Poisoning the World for Profit: Petro-Chemical Capital and the Global Pesticide Crisis

Just because something is not illegal, it may still be immoral.

Allowing the export of products recognized to be harmful is immoral.

Fatma Zora Ouhachi-Vesely

Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Commission of Human Rights

The destruction of the planet wrought by global capitalism is accelerating. The continued plundering of the world’s resources, worsening pollution, the magnification of “natural disasters” and chemical, geo-physical, and biological hazards alike are all manifestations of an unparalleled global ecological crisis. Climate change is perhaps the greatest manifestation of this crisis, threatening to irreversibly transform the ecological face of the entire planet, and facilitate the displacement of hundreds of millions of people from their homes and means of livelihood in the coming years, especially in the global South (Faber and Schlegel 2017). As demonstrated by the twin crises of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps never before have the “interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities” of [global] capitalism been more evident (Foster and Suwandi 2020, 1). And by weakening the environmental and public health regulatory capacities of the state, neo-liberal capitalism is allowing for the disparate displacement of these vulnerabilities onto poorer working class families, people of color, and communities lacking in political-economic power (Faber 2018; Faber et al. 2017; Pulido 2016). It is now clear that systemic racism, class exploitation, and the unequal exposure to pollution and other ecological hazards is a key factor in the higher rates of COVID-19 infections and fatalities found in low-income communities of color in the United States and other countries (Brandt, Beck, and Mersha 2020).

Although it currently receives less public attention, the severe abuses associated with chemical-intensive capitalist agriculture are another key driver of the global ecological crisis. According to a recent report by the United Nations, pesticides are having “catastrophic” impacts on the global environment and human health. The United Nations (UN) estimates that an average of about 200,000 people die each year from short- and long-term pesticide exposure. Some 99 percent of these victims reside in the global South, where environmental, health, and safety regulations are often the weakest (United Nations General Assembly 2017). The World Health Organization (WHO) figures are even more dire, estimating that three million severe pesticide poisonings occur each year, and, of these, a minimum of 300,000 people die, many of them children (Konradsen 2007; Eddleston 2002).

Chronic exposure to pesticides is also fueling a broader worldwide health crisis in the form of cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, disruption of the endocrine (hormonal) system, developmental and neurological disorders, sterility, respiratory conditions, and many other major health problems (United Nations General Assembly 2017). When toxic chemicals accumulate in the human body, cells become damaged and result in the growth of various types of cancer. As a result, chemical pollution is contributing to a worldwide cancer epidemic that kills 9.6 million people annually. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer is now the second leading cause of death globally, behind cardiovascular disease, and is responsible for one out of every six deaths. Pesticide exposure is directly implicated in the development of many of these cancers, particularly brain, prostate, and kidney cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and leukemia (Bassil et al. 2007; Alavanja 2009).

In the current moment, under the weight of corporate-led globalization, the expansion of chemical-intensive capitalist agriculture is amplifying the problem. The world is literally now awash in poisons manufactured by petrochemical capital. Every year over three million metric tons (tonnes) of pesticides—a family of poisonous chemical biocides that include fungicides, herbicides, insecticides, algicides, molluscicides, miticides, rodenticides, and slimicides—are applied to food crops globally (Pretty and Bharucha 2015). About two pounds of toxic pesticides are now applied for every acre of cropland in the world each and every year (compared to less than half a pound per acre in the early 1960s). The impacts are proving to be especially deadly for farmworkers (Berkey 2017). Annual acute pesticide poisoning affects nearly 1 in every 5,000 agricultural workers worldwide (Frison 2016, 29). Among the estimated two million agricultural workers in the United States, physicians diagnose 10,000 to 20,000 pesticide poisonings each year (CDC 2011, 1). However, these numbers grossly underestimate the problem. Some 88 percent of all acute occupational pesticide-related illness (AOPI) are never reported to public health officials (Prado et al. 2017, 395).

It is now abundantly clear to the global scientific community and activists alike that the corporate propaganda campaigns sponsored by the chemical industry that conclude it is safe to douse whole landscapes with massive quantities of pesticides are a dangerous falsehood. In the first global scientific review of its kind, scientists now find that habitat destruction, chemical-intensive agriculture, climate change, and invasive species are threatening over 40 percent of the world’s insect species with extinction. Another third are endangered, and could vanish within the next century at the current rate of decline. The impact of such an event would result in a catastrophic collapse of many ecosystems (Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019). What the authors fail to detail, in this instance, is the manner in which the institutions of global capital are fueling the conversion of these natural habitats into large-scale capitalist agricultural monocultures and the massive application of agro-chemical poisons that goes with it. The planet is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, but the rate of extinction for insects is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds, and reptiles. Given the critical role that insects like honey bees play in the food chain and sustaining agricultural systems, insect losses are yet another manifestation of the growing threats posed to humanity and the planet by the expansion of global capitalism in general, and capitalist agriculture in particular.

In this House Organ, I would like to share a series of observations on the changing nature of the U.S. and global pesticide industry in an era of corporate-led globalization. Although international agreements have been put into place to stem some of the worst abuses associated with the transfer of toxic chemicals and pesticides from the global North to the South, the pesticide crisis is accelerating. And the United States is perhaps the world’s worst offender. Unlike the European Union (E.U.), and many nations in the world that are reducing the application of the most hazardous types of agro-chemicals, the U.S. government continues to permit the domestic use of extremely dangerous synthetic pesticides that are banned in other countries. Some of these dangerous chemicals are exported to other countries, and then come back into the U.S. as pesticide residue on imported foods in a vicious “circle of poison.” The reason? By consolidating greater control over the global seed industry, and only allowing for the sale of pesticide-intensive seeds, U.S. and transnational petrochemical companies are creating a dependency among the world’s farmers for their toxic commodities. Non-toxic and more environment-friendly forms of pest management are jettisoned because they are not conducive to commodification and market control by petro-chemical capital. As such, one of the greatest health dangers confronting the American people, as well as other populations all over the world, stems from the deepening contamination of the land, water, and food with agro-chemical poisons manufactured by American petro-chemical capital at home and abroad.

The Globalization of the Pesticide Industry in the New Millennium

Global pesticide use is accelerating in the 21st century, and now averages well over two million tonnes. Before the pandemic, global pesticide use was even predicted to rise in 2020 above the 3.5 million tonne threshold (Sharma et al. 2019). The United States, European Union and, to a lesser extent, Japan continue to dominate pesticide production for the world market. However, one of the defining characteristics of the current era of corporate-led globalization is the internationalization of the productive circuit of capital, and growing shift in agro-chemical manufacturing to the global South. Due to the development of global telecommunications and transportations systems, capital now has the ability to geographically relocate and establish factories and manufacturing facilities from the global North to emerging markets in the South, especially in those countries with cheaper labor and weaker environmental enforcement (Faber 2008). In this vein, transnational chemical companies are increasingly shifting pesticide production facilities to Central America, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, India, China, Thailand, and other parts of Asia. Brazil and China have now joined the U.S. and the E.U. as being among the largest manufacturers and consumers of agricultural pesticides in the world (Nishimoto 2019, 141–142). Smaller domestic companies and pesticide sub-contractors are also proliferating in the global South, and are even less constrained by international pesticide safety standards (Galt 2008, 790).

The geographic shift in pesticide manufacturing mirrors the rapid expansion of chemical-intensive capitalist agriculture in the global South (Faber 2008). In Brazil, for instance, where there is a tremendous expansion of export-oriented agriculture and destructive logging, mining, and cattle ranching operations into the Amazon and elsewhere, the poorest one-third of all rural families own less than 1 percent of arable land. Eleven million peasants are landless. At the other end of the scale are the latifundia (plantations): with an average size in excess of 2470 acres, these large estates control over 50 percent of the country’s farmland. They account for the bulk of the soya bean, fruit and vegetable exports that make Brazil the fourth-largest agricultural exporter in the world, and one of the main suppliers of high-protein foodstuffs for the European cattle industry. The rapid expansion of capitalist export agriculture devoted to soy production in Brazil or palm oil in Indonesia comes at the expense of natural vegetation and is a major driver of deforestation and climate change. At current trends, agricultural lands will have expand 70 million hectares by 2050 (Byerlee, Stevenson, and Villoria 2014). In short, global capitalist agriculture is better oriented to feeding Northern consumers and European cows than to provide for the needs of the masses in the global South.

The expansion of capitalist export agriculture is also implicated in the spread of diseases and pandemics. As noted by the epidemiologist Rob Wallace, COVID-19 is not an isolated incident but rather is closely linked to the profit imperatives of global agribusiness. The expansion of capitalist export agriculture in the frontiers of the global South results in human exposure to wild animals and the pathogens they carry—pathogens previously contained by pristine natural ecologies. This was evident when American and European multinational proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. These connections are not well known because public health officials in the U.S. covered up the involvement of agribusiness in facilitating the H1N1 and H5N2 outbreaks (Wallace 2016, 2020).

Finance capital is not only a critical driver for the expansion of capitalist export agriculture; it also facilitates the expansion of a particular type of chemical-intensive agriculture that boosts the profits of American and transnational chemical companies. Less-developed countries with the highest levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) experience the greatest rates of pesticide use per acre of arable and permanent cropland (Jorgenson and Kuykendall 2008). The political power and pressure exerted by transnational chemical companies and global finance capital has led the global South to pursue agricultural policies that aggressively promote the adoption and implementation of chemical-intensive agricultural technologies by large and small family farmers alike. As stated by Andrew Jorgenson (2007, 75),

these policies often encourage the use of pesticides in export-oriented agricultural production, and developing countries are less likely to have institutional environmental controls that regulate the use of pesticides deemed as environmentally and humanly harmful. As farming systems in less-developed countries are integrated into the international economy, often through the influence and control of foreign capital, crop rotation and recycling of organic matter are more likely to be replaced by high-intensity use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

As a result, pesticide use in the global South has increased substantially since the mid-1980s (Galt 2008).

The other major factor fueling the growing use of pesticides is related to new ownership patterns in the chemical industry. Leading agrochemical companies have recently completed a period of significant consolidation of monopoly power over the world market. In 1990, there were more than ten major agrochemical companies in the U.S. and Europe. These ten companies are now down to five transnational giants: Bayer, DowDuPont (now Corteva), BASF, FMC, and Syngenta (which is under the umbrella of the China National Chemical Corporation, commonly known as ChemChina). Each of these companies invest 7–10 percent of its sales in new R&D activities every year, and these costs are growing due to the higher costs associated with environmental and toxicity studies and field trials, especially those deriving from more extensive regulations in the European Union (Nishimoto 2019).

The major pesticide transnationals are funding these acquisitions, mergers, and growing costs of pesticide research and development by acquiring formerly independent seed companies. In the age of neoliberalism, weak antitrust law enforcement and oversight by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and other state agencies has allowed these chemical company giants to create a monopoly over the “holy trinity” of global agriculture: pesticides, fertilizers, and the world’s global seed supply. Just four of these companies—Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina and BASF—control more than 67 percent of global proprietary seed sales (Mooney 2018, 4; Howard 2018). By capturing the global seed market, these major chemical manufacturers exclusively market higher-priced varieties of seeds that are highly dependent upon the use of expensive pesticides and fertilizers in order to achieve high yields (Howard 2016). And the costs of these chemical inputs and seeds are accelerating, resulting in a massive redistribution of wealth from family farmers to petrochemical capital. For instance, for corn growers in Illinois between 1990 and 2015, pesticide costs increased from $22 to $66 per acre, while seed prices increased from $23 to $118 per acre. Taken together, fertilizer, pesticide, and seed costs were 48 percent of crop revenue in 2015, compared to 32 percent in 1990 (Schnitkey and Sellars 2016).

A key component of this business strategy to consolidate control over the seed market is to focus on new forms of agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified seeds to further enhance the global demand for herbicides and pesticides. In the 1970s this strategy was initiated by the takeover of thousands of small, family-owned seed companies by petrochemical corporations such as Union Carbide and Occidental Petroleum. The 1980s witnessed the invention of the “life industry” by the petrochemical industry, with a focus on the commercialization of proprietary biotechnologies and the genetic engineering (GE) of seeds, plants, growth hormones, and pharmaceuticals. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and GE seeds were originally touted during this time in corporate propaganda as a means for both achieving higher yields and for freeing the farmer from a dependence on expensive chemical inputs. Instead, the dirty little secret of the petrochemical/biotechnology industry is that only the most profitable (e.g. chemical-intensive) lines of seeds were marketed. Varieties of traditional seeds non-dependent on chemical inputs were jettisoned. Instead, GE seeds increased pesticide use by design, intentionally boosting demand and market share for the chemical giants. And it proved to be remarkably successful. Monsanto’s patented genetics alone were planted on more than 80 percent of U.S. corn acres, 86 percent of cotton acres, and 92 percent of soybean acres in the United States (Howard 2016).

Since the late 1990s and into the new millennium, the agro-chemical giants and their subsidiary seed companies are extending their patents and other intellectual property rights to many other biological products and processes. This new phase includes seed sterilization technologies (e.g. so-called Terminator seeds), which prevent farmers from saving a portion of their seed for replanting the following year. An even newer focus of the seed company subsidiaries is to develop “precision agriculture” packages of GE-chemical intensive seeds for addressing not only “biotic stresses” (pathogens, pests, and weeds), which have been the traditional targets of conventional chemical pesticides, but also “abiotic stresses” (heat, cold, drought, excessive rainfall) associated with climate change. These new seed packages are essential to consolidating petro-chemical monopoly profits and control over global agricultural inputs. So, while the pesticide industry grew 3.8 percent from 2001 to 2016, the market for GE seeds developed and sold by major petrochemical companies achieved a growth rate of 13.3 percent, around three times higher than that of the agro-chemical market (Nishimoto 2019, 142).

With the privatization of plant breeding and imposition of neoliberalism, independent and public-interest breeding programs are withering, further consolidating the seed and agrochemical industry monopoly. As a result, pesticide use is rapidly expanding in both in the U.S. and globally. The advent of GE glyphosate-resistant weeds in herbicide-resistant weed management systems led to a 527 million-pound increase in herbicide use alone in the United States between 1996 and 2011 (Benbrook 2012). In fact, sales of GE seeds reached approximately $20.4 billion in 2016, about the same as all herbicide sales combined, which are the highest revenue generating pesticide (Nishimoto 2019, 142). Overall pesticide use increased by 404 million pounds, or about 7 percent, during this time frame (Benbrook 2012). Today, the world's ten biggest agro-chemical seed companies control almost three-quarters of the commercial seed market (Howard 2016). Led by the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina, some 18 million farmers in 28 countries around the world plant with biotech crops.¹

Capital’s Circle of Poison is Closing in On American Consumers

In their landmark book Circle of Poison investigative reporters Weir and Schapiro (1981) describe a process by which pesticides that are banned or highly restricted for agricultural use in the United States and the global North continue to be manufactured there and exported to the global South. In the early 2000s, for instance, the U.S. was annually exporting 22 million pounds of these extremely dangerous pesticides (Faber 2008). These same chemicals are applied in the global South on export crops, and then returned to the United States and the global North as pesticide residues on imported food. The implication is that the greatest pesticide dangers facing consumers in the North reside in contaminated food imports from the global South (Weir and Schapiro 1981, 4). This book rightfully made a huge impact by providing a strategic political roadmap for the pesticide-reform movement for some thirty years.

In the new millennium, the evidence now points to a different conclusion. The United States, once a world leader in restricting the domestic use of dangerous pesticides, is now one of the worst offenders. The evidence demonstrates that pesticides applied to U.S. crops and present in the country’s food supply are just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than pesticide residues found in imported food. Furthermore, driven by stricter standards in the E.U. and elsewhere, farmers in many other parts of the world are using new classes of relatively less dangerous pesticides in order to be able to sell their commodities global exports markets. The growth of the environmental movement in and pesticide-reform organizations such as the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) have helped to spur this trend. In particular, two international agreements on pesticides—the Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions—have proven instrumental in reducing the export of banned and severely restricted pesticides from the United States and European Union to the global South.

The Rotterdam Convention requires that any country importing pesticides and certain other hazardous chemicals must receive a prior informed consent (PIC) of bans or severe restrictions on those substances in other countries. In March of 2019 the Convention adopted a “compliance mechanism” to assist countries on the implementation of rules governing the import and export of hazardous chemicals. Representatives from 120 countries voted in favor of the stricter rules. Non-parties to the treaty are not bound by it and can thus freely trade pesticides on the PIC list. The United States signed the Rotterdam Convention in 1998, but has yet to ratify. The U.S. Congress remains subdued by the petrochemical industry on this issue. Instead, the U.S. participates as an observer in the conferences of the parties and in technical working groups, often working to undermine stronger rules and procedures designed to curb the trade in dangerous pesticides.

The Stockholm Convention seeks to completely eliminate the use of chemicals that the international community considers extremely dangerous. It also requires countries to restrict trade of these chemicals. The focus of the Stockholm Convention is on persistent organic pollutants (POPs), which move up the food chain and accumulate in the body fat of humans and other animals. These chemicals can cause reproductive and development disorders, many different kinds of cancers, and damage to the immune and nervous systems. The POPS treaty identifies 29 chemicals for elimination, including at least nine pesticides (aldrin, endrin, dieldrin, chlordane, dichlorro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex, and toxaphene). Only four member states of the United Nations are not Parties to the Convention, namely: Andorra, South Sudan, the Holy See (the Vatican), and the United States.

In short, the U.S. government is behaving as a wrecking ball working to undermine even modest international agreements around climate change, the export of toxic wastes, and the international trade in pesticides and hazardous chemicals. The colonization of the state (including Congress) by the polluter-industrial complex makes the continued obstruction of such agreements all the more likely in the near future. Nevertheless, the recent reforms in the PIC and POPs agreements speak to the pressure exerted by social movements on states and international bodies to address the global pesticide crisis (Galt 2008, 789).

Although there is still a very long way to go in ridding the world of the pesticide menace, very few (if any) of the organochlorine pesticides (such as DDT) prominently featured in Circle of Poison are still manufactured in the United States or Europe. Also, none of the original “Dirty Dozen” on the POPs list targeted by the Pesticide Action Network are produced in, exported from, or imported into the United States. As a result, the demand for the pesticides on the POP list has dropped significantly as many alternatives have become available. Non-POP pesticide production has now partially shifted to smaller businesses in the global South for use principally on domestically consumed crops (Galt 2008, 790–91). The greatest danger posed to American consumers is therefore no longer around the presence of banned or extremely dangerous pesticide residues on imported food from the global South. Countries that are more deeply integrated into global export markets, particularly those nations producing for the European and U.S. markets, have lower use of POPs and PIC list pesticides compared to domestic producers. This trend resulted from the passage of the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act in the U.S. that specifically targeted more dangerous families of chemicals (such organophosphates and carbamates).

The greater threat to the health of the American people instead resides in the use of legally registered but extremely dangerous chemicals inside the United States. Tens to hundreds of millions of pounds of pesticides still widely used in the U.S. have been banned or are being phased out in the E.U., China, and Brazil because of the grave health threats they pose to farmers, farmworkers, consumers, and the environment. The European Union, for instance, has banned (or is in the process of phasing out) some 72 pesticides that are approved for agricultural application in the United States. Brazil has banned 17 (and China 11) pesticides still approved for use in the U.S. In fact, of the 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides used in the U.S. in 2016, roughly a quarter (322 million pounds) of the pesticides are banned in the E.U. Similarly, some 26 million pounds of commonly used pesticides in the U.S. are banned in Brazil, and 40 million pounds are banned in China. Brazil and China are not particularly progressive when it comes to pesticide regulations. The U.S. has banned just 2–3 pesticides that are still approved for use in the E.U., Brazil, and/or China (Donley 2019).

In this context, the European Union has become the primary driver of stricter international rules around pesticides. While the E.U. has less land dedicated to agriculture than China, the export value of Europe’s agricultural products is higher than the U.S., China, and Brazil combined (Donley 2019, 13). The E.U. specializes in the export of high-quality, high-value agricultural commodities (e.g. fine cheeses, wines, chocolates, olive oils, etc.) to discerning consumers in the global North. Such consumers are wary of potential hazardous pesticides in these products. Consumer confidence in these products is paramount. Furthermore, given the lack of domestic oil and gas production, the political-economic power of the petrochemical industry is much weaker in Europe compared to the United States. As a result, European-based consumer movements, environmentalists, scientists, and family farmers are better able to resist the imposition of GE seeds and extremely dangerous pesticides.

These same popular forces were instrumental in pushing the European Parliament to adopt the landmark REACH Regulation, which regulates the registration, evaluation, and authorization of dangerous substances. REACH introduced a single system for all chemicals and abolished the distinction between “new” chemicals (those introduced on the market after 1981) and “existing” chemicals (those listed before 1981). Utilizing the precautionary principle, REACH has transferred the burden of proof onto capital to prove that a chemical is safe before it can be introduced into the marketplace (in contrast to the U.S., where the burden of proof is placed upon the public to prove that a chemical is dangerous after it has been introduced into the marketplace). In addition, REACH calls for the most dangerous chemicals to be substituted by safer alternatives.

But even though the European Union’s 2009 pesticide law banned the use of pesticides on the continent that cause cancer or disrupt the human endocrine system, Europeans will be exposed to some of the world’s most dangerous chemicals via food imports. Even as a new European Commission calls for an increased level of ambition to reduce significantly the domestic use and risk of chemical pesticides in the context of the recent Green Deal and the Farm to Fork strategy, a massive lobbying effort by transnational pesticide companies and key trading partners (especially the United States) led the EU to weaken its regulatory stance on hazardous residues in imported food. As a result, residues of dangerous chemicals rightfully banned in Europe would still end up on the plates of E.U. consumers (Corporate Europe Observatory 2020). Given that over 80 percent of Europe’s agricultural soils contain pesticide residues such as glyphosate and other dangerous chemicals, the domestic pesticide threat to European citizens will remain for years to come (Silva et al. 2019).

In short, the pesticides featured in Circle of Poison are no longer central to the profits of transnational chemical companies based in the United States or Europe. The export of banned, severely restricted, or never-registered pesticide exports from the U.S. have dropped ten-fold from the 1970s, comprising 2 percent or less of current exports. It is likely, however, that increases in the export of pesticides that have never been registered in the U.S. may offset these gains in reducing exports of banned or restricted pesticides. The amount of never-registered pesticides exports is increasing, and is problematic (Galt 2008, 790–791). As a result, the export sectors in Central America, Brazil, India, and other countries in the global South often use pesticides that are similar to those used in the global North, since they are subject to the same regulatory standards vis-à-vis residue testing. Importantly, this does not mean that this pesticide use is “safe” since most pesticides registered for general use in the U.S. and elsewhere pose significant and varied hazards to farmworkers, farmers, rural residents, the environment, and consumers (Wright 1990).

Nevertheless, the revamping of the global pesticide market is closing off the global circle of poison. The greatest dangers posed to American consumers are shifting to commercial foods grown inside the United States contaminated with legal pesticide residues. Neoliberal regulatory rollbacks have eviscerated the federal government’s enforcement authority, especially with respect to the deterrent value that FDA pesticide monitoring programs. Current pesticide regulations are grossly inadequate for protecting human health (let alone other organisms and the environment) and instead are strongly shaped by the corporations they are meant to regulate. Consequently, dangerous chemicals have an overwhelming presence in the U.S. food supply.

In what is termed toxic trespass, these dangerous chemicals are invading the bodies of U.S. citizens through our food and drink, and are linked to various types of cancers, learning disabilities and autism, immune system suppression, central nervous malfunction, damage to reproductive systems, and numerous other disorders (Schafer, Kegley, and Patton 2001, 24). According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the American people carry a “body burden” of the pesticides chlorpyrifos (Dursban) and methyl parathion that dramatically exceed acceptable thresholds for chronic exposure (Schafer et al. 2004). Nearly one-third of agricultural pesticides are suspected of playing some role in causing cancer in animal subjects of laboratory testing, and another one-third may disrupt the human nervous system. Still another third are suspected of interfering with the endocrine system (Galt 2008).

Pesticide residues on food in the U.S. have increased since 2010. Approximately 82 percent of domestically grown fruits and 62 percent of vegetables carry residues of weed killers, insecticides and other pesticides (FDA 2015). In recent sampling of the U.S. food supply, organophosphates were found in 100 percent of applesauce samples. Organophosphates are so toxic to children’s developing brains (even at low doses) that scientists have called for a complete ban—a call that is being ignored by the Federal government. The organophosphate pesticide chlorpyrifos is also found in the food and water of U.S. children at levels 140 times higher than deemed to be safe (Klein 2019, 4). Going against the advice of EPA scientists, the Trump administration handed the chemical industry a gift in 2019 by reversing a ban on chlorpyrifos that had been ordered by the Federal courts (Reed, Desikan, and Kalman 2019, 4). Neonicotinoids were also found in 80 percent of spinach sold in U.S. supermarkets. This pesticide is a key driver of bee colony declines, and associated with endocrine disruption and autism in children (Klein 2019, 4).

Glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen that is linked to high rates of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in farmers and groundskeepers. Human exposure to glyphosate in the U.S. has increased approximately 500 percent since 1993 with the introduction of genetically modified crops (Galindo 2017). Glyphosate is now the most used herbicide in the world and is found in 93 percent of the urine samples of Americans (Organic Consumers Association 2016). Enough of this single chemical is purchased each year to apply the equivalent of nearly a half-pound to every acre of cropland in the entire world (Benbrook 2016). A broad-spectrum herbicide that kills all vegetation, the chemical is having profound impacts on wildlife and organisms at the base of the food chain. Glyphosate was recently found on 100 percent of oat cereal and pinto bean samples in U.S stores. In fact, the average level of glyphosate found in cereal was more than twice the “allowable” level set by the Environmental Working Group (EWG)-proposed health benchmark for lifetime cancer risk for children (Klein 2019, 4). This data indicates that the contamination of American foods in the grocery store with dangerous pesticides is pervasive. Other countries have restricted or banned these pesticides because of the toxic threats they pose to people and other living organisms. Yet the use of these chemicals in the U.S. is still permitted.

American residents and peoples throughout the world continue to serve as test subjects for the chemical-exposure experiments being conducted by global capital. The latest science demonstrates that small exposures to toxic pesticides are having significant and lifelong impacts and that cumulative exposure from eating a variety of foods contaminated with multiple pesticide residues can have additive and synergistic impacts that are harmful to human health. More than 90 percent of Americans have detectable pesticides in their bodies, and government testing finds at least 29 different pesticides in the average American (CDC 2018). But despite grave human health risks having been well established for numerous pesticides, they remain in use. Even where pesticides have been banned or restricted, the risk of contamination can persist for many decades and they may continue to accumulate in food sources. In many cases, possible health impacts have not been extensively studied before pesticides are released to the market. This is particularly true for “inactive” ingredients that are added to enhance the effectiveness of the pesticide’s active ingredient and that may not be tested and are seldom disclosed on product labels. Moreover, the combined effects of exposure to multiple pesticides in food, water, soil and air have not been adequately studied (United Nations General Assembly 2017, 5).

To combat this crisis, popular movements on the Left must begin to outline and organize around an alternative political program for food justice, consumer and labor rights (particularly for farmworkers), environmental justice, fair trade, and economic democracy. By undermining health-based national pesticide registration requirements, the agrochemical industry has long used free trade agreements to block proposed bans on agro-chemicals identified as posing the worst hazards to human health (Rosenthal 2005). Alternately, “fair trade” agreements would establish strong health-based standards as “floors” for regulations rather than weak “ceilings” to not be exceeded. In other words, rather than a “race to the bottom,” whereby the nation with the weakest environmental and health regulations sets the standard “ceiling” which all trading partners must accept, we must work for a series of strong, mandatory standards that apply to all nations. Such a regulatory harmonization process would privilege nations with the strictest environmental laws as establishing a standard “floor” to which all other countries must comply if trade is to be conducted with them. Regulating the export of hazards must be comprehensive in scope.

Absent a post-capitalist future devoted to substantive social equality, a new regenerative agriculture, climate justice, and sustainable development, the global ecological crisis is destined to deepen. Unless there are successful challenges to the hegemony of the transnational petrochemical industry and conventional forms of input-intensive capitalist agriculture, the threats posed to human health and the environment by toxic agro-chemicals will only worsen. In this respect, the Left must challenge the neoliberal turn in mainstream agro-environmental activism that aligns with a voluntaristic or libertarian vision of justice, including a growing reliance on market-based mechanisms to support local organic farmers (Harrison 2014, 657). Instead, popular movements in the United States, and throughout the world, must embrace more structural regulatory and systemic changes—an eco-socialist mandate for the adoption of a new non-toxic, regenerative agriculture and agro-ecology that puts the needs of people above profits, and nature above the narrow self-interests of petrochemical capital and agribusiness (Engel-Di Mauro 2020; Magdoff 2015; Motta 2016). To do so will require opposing ecological imperialism and the non-democratic nature of global capitalist system itself (Foster 2002).

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Christina Schlegel for their helpful editorial comments and suggestions. I would also thank Laura Bernstein for her research assistance around this project. The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author.

Notes

1 See the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, “2014 Biotech Crop Report.” ISAAA Brief 49-2014. http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/briefs/49/infographic/default.asp