Courtney Marie Dowdall, Ryan J. Klotz. Pesticides and Global Health: Understanding Agrochemical Dependence and Investing in Sustainable Solutions. Anthropology and Global Public Health Series. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2013. 148 pp. $89.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-61132-304-7; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-61132-305-4.

Reviewed by Erik Phillips-Nania
Published on H-Socialisms (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)

Transitioning to Sustainable Agriculture

Pesticides and Global Health: Understanding Agrochemical Dependence and Investing in Sustainable Solutions could be titled Agrochemicals and Farmer Health in Central America. It includes a substantial focus on the health effects of direct, acute agrochemical exposure to farmers, but it is not about pesticide or agrochemical health impact on food consumers or the environment, as the title might suggest. The book explores, from the lens of two anthropologists, Courtney Marie Dowdall and Ryan J. Klotz, the complex political, cultural, and economic issues of Guatemala’s agriculture (chapters 1 and 2 and the conclusion, about seventy pages). It also includes two interesting case studies on coffee and vegetable farms, comparing farmers using synthetic agrochemicals with those using organic methods (chapters 3 and 4, about sixty pages). The greatest strength of the book is the broad cultural analysis.

The globalized food system has many problems and Guatemala’s struggling farmers provide an important perspective that is relevant and important for any community advancing local and global sustainability. The book’s focus is about how time, labor, the economy, health, and other factors dominate the farmers’ consideration about what practices to use. The authors also explain how corporate actors are focused on securing predictability, standardization, lower labor costs, lower safety and environmental regulations, and the reduction of short-term risks. This results in the industry’s dominance of state regulation at the expense of farmer health, livelihood, and sustainability. A recurring theme throughout the book is the “product price treadmill,” where agrochemicals help increase productivity but lower prices and erode profits, which is an incentive for farmers to increase production even more.

The authors identify fertilizers (not pesticides) as one of the most contentious factors in the choice to continue using synthetic chemicals or switch to organic practices. The authors document how a conventional Guatemalan farmer uses about five hundred pounds of chemicals whereas an organic farmer uses about three thousand pounds of composted biomass for the same 43.7 m^2 cuerda—and, thereby, considerable more time and labor. But the reader is left wondering where all of this biomass comes from and its effects and pressures on local biodiversity. How sustainable is this organic solution?  

The anthropologist authors say that “this process of [agrochemical] agricultural modernization has resulted in a ... more predictable and productive” system that is superior to the organic alternative (p. 29). This is a controversial statement. Conventional methods are only as predictable for short-term (not longer-term) yields as the volatile fossil fuel and economic markets allow; and agrochemicals can increase the production in volume, but it is usually far less productive based on nutrition and soil erosion. Furthermore, all the organic compost in the organic system enhances the soil’s ability to store water and reduce vulnerability in the face of droughts and floods—plus it sequesters carbon dioxide—thereby enhancing the system’s productivity, predictability, and sustainability. All the organic compost would also certainly help with soil and water health and quality. But none of these sustainability issues are considered.

Variability in weather and the need for more predictable harvests are repeatedly cited as primary motivations for agrochemical use, but the issue of climate change is never mentioned. The climate context involves the increasing frequency and severity of temperature extremes and changing rainfall patterns. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) landmark Fifth Assessment Report (AR5, 2014), as well as many other findings, are issuing calls for urgent change in agricultural systems, warning that conventional practices like the overuse of agrochemicals are maladaptive and increasingly vulnerable to devastating impacts. While many experts feel that agrochemicals and climate change are putting the global food supply at risk, this book takes a more reserved tone and narrow focus.

Similarly, the authors begin their conclusion with an even more controversial, if not demonstrably false, claim that contemporary practices using agrochemicals are “assuring the safety of agricultural commodities that reach consumers” (p. 119). The authors link pesticide use to cancer, birth defects, developmental harm, and nervous system damage to farmers, but the agrochemicals persist beyond the field and are an issue facing food consumers as well. The authors also fail to make the connection that plants grown with agrochemicals, although appearing more abundant and large, contain fewer nutrients and, with systemic pesticides that pervade the inside of the vegetables and fruit (and cannot be washed away), are poisonous to the planet and to humans, causing disease. The issue of bioaccumulation is left unmentioned. The only people who benefit from agrochemicals seem to be the corporations, from the sale of the chemicals and indirectly from the suffering of people through the pharmaceutical industry and the multitrillion dollar disease-care system. However, the authors’ view is that agrochemicals do have significant benefits that should be weighed against the challenges of organic practices.

The status of vegetable production in Guatemala is unclear. Vegetables are obviously an important crop for widespread subsistence farming, but the authors emphasize wrongly that coffee and fresh vegetables are “two of [Guatemala’s] most important export crops” (pp. 121, 97). This justifies their focus on their two case studies. However, a quick look to the Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO’s) website or elsewhere shows that the biggest agricultural export crops are coffee, sugar, and bananas. This was a frustrating error because it would have been useful to include the agrochemical status of these other two important commodities. Nevertheless, the case study about vegetable farming seems representative of the majority of small farmers in Guatemala and beyond.

The authors talk about state failure, ineffectiveness, militarization, and corruption—resulting in Guatemala having the most chronically malnourished (44 percent of the population) and impoverished (56 percent below the poverty line) population in Latin America (p. 49). Unfortunately, I was surprised that the authors only dedicated one paragraph to the refugee crisis (pp. 50-51). Since 2010, there has been a dramatic increase in refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, an area that is an epicenter of gangs, drug cartels, violence, and organized crime. The violence and chaos that grips the country is referred to as something that took place in the past (the 1980s and 1990s [p. 8]), when in fact the violence has been escalating in the 2010s.[1] The refugee and internal displacement crisis deserves more attention in an ethnographic analysis.

The examination of agrochemical exposure and health effects is very informative in some ways and misleading in other ways, with the authors emphasizing how “extremely difficult” it is to establish a link between exposure and any health effect (pp. 32). The authors fall into the trap of repeating industry’s reductionist obsession with minutia, rather than conducting a holistic analysis. As in other sectors of the business world, industry dominates the relevant scientific research and often the professional organizations that create an illusion of impartiality. The authors might have been more critical of the health studies. The authors talk about the “difficulty of isolating the effects of a single chemical over time,” which is how industrial scientists frame the issue (p. 33). They assume that one must isolate the single factor among thousands that causes the negative end result, ignoring other complexities that often are the real culprit. This reductionist approach typifies industry-oriented arguments about other food products, as seen in the debates over tobacco and nutrition. The result, as the authors point out, is a finding of no correlation between human exposure and detrimental health effects. This results in extremely weak protective regulations, while regulators and industry scientists wait for uncontested epidemiological evidence. Even if these health effects were recognized, the authors point out other important factors that would make them somewhat irrelevant, such as lax monitoring, lack of access to health care, underreporting of illnesses (as high as 98 percent), and lack of safety equipment and farmer education.

The “sustainable solutions” are only given a dozen or so pages, and primarily involve the need for human development: cooperation, building networks and institutions, knowledge sharing, training and education for farmers and consumers, economic assistance for farmers, and practices such as polyculture crop rotation and composting. I was surprised that alternatives to pesticides, including integrated pest management (IPM), are not discussed except for describing one example where a community uses pest-trapping devices.

The authors’ conclusion is that farmers must play the central role in sustainable development, but in a more focused and collaborative way with the international aid efforts that are trying to help them recover from four decades of ongoing civil violence. “The biggest lesson,” the authors say, is that “much more aid is needed” for broad structural change (pp. 8, 126). Guatemalan farmers are dealing with a complex systemic disaster involving a sixteen trillion dollar debt to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the largest in Central America, plus corporate exploitation, illiteracy, poverty, physical stresses, a bad health care system, and a corrupt government (p. 47). The authors’ main point is that international efforts in helping with public health in agriculture can have synergistic co-benefits to address big-picture concerns as well. While the authors document a variety of important ways the market and industry are exploiting the farmers, none of their solutions target these bigger issues. In the end, most of the solutions in this book are related to how it is the farmers’ decision to organize and the farmers’ decision to work harder for healthier organic practices, even though they are already being pushed to their limits.

In summary, the book is a very good ethnographic and anthropological analysis about Guatemala’s agriculture, the use of agrochemicals, health and regulatory situations, cultural and family relations, the educational and health care systems, socioeconomic development, and the future fate of farmer cooperatives. However, it has a number of important weaknesses, biases, and omissions related to the sustainability of organic fertilizers, alternatives to pesticides, predictability and productivity of agrochemical methods, climate change, agrochemical safety and health effects, sugar and banana commodities, the refugee crisis, and attitude toward the benefits of agrochemicals and the agricultural industry. Thus, the overall analysis falls short and is misleading in a number of important ways. Nevertheless, Pesticides and Global Heath contains great analyses on various other issues, especially the conclusion about “confronting the knowledge-dependence treadmill” through building farmer-based institutions (p. 125). Overall, the book is a good summary of the authors’ perspective based on their eighteen-month visit to Guatemala in 2009-10.

Note

[1]. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Children on the Run (Washington DC: UNHCR, 2014), 4, http://www.unhcrwashington.org/sites/default/files/1_UAC_Children%20On%20the%20Run_Executive%20Summary.pdf.

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Citation: Erik Phillips-Nania. Review of Dowdall, Courtney Marie; Klotz, Ryan J., Pesticides and Global Health: Understanding Agrochemical Dependence and Investing in Sustainable Solutions. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. September, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42283

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