EPA Approves 'Forever Chemicals' on Food Crops—No Warning to Farmworkers

The Environmental Protection Agency has approved three new PFAS pesticides for use on food crops—under the radar, with no public warning to the farmworkers who will handle them or the families who will eat the food they’re sprayed on.

One of the three carries internal EPA warnings. Scientists within the agency flagged it as having “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential,” according to reporting by the Environmental Working Group. That didn’t stop approval.

PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are called “forever chemicals” for a reason. Once in soil or water, they don’t break down. They accumulate in the bodies of people and animals. They’ve been linked to kidney and liver damage, thyroid disease, reduced immune response, and cancer. Yet the EPA has allowed them into US agriculture with minimal public review.

The silence around this approval matters. Farmworkers—who apply pesticides in fields and pack houses—are already among the most poisoned workers in America. They face chronic exposure to pesticides with minimal protection and no union voice in how those chemicals are regulated. Adding PFAS to the spray roster deepens an existing injustice.

The timing is also a tell. The decision came as Congress has been moving to reverse the Supreme Court’s recent pesticide immunity ruling, which blocked consumers and farmworkers from suing pesticide makers for harm. While lawmakers scramble to restore legal recourse, the EPA is quietly expanding what’s allowed to be sprayed—and who has to be exposed to it.

This is the shape of the current deregulation era in agriculture. Restrictions are quietly dismantled while the public isn’t looking. Protections that took decades to build are unwound in a press release no one reads. And the people closest to the chemicals—the farmworkers who depend on day labor, no benefits, and no bargaining power—absorb the risk.

PFAS contamination is already widespread in US farmland, and several states are now tracking it in drinking water and biosolids. Adding three new PFAS pesticides to the approved list doesn’t fix that problem—it makes it worse.

The EPA approval is documented by the Environmental Working Group, which has long tracked agency decisions on pesticides and their human health impacts. But there’s been little mainstream media coverage of the decision. That silence—the lack of warning to farmworkers, the lack of pressure on retailers, the lack of public alarm—is itself the story.

Farmworkers aren’t powerless. But they’ve been left out of the conversation again. As farm labor organizing accelerates across the country, this quiet approval shows why: the systems that regulate what gets sprayed on food were never built to protect the people who grow it. That gap is widening, not closing. And the chemicals in question will last forever in the soil and in the bodies of those exposed.