Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the initial warnings about long-time use of Dieldrin and the adoption
of non-chemical control measures suggests that fruit company executives
tended to pay less attention to their scientific staffs and field hands than to
their stockholders and U.S. government regulatory agencies. In the case
of DBCP, the product boosted yields and had no discernable negative
effectsonbananaplants,promptingthefruitcompaniestousethenemati-
cideundercertainsoilconditions.ThecompaniescontinuedtouseDBCP
in Central America even after governmental regulatory agencies in the
United States acted to restrict its use due to occupational health concerns.
There can be little doubt that, as Jorge Romero's anecdote about Be-
nito suggests, individual decisions and behaviors contributed to workers'
levels of exposure to pesticides. At the same time, changing production
practices created working environments that were permeated with agro-
chemicals. Bent on maximizing labor e
ciency and fruit yields, the fruit
companies' researchers tended to raise concerns about chemical inputs
only when they showed signs of being toxic to banana plants and/or suf-
ficiently irritating to workers to lower productivity. Consequently, the
fruit companies sometimes found ways to reduce exposures to acutely
toxic substances but displayed little concern for understanding the long-
term effects of agrochemicals on worker health and the surrounding
environment.
In the late 1960s, export banana production/consumption dynam-
ics began to be influenced by powerful environmental movements in the
United States and Europe that sought to regulate the use of pesticides. In-
spired largely by Rachel Carson's widely read book SilentSpring, U.S. en-
vironmentalists succeeded in restricting and/or banning the use of some
persistentorganochlorines(e.g.,DDT)capableofcausinglong-termdam-
age to people and wildlife. Regulations restricting pesticide use tended
to be based on residue levels—thresholds that provided a degree of con-
sumer safety but did little to protect farmworkers.
In spite of the United Farmworkers' early calls for a ban on DDT and
organized consumer boycotts of California table grapes, it was Carson,
not Cesar Chavez who became the most prominent symbol of the U.S. en-
vironmental movement.
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In some instances, pesticide reforms actually
increased risks to farmworkers by encouraging greater use of chemicals
(including organophosphates) that broke down quickly in the environ-
ment but that were acutely toxic to humans. The environmental move-
ment in the United States largely failed to alter the banana companies'
