Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
workerhousingunitssituatedalongsidethefarms.Oneformercampresi-
dent recalled that drifting pesticides sometimes poisoned chickens and
other domestic animals. 104 Worker complaints apparently prodded Stan-
dard Fruit to install new sprinklers that reduced the amount of drift.
At some point in the 1970s, the company began applying DBCP in a
granularformulationthatworkersinjectedintothebaseof bananaplants.
This method significantly reduced the contamination of plantation living
spaces but left applicators vulnerable to exposure.
Public concern about the effects of DBCP exposure on human health
did not surface until 1977 when a group of male workers in a California
chemical plant learned that they were sexually sterile.That sameyear, the
U.S.governmentgreatlyrestrictedDBCPuse.StandardFruitcontinuedto
usetheproductonitsCentralAmericanbananafarmsfortwomoreyears.
The consequences of the fruit companies' use of DBCP are still being un-
raveled. In Costa Rica some ten thousand people may have suffered seri-
ous health effects (including cancers and sterility) from their exposure to
DBCP. In Honduras, the number of individuals affected by the nemati-
cide could be as high as 2,500, but a precise figure will never be known.
Lori AnnThrupp found that economic considerations largelydrove Stan-
dard Fruit's decision to use DBCP in Costa Rica, which was less expensive
and equally effective (when applied at high frequencies) as less hazardous
alternatives. 105 This perceived financial incentive, combined with the sup-
pression of toxicological studies by the manufacturers of DBCP and fruit
company research agendas that prioritized keeping banana plants—not
bananaworkers—healthy,allexplaintheuseof DBCPinCentralAmerica
and elsewhere for more than a decade. The broad outline of the DBCP
story is a distressingly familiar one for Latin American farmworkers who
have often lacked the resources and political power to ensure a safe work
environment. 106 But the story of DBCP cannot be fully explained in po-
litical and economic terms: changing agroecological conditions gave rise
to the nematode ''problem'' in the first place.
As is the case with fungal pathogens, parasitic nematodes have a dy-
namic relationship with their hosts and the surrounding agroecosystem.
In Central America, the emergence of a burrowing nematode problem
coincided with the industry-wide conversion to Cavendish cultivars. 107
Cavendish-typeplantsarehighlysusceptibletonematodeinfections.Fur-
thermore, the routine pruning and fertilizer applications intended to
boost yields tended to exacerbate the degree of damage caused by nema-
tode infestations. Pruning—an operation dating back to the nineteenth-
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