Strawberry Fields as Extreme Environments: The Ecobiopolitics of Farmworker Health

Abstract

Based on nearly two years of ethnographic research with farmworkers in California’s Pájaro Valley, in this article I build on Olson’s idea of “extreme environments.” By merging theories of biopolitics and political ecology, or ecobiopolitics, I explore the naturalization of chemically intensive systems of agricultural production and the health consequences they produce for farmworkers. State and industry regimes of agricultural knowledge and practice are designed to control workers and the environment in strawberry fields. They also produce devastating syndemics and chronicities of disease in farmworker bodies and communities. The relationships between health disparities and farmworkers’ lifetimes of exposure to toxic pesticides remain underexplored and poorly understood, perpetuating toxic ignorance about the relationships between pesticides and farmworker health. This enables equating worker well-being with industry well-being. Synergies between ethnographic and environmental health research are needed to challenge toxic ignorance, toxic layering, and the invisible harms they produce in agricultural communities.

Keywords:

• ecobiopolitics
• extreme environments
• farmworkers
• pesticides
• syndemics and chronicities

Notes

1. Others include chloropicrin, metam sodium, 1, 3-dichloropropene (1,3-D or Telone), and Dazomet. Their respective uses have waxed and waned, but overall fumigant use in California has remained constant (CA DPR 2013; Froines et al. 2013). Methyl iodide, a broad spectrum, highly toxic, yet non-ozone depleting soil fumigant, was slated to replace methyl bromide as the fumigant of choice; however, massive public concern and grower hesitancy to use an unfamiliar and publically unpopular product led to a historic victory for health, environmental, and farmworker activists, myself included, when the manufacturer, Arysta LifeScience, voluntarily pulled the product’s long sought product registration with the CA DPR and the US EPA (Froines et al. 2013).

2. The first and only fumigant-free nursery went out of business in California in 2000 (Gross 2011).

3. Plastic has largely replaced organic mulches like straw (from whence strawberries got their English name).

4. Henke (2008), for instance, describes how the chemicals most often used to control pests in the lettuce industry are referred to by growers as the “Salinas Cocktail,” in reference to the Salinas Valley, a key leafy-greens growing region just south of the Pájaro Valley.

5. The American Public Health Association observes that there are number of barriers that health care providers face in making and reporting pesticide exposures including the contradictory requirements of different laws such as: the Health Information and Patient Protection Act (HIPPA), the challenges posed by workers’ compensation insurers with respect to paying for illnesses of uncertain diagnoses, and the failure of the EPA to require pesticide companies to research biomarkers for human testing and to institutionalize farmworker or population-level biomonitoring in communities where pesticides are used regularly (American Public Health Association 2010).

6. Workers’ compensation lawyers in California are paid a small (10%) portion of the medical and permanent disability settlement awarded in court (Saxton 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dvera I. Saxton

Dvera I. Saxton completed a postdoc with the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, USA. She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at California State University Fresno, CA, USA.