The Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and for Life interviewed ObAgro researcher Allan de Campos Silva, PhD in Human Geography from USP, for the first episode of the Podcast “The Toxic Business of Agriculture”. We are now making the full interview available, which can be viewed below.
The episode tells the emblematic case of a traditional community in Parque do Mirador, a state conservation unit located in the south of Maranhão, whose land and river were contaminated by the use of pesticides. The case reveals an increasingly common reality in Brazil: the use of pesticides as a chemical weapon to expel traditional peoples and communities from their lands. The situation is mainly caused by the actions of the ruralist caucus in the National Congress, which is constantly working to further relax the regulations and registration of poisons in the country.
In addition to Allan, the episode features the participation of Larissa Bombardi, a professor and PhD in Human Geography from USP, federal deputy Nilto Tatto (PT-SP) and Maria Kazé, who is a member of the national coordination of the Small Farmers Movement (MPA) and the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and for Life. Throughout the podcast, topics such as agroecology, popular resistance, legal assistance and reproductive rights will be discussed.
Listen to the Podcast The Toxic Business of Big Ag at:
Interview of the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and for Life with ObAgro researcher, geographer Allan de Campos
Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and for Life (CPCAPV): How do you evaluate the transition of agriculture to the agro-capitalist system?
Allan de Campos (AC): Different peoples around the planet domesticated plants, which in their original versions would be unrecognizable to us today... bananas with huge seeds and little pulp, tiny tomatoes... we can say that the history of humanity is linked to its ability not only to cultivate but also to transform plants, landscapes... it turns out that with the advent of capitalist modernity, agriculture began to be guided by an absolute criterion, which is productivity, that is, how quickly I can harvest the product of this plant. When modern society internalizes this criterion above all other qualities that a plant/landscape has, such as the ability to resist bacteria, the ability to resist drought, qualities contained in its diversity, sooner or later the spell ends up backfiring on the sorcerer. In the case of Brazil, if we remember, colonization began with the aim of producing tropical goods for Portugal, such as sugar cane, produced by the hands of people kidnapped in Africa and enslaved by traffickers and sugar mill owners. If you stop to think about it, the sugar cane economy is based, on the one hand, on the radical simplification of the existence of the enslaved human being as an abstract work machine, whose function is to harvest sugar cane and that's it, an economy that even produced epidemics of malaria and yellow fever. But from the point of view of the landscape, how many forests, fields and floodplains were not deforested to make way for large estates of a single plant, sugar cane? So we also see this radical simplification of nature... and this is a big problem... the first time a bacteria was identified affecting plants was precisely in sugarcane, during the gummosis epidemic in 1860... This bacteria prospered precisely because the colonial and slave economy was guided by productivity to the detriment of everything else and eliminated the most complex socio-ecological systems that existed here... This bacteria (Xanthomonas axonopodis) ended up causing enormous losses in sugarcane production... and here we begin to see the lack of intelligence in this entire project of producing ecologically simplified goods... The modern, capitalist form of agriculture is a true testing ground for the evolution and expanded and uncontrolled reproduction of pathogens, which are increasingly resistant... and this will also apply to industrial livestock farming, to bacteria and viruses. In addition to this aspect of productivity to the detriment of the biodiversity of landscapes, the other big problem of capitalist agriculture is the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides... the so-called brilliant inventions of the Green Revolution. It turns out that, combined, fertilizers and pesticides not only deplete natural resources, but also make plants, animals and humans sick. And even the "pope" of the Green Revolution, the biologist Norman Borlaug, who always worked in this sense of improvement aimed at capitalist agriculture, ended up recognizing that agriculture without biodiversity really does represent a threat. Capitalist agriculture, we call it entropic, because it does not sustain itself, it will always depend on external inputs, which in practice will reveal itself as a kind of destructive ecological balance, which links, for example, European agrochemical factories and Brazilian crop fields, as shown by Larissa Bombardi's research in her book “Agrochemicals and Chemical Colonialism”. On the other hand, there are thousands of ways of producing food, in the food traditions of peoples, who value above all the regenerative capacity of their landscapes. In Brazil, there are plenty of examples, such as quilombola and indigenous agroforests, to name a few. Native peoples, like our indigenous peoples, deal with agriculture like a collector with his collection, which is why anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha talks about peoples of megadiversity, always seeking to expand biodiversity.
CPCAPV: What is the relationship between the use of pesticides and the health of the population?
AC: Although it may not seem like it, the history of this relationship between pesticides and the population's illness is quite long... If we remember, DDT, a pesticide used as an insecticide on plantations, despite the broad consensus regarding the harm it causes, was only banned in Brazil in 1995, despite having already been banned in the US in 1972. The specific fight against DDT dates back to the 1960s, when the American Rachel Carlson wrote the book “Silent Spring”, denouncing the relationship between this pesticide, the death of insects and birds and cancer in humans. Rachel Carlson also spoke about the problem of resistance of so-called pests to pesticides, since nature will always find ways to circumvent our life-eliminating technologies... which I call antibiotic technologies... Even with this victory, today we are still deeply entangled in this problem... All over the world, capitalist agriculture advances with a promise that seems more like a threat: large corporations want to transform any act of planting into a commodity, a properly capitalist activity. To this end, an entire market of high-yield seeds, pesticides and chemical fertilizers was created, the so-called “technological package”. And one of the most widely used pesticides in grain crops, such as soybeans, is Glyphosate, known by its commercial name, Round-Up, and produced by Monsanto, now controlled by Bayer. Glyphosate is a herbicide that kills other weeds and leaves only Monsanto's seed to sprout. Monsanto has done everything it can to avoid accusations that glyphosate causes cancer. At some point, they even took on the blame, at least in part, when in 2003 an email was leaked from a company scientist saying that one of the ingredients in Round-up, which helps with the absorption of the product, would in fact cause cancer. In any case, Monsanto is currently facing hundreds of thousands of lawsuits linking glyphosate to cancer. The company has already been ordered to pay a large amount of damages in the cases already tried. In the latest decision in December 2022, it was ordered to pay a collective compensation of 11 billion dollars. Pesticides in the glyphosate category, called organochlorines, can be transmitted from mother to fetus or baby through breastfeeding, and have also been associated with a growing number of cases of autism in children. So, I would say that the main problems with pesticides are the occurrence of cancer and autism, but also neurodegenerative diseases, heart problems, fertility problems and miscarriages. However, simple exposure to the product can cause vomiting, nausea, weakness. In Brazil, we have a huge problem, which is the spraying of pesticides by airplanes, which has already been banned in the state of Ceará, but which always ends up causing huge health problems, including for children, as in the case in SINOP, the capital of soybeans in Mato Grosso do Sul, where a plane dropped pesticides on top of a school. In a report from the end of 2022, UNICEF estimated that around 27 million children and adolescents are exposed to pesticides today in Brazil.
CPCAPV: What does the production of goods for the global economy have to do with all this?
AC: We are still experiencing the aftermath of what Argentine sociologist Maristela Svampa called the commodities consensus, and this applies to Brazil, but also to South America and Europe. This means that countries' political agendas are hijacked by this form, symbolized by commodities, which in the end is an English word for merchandise, but which simply encompasses soybeans, iron ore, etc. In practice, this consensus around goods or commodities means that in 2022 Brazil invested more than 200 billion in agribusiness and failed to strengthen the initiatives that feed and protect us, in addition to opening space for groups of looting and destruction such as the miners on Yanomami lands. The consequences of this arrangement can be summed up in that case, which everyone must remember, of the people looking for bones in a truck to make soup, in Rio de Janeiro. What not everyone remembers is that this happened in the same month that China stopped importing beef from Brazil because two cases of mad cow disease emerged here in Brazil, in September 2021. Mad cow disease is an infectious disease that can also be produced naturally by the animals themselves when they get old... China decided to cut purchases immediately, fearing a greater contagion. Amid the blockade, Brazilian farmers even rented refrigerated containers to store beef until the blockade was lifted. When an agricultural producer was asked if that crisis would cause meat prices to fall, he replied that the Brazilian market was already “saturated” - more than 33 million people going hungry is a “saturated market”, because for the market, the only subject is the one who consumes its goods, those who don't have money are out of the equation. Well, without getting into the fact that, because of this “market saturation”, meatpacking plants were closing and laying off workers, cattle producers began to postpone the time of slaughtering cattle in the pasture. Older, recumbent cattle have a chance of producing this mutation, which causes mad cow disease. In other words, cattle farming does not kill hunger, it negotiates acceptable levels of hunger in human beings so that it can continue to reproduce, while producing diseases as a mere side effect of “market saturation”. I wonder how long Brazilian society will continue to double down on this bet? Why not dry up the source that finances agribusiness with public money and direct these resources to regenerative agriculture initiatives, which heal and feed people and landscapes. It is also worth remembering that agribusiness throughout the world is deeply subsidized by the State, because the levels of productivity that capitalist agriculture has reached have put its own economy in check. Without help from the State, agribusiness goes bankrupt. On the other hand, the climate change agenda is slowly infiltrating the market economy, but only slightly, setting a tone rather than profoundly reorganizing our practices. When the research on pesticides in Brazil conducted by Larissa Bombardi reached Europe, European supermarket chains began to boycott Brazilian products and soon a horde of agribusiness ideologues began to make noise and accuse researchers who simply pointed out the facts of treason. What I think of this commodities consensus is that it has a few watchdogs who make a lot of noise, because of the support of the corporate media. But with so much hunger, illness, death and destruction, there is no way this project will stay on its feet for much longer.
CPCAPV: What is the relationship between agriculture, environmental destruction and pandemics?
AC: This is where things start to get more complicated. Just look at soybeans: after the Amazon moratorium, a project that joined forces to try to curb deforestation in the Amazon, it began to make strong progress in the Cerrado. And even in the Amazon, the effects of the moratorium were still very limited. We have seen alarming deforestation rates in all of our biomes. Just remember the dramatic fires in the Pantanal, like those that left even the sky in São Paulo dark with smoke. When we destroy the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Pantanal to make way for large farms producing agribusiness goods, we are destroying the social and ecological foundations that could get us out of this mess. But, worse than that, we are also creating new problems. A recent study led by Cláudia Codeço showed how areas where cattle and soybeans predominate have higher rates of some infectious diseases, such as hantavirus and dengue fever. COVID-19 itself emerged from a context of forest destruction and industrial livestock farming in Southeast Asia. Bats, the likely original host animals of the COVID-19 virus, are losing their fallow trees, which are making way for grain farms and large-scale animal farming. This is the ideal condition for viruses from wild animals to jump to livestock and exercise their evolutionary pathways there to eventually produce a variant that is capable of infecting humans. The Amazon alone has about 120 species of bats, each of which contains between 2 or 3 species of wild coronaviruses. Raising chickens and pigs by the tens of thousands, on the border of the deforested forest, for example, is creating a bridge that connects humans to new infectious diseases. Since 2023, we have reached a new level for avian flu, caused by the H5N1 virus, to become a pandemic. After devastating flocks of intensively farmed birds in the United States (38 million birds slaughtered), in Europe and Asia, the disease has reached wild birds in South America. And lastly, an outbreak occurred in Spain that affected a mink farm, those small mammals raised for their fur. Then, in 2024, workers at cattle slaughterhouses developed conjunctivitis that was associated with infection by the avian flu virus, which has already discovered how to infect several non-human mammals. There was a time when about 25% of milk in the US contained traces of avian flu. Under these conditions of genetic monoculture and on a large scale, avian flu is getting closer every day to producing a mutation that makes the virus capable of being transmitted and causing disease in humans in the respiratory form... just as happened with COVID-19. Not only have we not learned anything from COVID-19, we are also accelerating the spread of new emerging diseases. The origins of this pandemic production method lie in environmental destruction and the expansion of large-scale monoculture of grains and animals, that is, agribusiness as such. Therefore, if there is one thing we need to understand, it is that capitalist agriculture, which today takes the form of agribusiness, is a suicidal project and must be abolished.
CPCAPV: How do you evaluate the actions of the National Congress regarding the authorization of the use of these substances? Is there any prospect for reducing the use of pesticides in Brazil?
AC: Until 2022, the actions of Congress regarding the authorization of pesticides were shameful. In the last 4 years, during the Bolsonaro government, more than 2,000 types of new pesticides were approved for use in Brazil. And as has been said, at the end of the government, on December 19, 2022, a Senate committee approved the Pesticide Bill, nicknamed the Poison Package. The bill, which has been under discussion since the late 1990s, proposes changing and making more flexible the rules by which pesticides are approved and sold in Brazil. And this package was approved at the end of 2023, in the first year of the new Lula government, by a Congress hijacked by the agribusiness agenda. Another element that the project proposed was to use the term “pesticide” instead of agrochemical. This is very important, because it is a kind of public opinion maneuver. The term pesticide, which is no longer used in critical studies, refers to the idea that agriculture is a hygienic enterprise, with cultivated species and pests. So, the substance used to combat these so-called pests would be pesticides. It turns out that there is a dispute over this understanding, because for regenerative agriculture, for agroecology, the system finds ways to produce without using these technologies that eliminate life, without such antibiotic technologies. The principles of agroecology point precisely in this direction. One of the main precursors of agroecology, the French agronomist Chaboussou, realized that it was necessary to change this paradigm while working in wine production in France... and proposed the theory of Trophobiosis, which points out precisely that the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides makes plants sick. This is clearly described in his book, entitled: Plants sick from the use of pesticides, published by the MST publishing house, Expressão Popular. Finally, what this name change sought to hide is that pesticides are toxic, that is, they make people and landscapes sick, so it is not simply a pesticide, it is a toxic product that affects us all. Now, of course there is a prospect of reducing the use of pesticides in Brazil, but this will depend on awareness and mobilization of the entire Brazilian society, because it is stronger and knows better about the future than the agribusiness caucus.
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Interview conducted in February 2023 and revised in August 2024. More information at:
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