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Introduction: Pesticide Problems, Pesticide Paradoxes
- University of Arizona Press
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Arturo Aguilar1 stands in front of me in his agrochemical storeroom. I’ve just arrived at his farm near Paraíso in Cartago Province, Costa Rica. He takes a swig from an unlabeled bottle full of a brown liquid that he periodically sprays on his vegetable and herb crops. I’m horrified, being well versed in the many negative health effects of agrochemical exposure— death from acute poisoning, cancer, birth defects, and undermining of the immune system, to name a few. I fear that Arturo is joining the ranks of hundreds of thousands of small farmers, most notably in India, who have taken their lives because of increasing indebtedness and other negative impacts of the rollback of state support of agriculture (Mohanty 2005). He puts me slightly at ease by grinning loudly and declaring, “I’m an enemy of agrochemicals.”2 Rather than an attempted suicide, Arturo explains that his stunt was to show the lack of toxicity of an organic spray he buys from his farmer friend, who obtains it from EARTH University, a sustainable development-oriented facility in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. Like thousands of other farmers, Arturo grows his crops in the highland area of Northern Cartago, a major vegetable-producing area thirty miles east of San José, the capital of Costa Rica. Unlike most of these farmers, he has decided to do his best to reduce and eventually discontinue his use of synthetic pesticides. He is not an organic farmer but belongs to a farmers’ organization that sells produce to an agroexport firm servicing North American and European markets and high-end national markets in Costa Rica such as tourist restaurants and supermarkets. The exporter’s managers and those at other agroexporters in the area attempt to control farmers’ pesticide use by prohibiting the use of the most residual and toxic ones to comply with export market regulations in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Arturo’s commitment to reducing Introduction Pesticide Problems, Pesticide Paradoxes 4 Introduction his agrochemical use illustrates how, in an increasingly globalized and yet highly unequal world economy, food standards and regulations in the industrialized world affect export-oriented agriculture in developing countries. By focusing on vegetable production and pesticide use, this book examines how three major processes come together: agrarian capitalism, market regulation in agrifood commodity chains, and the ecological underpinnings of agriculture. At its core, my argument draws on Karl Polanyi ’s “double movement” of societal self-protection. Polanyi described the ill effects of the commodification or “marketization” of land, labor, food, and money during the development of capitalism in England and Europe and the awakening of society to the social and environmental destruction brought by these tremendous transformations. This created a countermovement that sought to limit the effects of commodification: “human society would have been annihilated but for protective countermoves which blunted the action” of the self-regulating market (Polanyi 1957, 76). But just as the spread of capitalism has been geographically uneven (Smith 1984), so too have the various countermovements to protect society and the environment from commodification’s most negative effects. Here I focus on two regulatory structures—that of the United States and Costa Rica—that are highly unequal in their effectiveness in shaping the agrifood system. By examining the intersection of these two regulatory systems with the dynamics of agrarian capitalism in a specific setting— Northern Cartago and the Ujarrás Valley—I show how market integration produces different socioecological outcomes. These vary according to the strength of the regulatory apparatus and the economic arrangements between produce buyers and farmers. In short, farmers who export to the United States and Europe have lowered their pesticide use and adopted agroecological methods to comply with export requirements, while national market vegetable farmers maintain some of the highest levels of pesticide use in the world. Additionally, export farmers who are better supported—those with a fixed price for their produce—are more likely to use the least toxic and least residual synthetic pesticides and adopt agroecological alternatives to pesticides. The chapters that follow explain why and how these and other important outcomes have occurred. [54.82.20.97] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:04 GMT) Pesticide Problems, Pesticide Paradoxes 5 Understanding the causes of these outcomes offers insights into agrifood system regulation and governance. Yet these kinds of insights are rare these days, in part because of decades of thinking that exportoriented market integration has worse impacts than local or national market integration. But it...