Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Chemically Dependent
Decades after Silent Spring, pesticides remain a menace
-- especially to farmworkers

By Tom Philpott 18 Oct 2006
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2006/10/18/pesticides/index.html

In 1962, Rachel Carson published her landmark Silent
Spring, which documented the ravages of agricultural
pesticides, particularly DDT, on wildlife. The book
inspired wide outrage and helped spark the modern
environmental movement. It eventually led to a (now-
controversial) ban on DDT. But since then, use of other
pesticides has boomed.

According to a USDA report, between 1964 and 1982,
pesticide use in the U.S. jumped by a factor of almost
three, peaking at nearly 600 million pounds annually.
The USDA is shockingly casual about releasing current
pesticide statistics. The freshest data I can find show
pesticide use hovering at 500 million pounds in 2002 --
more than double the 1964 level.

This annual avalanche of toxins onto our crops and
soils has been accompanied by mounting evidence of
their ill effects on public health -- particularly that
of farmers and farmworkers. The latest entry: a study
from Canada showing that women who had worked on farms
were nearly three times as likely as other women to
develop breast cancer.

The Agricultural Health Study, a joint venture of
several public-health agencies, has revealed direct
links between chemical-intensive farming and both
prostate cancer and retinal degeneration. A link has
also been established between pesticide use and
Parkinson's disease.

Shifting the Burden

If Carson's book had a limited effect on the rising
tide of pesticide use, it probably did affect the types
of agricultural poisons used.

In 1990's The Death of Ramon Gonzales: A Modern
Agricultural Dilemma, Angus Wright argued that Silent
Spring sparked a backlash against so-called
"persistent" pesticides, which build up over time in
soil, groundwater, and the bodies of animals. These
dangerous chemicals also tend to cling in residue form
to fruits and vegetables in the supermarket.

The agrichemical industry's response -- embraced by
farm owners, government regulators, and global aid
institutions -- was to promote pesticides that break
down rapidly. But these alternatives, known as "non-
persistent" chemicals, are much more dangerous at the
time of application. The strategy, Wright says, was to
placate public fear about pesticide poisoning by
shifting as much of the risk as possible onto farm
ecosystems and farmworkers, and away from consumers and
the broader environment.

The shift occurred later in Mexico and other developing
nations than in the U.S., Wright shows. That's because
the chemical industry's first reaction to U.S. public
anger about DDT and other "persistents" was to shut
them out of the U.S. market and push them on farmers in
the global south, which had weaker regulatory regimes.
But muckraking journalists exposed a "circle of
poison": chemicals that had been banned in the United
States were reappearing in U.S. supermarkets heavily
stocked, particularly in winter, with Mexican fruit and
vegetables.

As a result of public outcry, use of the quicker-to-
break-down but highly toxic non-persistent chemicals
then exploded in the global south, particularly in
areas characterized by export-oriented farming. This
early-1980s switch had "immediate and tragic
consequences for farmworkers," according to Wright.
Despite strong industry-backed standards requiring that
anyone handling such poisons be protected by
respirators, rubber coveralls, and other gear, Wright
observed such requirements being routinely violated by
large, export-minded landowners.

Such violations remain routine -- and not just in
Mexico. A 2002 report [PDF] spearheaded by the
Pesticide Action Network summarizes findings from
California's Department of Pesticide Regulation. The
agency surveyed a sampling of pesticide-reliant farm
operations between 1997 and 2001. Fully one-third
violated regulations involving protective equipment,
washing facilities, and fieldworker access to pesticide
use information. The agency claimed that 88 percent of
the protective-equipment violations stemmed from
employer negligence.

In Death, Wright traces the fate of one young
farmworker who died in 1981, most likely from exposure
to a class of non-persistent insecticides known as
organophosphates. Many products from this pesticide
class -- which came upon the world stage as a nerve gas
developed by German engineers during World War II --
remain legal in the United States. Two months ago,
after contemplating the matter for 10 years, the U.S.
EPA approved use of 32 organophosphates -- a decision
so egregious that it prompted a public outcry from
hundreds of agency scientists who claimed their leaders
had been swayed by industry influence.

Like the oil industry, agribusiness survives on its
ability to privatize profits and socialize costs. Heavy
pesticide use helped bring about short-term gains in
crop yields, which has meant billions in profits for
grain traders, food processors, agrichemical giants,
and other food-related multinational corporations. To
these firms, pesticide-related deaths and maladies are
what economists call an "externality" -- a cost that
lands in someone else's ledger.

That the burden has been engineered to fall most
heavily on farmworkers -- a group not known for its
access to high-level health care -- is particularly
galling.

Farmworker health has quietly become a kind of human
sacrifice at the altar of cheap food. Consumers in the
U.S. benefit from -- and low-income people rely on --
the world's cheapest food system. They owe it to
farmworkers to demand an end to, or at least a severe
reduction in, pesticide use. Consumer hell-raising
helped ban DDT and other persistent pesticides in the
1970s. More than 40 years after the publication of
Silent Spring, it's time to finish the job.

- - - - - - - - - -
Grist staff writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at
Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and
small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North
Carolina.