https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3740-459X
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ABSTRACT
Taking an organizational sociology approach, the study of French pesticide regulation highlights the role of the unexpected effects of secrecies in organized ignorance. It demonstrates that the main regulator, the French food safety agency (ANSES), as well as the users of pesticides, the farmers, develop their own subcultures of secrecy to conceal information about their real practices. These subcultures support each other tacitly: the opacity created by farmers around their practices stifle knowledge production and reporting on their exposure to pesticides. Consequently, the risk standards are never called into question, which ensures that the French food safety agency maintains its scientific reputation. In turn, the fact that official standardization of risk is never challenged, impedes the reinforcement of pesticide regulations that would otherwise hamper day-to-day crop management. This tacit agreement between these combined subcultures maintains the illusion that the regulatory science used for risk management could control a broad spectrum of hazards, when in fact it has only a limited or even outdated knowledge of them. This deepens the definitions of organized ignorance. It demonstrates that non-knowledge production results not only from the complex mix of political, scientific and regulatory frameworks surrounding official expertise as STS researches tend to show, but also from more widespread and less perceptible sociological mechanism such as tacit understanding. Unexpected effects of intentional actions also count as much as willful actions in strategic ignorance production.
Acknowledgements
I would specifically like to thank Jean-Claude Thoenig, Todd Laporte, and Pierre Benoit Joly who actively contributed to this research.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Internal documents of the Monsanto that the U.S. justice began to publish in early 2017 following lawsuits filed by cancer victims.
2 Source: BASIC, Analyse de la création de valeur et des coûts cachés des pesticides de synthèse, 2021. https://lebasic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/BASIC_Etude-Creation-de-Valeur-et-Couts-Societaux-Pesticides_20211125.pdf.
3 In 2013, a report by the French national institute for health and medical research (Inserm, Citation2013) classified chronic diseases caused by pesticides, stating that long-term exposure to given substances could ‘very likely’ cause neurodegenerative diseases and blood cancers.
4 18.3% of European agricultural production, amounting to 75 billion euros (Ecophyto II, Citation2015, p. 2).
5 Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, Ministry of Agriculture, Agro- food and Forests (2015) Plan Ecophyto II« Ecophyto II, 2015, p. 2.
6 Public agencies specialized in agricultural advice in French local territories (départements).
12 These examples were given by apple producers interviewed.
13 European regulations allow for authorization of an unapproved product in case of ‘unforeseeable danger that cannot be controlled by other means’.
15 Six hours for outdoor treatments, 24 h for irritants, 48 h for products that may cause sensitization of the body by the dermal or respiratory route.
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François Dedieu
Francois Dedieu is a sociologist and has been a research fellow since 2011 at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Science, Innovation and Society (LISIS) of the French National Institute for Agricultural an Environmental Research (INRAE). He was awarded a PhD in sociology in 2009 by Sciences Po Paris (Center for Sociology of Organizations, CNRS/ Sciences Po University).