Some see a link between huge use of pesticides and increase in illness across the country
Farmworker Fabián Tomasi was not trained to use protective gear as he pumped pesticides into crop dusters. Now at 47, he’s a living skeleton.
Schoolteacher Andrea Druetta lives in a town where it is illegal to spray agrochemicals within 500 metres of homes, and yet soy is planted just 30 metres from her back door. Recently, her boys were showered in chemicals while swimming in their backyard pool.
Sofía Gatica’s search for answers after losing her newborn to kidney failure led to the country’s first criminal convictions for illegal spraying last year. But 80 percent of her neighbours’ children surveyed carry pesticides in their blood.
US biotechnology has turned Argentina into the world’s third-largest soy producer, but the chemicals powering the boom aren’t confined to soy and cotton and corn fields. The Associated Press documented dozens of cases where these poisons are used in ways specifically banned by existing law.
Now doctors are warning that uncontrolled pesticide use could be the cause of growing health problems among the 12 million people who live in the nation’s vast farm belt.
In Santa Fe province, the heart of Argentina’s soy industry, cancer rates are two times to four times higher than the national average. In Chaco, the nation’s poorest province, children became four times more likely to be born with devastating birth defects in the decade since biotechnology dramatically expanded industrial agriculture.
“The change in how agriculture is produced has brought, frankly, a change in the profile of diseases,” said Dr. Medardo Ávila Vázquez, a pediatrician who co-founded Doctors of Fumigated Towns. “We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects, and illnesses seldom seen before.”
The new normal
Once known for its grass-fed beef, Argentina has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1996, when the St. Louis-based Monsanto Company marketed a promising new model of higher crop yields and fewer pesticides through its patented seeds and chemicals.
Today, all of Argentina’s soy and nearly all its corn, wheat and cotton are genetically modified. Soy farming tripled to 47 million acres, and cattle are now fattened in feedlots on corn and soy.
But as weeds and insects became resistant, farmers increased the chemical burden ninefold, from 34 million litres in 1990 to more than 317 million litres today.
Overall, Argentine farmers apply an estimated 1.95 kilograms of agrochemical concentrate per acre, more than twice what US farmers use, according to an AP analysis of government and pesticide industry data.
Monsanto’s “Roundup” pesticides use glyphosate, one of the world’s most widely applied and least toxic weed killers. The US Environmental Protection Agency and many others have declared it to be safe if applied properly. In May, the EPA even increased allowable glyphosate residues on foods.
Despite the wholesale adoption of Monsanto’s model, safety rules vary.
Some of Argentina’s 23 provinces ban spraying within 3 kilometres of populated areas; others say farmers can spray as close as 50 metres. About one-third set no limits, and rule-breakers are very rarely punished.
A federal law requires toxic chemical applicators to suspend activities that threaten public health, “even when the link has not been scientifically proven,” and “no matter the costs or consequences,” but it has never been applied to farming, the Auditor General found last year.
In response to soaring complaints, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner ordered a commission in 2009 to study the impact of agrochemical spraying on human health. Its initial report called for “systematic controls over concentrations of herbicides and their compounds … such as exhaustive laboratory and field studies involving formulations containing glyphosate as well as its interactions with other agrochemicals as they are actually used in our country.”
But the commission hasn’t met since 2010, the auditor general found.
Agriculture Secretary Lorenzo Basso said people are being misinformed.
“I’ve seen countless documents, surveys, videos, articles in the news and in universities, and really our citizens who read all this end up dizzy and confused,” he said. “Our model as an exporting nation has been called into question. We need to defend our model.”
In a written statement, Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher said the company “does not condone the misuse of pesticides or the violation of any pesticide law, regulation, or court ruling.”
Using it early and often
Argentina was among the earliest adopters of the “no-till” method US agribusinesses promoted. Instead of turning the topsoil, spraying pesticides, and then waiting until the poison dissipates before planting, farmers sow seeds and spray afterward without harming “Roundup Ready” crops genetically modified to tolerate specific poisons. Farmers can now harvest multiple crops each year on land that wasn’t profitable before.
But pests quickly develop resistance to the same chemicals applied to identical crops on a vast scale, forcing farmers to mix in more toxic poisons, such as 2,4,D, used in “Agent Orange” to defoliate Vietnam’s jungles. Some Argentine regulators called for labels warning that these mixtures should be limited to “farm areas far from homes and population centres,” but they were ignored, the auditor found.
“Glyphosate is even less toxic than the repellent you put on your children’s skin,” said Pablo Vaquero, Monsanto’s spokesman in Buenos Aires. “That said, there has to be a responsible and good use of these products, because in no way would you put repellent in the mouths of children and no environmental applicator should spray fields with a tractor or a crop-duster without taking into account the environmental conditions and threats that stem from the use of the product.”
Out in the fields, Tomasi was routinely exposed.
“I prepared millions of litres of poison without any kind of protection, no gloves, masks or special clothing. I didn’t know anything” he said.
Teachers in Entre Rios began to file police complaints this year. They said sprayers failed to respect 50-metre limits at 18 schools, dousing 11 during class.
a troubling survey
Dr. Damián Verzenassi, who directs the Environment and Health programme at the National University of Rosario’s medical school, decided to try to figure out what was behind an increase in cancer, birth defects and miscarriages in Argentina’s hospitals.
“We didn’t set out to find problems with agrochemicals. We went to see what was happening with the people,” he said.
Since 2010, this house-to-house epidemiological study has reached 65,000 people in Santa Fe province, finding cancer rates two times to four times higher than the national average, including breast, prostate and lung cancers. Researchers also found high rates of thyroid disorders and chronic respiratory illness.
“It could be linked to agrochemicals,” he said. “They do all sorts of analysis for toxicity of the first ingredient, but they have never studied the interactions between all the chemicals they’re applying.”
Dr. María del Carmen Seveso, who has spent 33 years running intensive care wards and ethics committees in Chaco province, became alarmed at regional birth reports showing a quadrupling of congenital defects, from 19.1 per 10,000 to 85.3 per 10,000 in the decade after genetically modified crops and their agrochemicals were approved in Argentina.
chemicals in the water
Determined to find out why, she and her colleagues surveyed 2,051 people in six towns in Chaco, and found significantly more diseases and defects in villages surrounded by industrial agriculture than in those surrounded by cattle ranches. In Avia Terai, 31 percent said a family member had cancer in the past 10 years, compared with 3 percent in the ranching village of Charadai.
Visiting these farm villages, the AP found chemicals in places where they were never intended to be.
Claudia Sariski, whose home has no running water, says she doesn’t let her twin toddlers drink from the discarded poison containers she keeps in her dusty backyard. But her chickens do, and she uses it to wash the family’s clothes.
“They prepare the seeds and the poison in their houses. And it’s very common, not only in Avia Terai but in nearby towns, for people to keep water for their houses in empty agrochemical containers,” explained surveyor Katherina Pardo. “Since there’s no treated drinking water here, the people use these containers anyway. They are a very practical people.”
The survey found diseases Seveso said were uncommon before — birth defects including malformed brains, exposed spinal cords, blindness and deafness, neurological damage, infertility, and strange skin problems.
Aixa Cano, a shy 5-year-old, has hairy moles all over her body. Her neighbour, 2-year-old Camila Verón, was born with multiple organ problems and is severely disabled. Doctors told their mothers that agrochemicals may be to blame.
“They told me that the water made this happen because they spray a lot of poison here,” said Camila’s mother, Silvia Achával. “People who say spraying poison has no effect, I don’t know what sense that has because here you have the proof,” she added, pointing at her daughter.
It’s nearly impossible to prove that exposure to a specific chemical caused an individual’s cancer or birth defect. But like the other doctors, Seveso said their findings should prompt a rigorous government investigation. Instead, their 68-page report was shelved for a year by Chaco’s health ministry.
“There are things that are not open to discussion, things that aren’t listened to,” Seveso concluded.
Scientists argue that only broader, longer-term studies can rule out agrochemicals as a cause of these illnesses.
“That’s why we do epidemiological studies for heart disease and smoking and all kinds of things,” said Doug Gurian-Sherman, a former EPA regulator now with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If you have the weight of evidence pointing to serious health problems, you don’t wait until there’s absolute proof in order to do something.”
By Michael Warren and Natacha Pisarenko
AP