EPA backs down from plan that could have allowed youth farmworkers to handle pesticides

The Environmental Protection Agency has abandoned plans to roll back a set of protections for farmworkers, including a proposal to ease Obama-era regulations requiring anyone working with dangerous pesticides to be at least 18 years old.Passed in 2015, the rules became a target of the EPA a year after President Trump’s election. The agency announced in late 2017 that it was reconsidering the minimum age requirements, opening the door to the possibility that it might lower the age limit or do away with it entirely.The agency cited as justification an executive order signed by the president calling for “reducing regulation and controlling regulatory costs.”But the EPA said recently that the effort to scale back those environmental and health regulations would not go forward, disappointing industry groups and pleasantly surprising environmental and farmworker advocacy groups.