Agricultural Health & Safety Among Racial and Ethnic Minorities: Current Research and Perspectives

organized effort by a coalition of concerned health and safety professionals to raise awareness among legislators and the public about the high rate of occupational injury and illness in agriculture. This document outlined research and prevention goals for agricultural health and safety, and gave rise to ten NIOSH-sponsored agricultural health and safety research centers around the country. Before that time, OSHA and a handful of other federal agencies had attempted to take action in three areas of agriculture: agricultural injury prevention, pesticide management and migrant farmworker health, but with mixed results (M. Myers, 1992). The publication of Agriculture At Risk: A Report to the Nation represented the first national, coordinated effort to address occupational safety in agriculture. When this effort began, the focal point was production agriculture as a whole. The main message was that agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in America, and is the only one that federal and state government was taking almost no action to protect. The bulk of the data presented related to white farm owners and their families, and had little to say about other races, ethnicities or occupations within agriculture. While minority research in agricultural health and safety is limited, national data on agricultural fatality by race suggests that black workers are at higher risk for occupational fatality than white