is

Paraquat is a non-selective contact herbicide: it kills green plant tissue on contact, with kill visible within days of application. It’s used for weed control in row crops, primarily before planting season or between growing rows. In large-scale commodity agriculture, its speed is a selling point — fast kill means faster field prep, which matters when millions of acres need to move through a tight planting window.

It is also acutely toxic. The EPA classifies paraquat as a restricted-use pesticide, meaning only licensed applicators can legally handle it. Accidental ingestion can be fatal in small amounts. By design, the chemical carries an added blue dye and an odorant — a tell that its regulatory profile already acknowledges known, serious hazard at the point of contact.

The chronic hazard is where the real fight is.

The Parkinson’s Connection

Paraquat belongs to a class of compounds that generate reactive oxygen species in biological tissue — highly reactive molecules that damage cells, including the dopamine-producing neurons that Parkinson’s disease progressively destroys. Researchers have studied agricultural workers with long-term paraquat exposure for decades, and the association between that exposure and elevated Parkinson’s risk has built a substantial body of evidence.

EWG has described paraquat as carrying “links to Parkinson’s disease, childhood leukemia and other serious health harms.” The Parkinson’s Foundation — which joined the coalition advocating for New York’s ban — has made paraquat’s continued US registration a focus of its policy work, arguing that the evidence of harm is sufficient to justify withdrawal.

The European Union reached that conclusion in 2007, when the European Commission withdrew paraquat’s registration, citing unacceptable risks to human health. That decision survived a legal challenge, and the EU ban has remained in effect. According to EWG’s advocacy coalition, more than 30 countries have now prohibited the herbicide. The United States is among a small group of developed nations where it remains in legal agricultural use.

The EPA has continued to register paraquat for use in the US, and periodic agency registration reviews — the process by which the EPA evaluates whether existing pesticide authorizations continue to meet statutory standards — have not resulted in cancellation. The question of whether that standard is set high enough for a chemical with this evidence record is one advocates have taken to federal court.

The State-Level Frontline

With federal action stalled, the fight has moved to state legislatures.

In early June 2026, ahead of the New York Legislature’s adjournment, EWG and coalition partners pressed lawmakers to pass a bill banning paraquat before the session closed. The coalition included the Parkinson’s Foundation and the American Bird Conservancy, which has separately documented paraquat’s effects on bird populations in agricultural landscapes.

State bans are the available tool because they sidestep the slow-moving federal process. A state legislature can prohibit purchase, use, or distribution within its borders without waiting for EPA action. That’s the same model that has driven progress on PFAS pesticides in California, where AB 1603 would force reform ahead of any federal timeline.

The chemical industry opposes state bans, typically arguing that restrictions disrupt integrated pest management programs and that alternatives may drive greater total herbicide use. Those are real agronomic considerations. They are also the arguments that chemical registrations stay active on, decade after decade, while the health evidence accumulates.

Who Gets Hurt

The workers most exposed to paraquat are the ones least positioned to object.

Migrant farmworkers — including many on H-2A guest worker visas, already facing federally imposed wage cuts this desk reported on earlier today — are the population most likely to be present in recently sprayed fields. Re-entry intervals after paraquat application exist on paper; enforcement is inconsistent, and field monitoring is minimal in large agricultural operations.

Workers who are living in employer-provided housing, dependent on their visa status, and facing the wage pressures this desk has been tracking are not in a structural position to demand respirators, refuse assignments, or report violations that might cost them their placement. The pathway from repeated field exposure to a Parkinson’s diagnosis can span two decades — long after any particular farm or crew assignment is a distant memory.

This is the same gap running through every poisoned-ground story on this beat. The people absorbing the chemical exposure are not the people making the decisions about which chemicals are registered and which aren’t.

Debt, Consolidation, and the Persistence of Paraquat

Paraquat’s continued presence in US agriculture isn’t just regulatory inertia. There are real economic forces keeping it in use.

Chapter 12 farm bankruptcy filings remain elevated, and farmers under debt pressure have limited room to switch to more expensive alternative herbicides. Herbicide-resistant weed populations have expanded significantly across commodity cropland — glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth is now common across the cotton and soybean South — and paraquat’s different biochemical mechanism makes it useful in resistance management programs that need to rotate chemistries.

That’s not a cynical argument. It’s a real bind that corporate consolidation of the agri-chemical sector has helped create: fewer companies control more of the chemistry, alternatives are expensive and often controlled by the same firms, and the financial pressure on individual farming operations makes cheap registered products hard to walk away from.

The loop breaks slowly. One state at a time, one courtroom at a time — and in the meantime, the people working closest to the spray nozzle are the ones who pay the price for how slowly it moves.