Toxic turn in Brazilian agriculture? The political economy of pesticide legalisation in post-2016 Brazil

Abstract

Pesticides are becoming a key topic in critical academic research; they entail substantial negative global impacts on human health and other-than-humans’ existences. Even though decades of agroecological research and practice have demonstrated that no pesticides are needed to produce enough food, pesticides are still most typically taken for granted as an indispensable part of food production. In this article, we analyse events and policies through which Brazilian agriculture has become a global hotspot for pesticide consumption in the global agrarian capitalism. We provide an overview of the pesticide legalisation in Brazilian agriculture and discuss the ramifications of recent changes for pesticide-free agriculture. The post-2016 legalisation of pesticides has taken place concomitantly with a quick dismantling of the structures supporting agroecology and protecting the environment. The toxic turn of the Brazilian agriculture is seen in part as a reactionary response to the momentum of agroecology, which removes pesticides from agriculture, that had gained strength under the first Workers’ Party regime between 2003 and 2016. A pivotal policy goal for the new Lula government should be an agroecological transformation, which can be justified by politicising pesticide use as a major, multidimensional problem of the ‘agribusiness economy’.

Keywords:

• Pesticides
• agroecology
• extractivism
• sustainable development

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to two anonymous referees who offered critical but helpful and supportive comments and questions to improve the article. It is rare to find a more encouraging referee’s opening sentence than ‘I am wildly enthusiastic about this piece and I want it in print as soon as possible’. We also thank the Managing Editor Madeleine Hatfield for the sound and smooth publication process. An initial version of this article was presented in 2020 in the Development Days conference of the Finnish Society for Development Research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and HELSUS, by the project ‘Agroforestry practices and cosmologies as tools of sustainability transformations in Brazil?’ (Ollinaho), and the Academy of Finland (10.13039/501100002341, grant number 316725) (Kröger).”

Notes on contributors

Ossi I. Ollinaho

Ossi I. Ollinaho works currently as a lecturer in global development studies at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland. In his research on social theory, building on Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology, Dr. Ollinaho has theorised a cumulative type of change as one basic type of social change prevalent in contemporary realities. He has also provided conceptual insights on issues such as ‘business as usual’, environmental change, virtualisation of life-worlds, extractivisms, and economics with an aim to better understand contemporary human and other-than-human conditions. In his more empirical work conducted mostly in Brazil, he has focused on agroforestry, agroecology and renewable energies as part of critical agrarian studies. To date, he has published his work in (in chronological order): Environmental Sociology, Autrepart, Review of African Political Economy, Revista NERA, Human Studies, Sustainability, Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Globalizations.

Marcos A. Pedlowski

Marcos Antonio Pedlowski completed his bachelor’s degree in geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1986, where he also obtained his master’s degree in geography in 1990. In 1997, he obtained his PhD in environmental design and planning at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). Since 1998 he has been Associate Professor at the Laboratory of Studies of the Anthropic Space at the Darcy Ribeiro North Fluminense State University, Brazil. He has extensive experience in the area of environmental studies, with an emphasis on geographic approaches. He has been working mainly on agrarian reform, changes in vegetation cover and land use in the Amazon, and on studies about the social and environmental impacts of the use of pesticides in Brazilian agriculture. He keeps a blog (https://blogdopedlowski.com) that aims to make critical research on these issues more visible.

Markus Kröger

Markus Kröger is a professor of global development studies at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences, Finland. He has published extensively on the political economy of development and natural resource extraction, social movements, and forestry and mining policies. He has published four monographs. His first book, Contentious Agency and Natural Resource Politics, discusses the global industrial forestry sector. Iron Will: Global Extractivism and Mining Resistance in Brazil and India presents a theory of investment politics and spatial causalities to explain through which strategies social movements succeed in their resistance. Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis is a hands-on methodological guidebook. His latest book, Extractivisms, Existences and Extinctions: Monoculture Plantations and Amazon Deforestation, offers a new theory of political economy of existences.