Toxic Injustice: A Transnational History of Exposure and Struggle by Susanna Rankin Bohme (review)

Toxic Injustice is an exceptionally fascinating and transnational history of the birth and slow death of DBCP (dibromochloropropane). Designed by Dow and Shell in the 1950s, DBCP was widely used in agriculture as a pesticide during the 1960s and 1970s in both the United States and Central America despite early indications that it was dangerous to human health. DBCP then achieved worldwide notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s as a global campaign revealed that the chemical was responsible for the sterility of thousands of banana workers in Central America.

Toxic Injustice tells this story in two interrelated parts: first by tracing DBCP’s creation, promotion, and widespread use from the 1950s to the 1980s and then by exploring the struggles of workers, lawyers, and their allies since the 1980s to achieve justice for the damage caused. Both stories are truly global. The first looks at the role of corporate and state power in mobilizing science, regulations, and laws to promote the geographically uneven spread of DBCP across the globe in ways that affected marginalized groups disproportionately. Even after the chemical’s dangers were clearly demonstrated and its use curtailed in the United States, chemical companies continued to produce and sell it outside the United States while transnational banana companies applied it on plantations throughout Central America. In short, Central American plantation workers were those most harmed precisely because they were the least able to access information about the pesticide’s dangers or resist its use. The second part of the story chronicles the transnational struggle by workers and their allies to achieve justice.

The strength of Toxic Injustice is that these two stories overlap and are put into dialogue with one another in such a way that we come to understand how the production, distribution, and use of DBCP was challenged and shaped by political struggles and how workers’ movements themselves unfolded within a terrain that was partially determined by DBCP’s global circulation and use. In telling this global story, Susanna Rankin Bohme does an excellent job of demonstrating not only how and why worker struggles were central to this process but how crucial states were—even less powerful ones in Central America—in shaping this larger history of worker resistance and exploitation, global banana trade, corporate malfeasance, occupational health, and the search for justice.

It is also worth noting that this book is exceptional in the wide range of sources the author was able to use, including not only newspaper accounts, trade publications, government reports, and worker-activist testimonies but also internal corporate documents, legal testimony from a multiplicity of trials, a WikiLeaks search, and primary sources from the US government through a Freedom of Information Act request. The breadth and richness of these sources not only allows for wonderful details and periodic surprises but also allows Bohme to tell a truly transnational history through a wide range of voices. This makes for a compelling read.

The book has a wonderfully clear organization. The first chapter starts with the development and regulation of DBCP from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s. On some level, the broad contours of this story—namely, that “scientific inquiry” into the potential risks of DBCP was perverted by the goal of securing regulatory approval for a potentially profitable pesticide—are not all that surprising. But the story itself is wonderfully rich and gives us a great sense of how marketing, laboratory testing, regulation, and sales are all intertwined and deeply politicized. Science that did not directly support the broader imperatives of regulatory approval and expanding sales was systematically brushed aside.

Chapter 2 moves the story forward both chronologically and in terms of the life of DBCP by exploring the chemical’s widespread use in the United States and Central America. In both places, it was largely Latin Americans who faced the greatest exposure to the chemical. In the United States, farm workers, often from Mexico...