Ambiguities at Sites of Acceptance: Agrarian Neoliberalism and Herbicide Exposure in Argentina

INTRODUCTION

Genetically modified crops (hereafter, GM crops) were first introduced in Argentina in 1996, with the commercial release of herbicide-tolerant soybean seed. These seeds are genetically engineered so the plants can resist glyphosate, an herbicide that eliminates weeds, thus bypassing the need to plow the land (a technique known as “no-till”). GM soybean production quickly took hold in the Pampas, a region at the center of the country, and an export-oriented region of colonial settlement. These agricultural innovations gained ground amidst the implementation of a sweeping program of neoliberalization in Argentina from 1991 to 2001. ¹

By the mid-2000s, half of the arable land in Argentina had been planted with GM soybean seeds, feeding a $20 billion (USD) a year business and becoming a centerpiece of Argentina's agricultural exports (which in turn represents >50% of the country's foreign trade). Although the national administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2008–2015) departed from previous neoliberal policies and adopted neodevelopmentalist, Keynesian policies, they did little to alter the reliance on monocultures and agrochemicals of export-oriented agriculture. Neodevelopmentalist administrations took advantage of the “soybean boom” by applying heavy taxes on agricultural exports (starting at 23% in 2002 and reaching 35% by 2007).

The sweeping expansion of GM soybeans created prosperity for some agribusinesses and farmers and nurtured the tax revenues of governments. Yet it also brought about negative public health and environmental impacts. More than 200 million liters of glyphosate-based herbicides are sprayed in Argentine GM soybean fields in any given year (up from 28 million liters used in the late 1990s). ² This has created a series of socioenvironmental problems, from contamination of waterways to cancer clusters in rural towns. ³

In this article, we tackle these issues from a bifocal approach. We first examine discourses at the national scale to show how herbicide use is publicly and institutionally justified, promoted, and legitimized. This analysis also identifies how agrochemical exposure is downplayed, minimized, or reframed. We argue that some of these discourses are replicated at the localized scale, but as they are adopted at this level they are also adapted and modified in significant ways.

Based on the analysis of our interviews, we claim that these localized understandings of pesticide use and exposure are less straightforward and present ambivalences and ambiguities that hardly enter the public register. In presenting these arguments, our goal is to advance a more nuanced knowledge of how pesticides are legitimized, understanding the situated knowledge and standpoints ⁴ of the actors who benefit from their use.

Previous study has explained the legitimation of pesticide use in ideological terms and in connections to political economy, as a manifestation of “export-oriented populism,” ⁵ an expression of a dominant “bio-hegemony,” ⁶ or as a function of the neocolonial project of agribusiness and the ideology of scientism. ⁷ We seek to extend this body of research by inspecting an underexplored area of research, namely, the subjective aspects underlying localized and quotidian understandings of pesticide use and agrochemical exposure, which underpin rural towns as “sites of acceptance.”

The analysis of these two types of discourses (i.e., public discourses with national reach and the more intimate, embedded, and localized understandings) suggest significant overlaps but also key differences. These contrasts draw attention to how the acceptance of pesticides is not only an expression of material interest or ideological blinders, but also responds to the concerns of situated subjectivities that make sense of pesticides on their own terms and according to their localized contexts.

Furthermore, this indicates the importance of what Malin (extending Karl Polanyi's “double movement”) calls a “triple movement”: the local support for market relationships (in this case, GM crops dependent on agrochemicals) that are seen as technologically advanced, conducive to community development, and an activity embedded in local history. ⁸ This study contributes to understanding “sites of acceptance” and the importance of focusing on more privileged actors (and not only on marginalized populations) to advance the insights of the environmental justice (EJ) literature.

EJ AND PESTICIDE USE IN ARGENTINA

This article contributes to the EJ literature in two main ways. First, and in broad terms, our focus expands the scope of the EJ literature by probing certain categories in the so-called global South. Although there is an increasing interest in extending the EJ perspective to the global scale, ⁹ the original and overwhelming focus of this literature on urban contamination perpetrated by large corporations and affecting racialized groups in the United States demands the re-examination of some assumptions when applied to different social contexts.

To put it succinctly, “It is evident for many that it is not possible to transfer the idea of environmental justices as such to Latin America.” ¹⁰ In Argentina, for instance, quintessential U.S. ideological tropes such as rugged individualism justifying toxic pollution ¹¹ do not carry the same weight. Furthermore, we found that sites of acceptance in the Argentine Pampas are locally expressed in patriotic or nationalistic terms that are not necessarily nativist (as they may be in the United States or Europe), but rather presented as the right of countries in the “global South” to “pollute freely,” just like the countries in the “global North” did in their path toward development.

Second, a focus on farming offers a counterpoint to an established EJ storyline. Unlike the opaque contaminating corporations that are the usual suspects in standard EJ work, the Argentine farmers we interviewed are embedded in their communities. They are both “perpetrators” and “victims,” as they apply agrochemicals on their own farms and close to where their families live, complicating the typical EJ storyline. As Jill Harrison argues, when aiming to “uphold and amend” EJ arguments: “environmental inequalities stem not only from a lack of knowledge, care, or political will but also from many actors' attempts to do the right thing.” ¹²

In addition, these toxic exposures do not take place in the poor racialized communities that figure prominently in the EJ literature ¹³ but in relatively prosperous and “White” rural towns in the Pampas, an area comparable with the U.S. Midwest.

We focus on actors “in the middle,” that is, actors located “in between the distribution of power and their role in creating and reinforcing environmental injustice,” whose position in the agrarian social hierarchy is between the “top” (e.g., agribusiness' CEOs or national state officials) and the “bottom” (“the poor and powerless, those who due to their class, gender, and/or race occupy the lower rungs of society”). ¹⁴ According to Legizamón, those “in-between” actors are strategic in reproducing the status quo and helping perpetuate environmental injustices.

The role of these actors matters because their views confirm that the dependence on natural resources, a strong identification with the industry, and the embeddedness of agricultural markets in local communities are key elements in building sites of acceptance. ¹⁵ They are “the rural folks of the Pampas who are of European descent and who reap some benefits from soybean production (mostly in terms of rent or income), but, because they live near toxic facilities (the farms, in this case), they also bear the health and environmental costs of extractivism.” ¹⁶ We, however, did not find that they completely invisibilize the toxic hazards of agrochemical spraying. Rather, as we will show, they are ambiguous or ambivalent about pesticide use.

METHODS AND DATA

This contribution is based on the analysis of in-depth interviews and of publications of organizations representing Argentine farmers and agribusinesses. We used these methods since they afford access to how they understand pesticides on their own terms.

We reviewed the websites and documents produced by agribusiness organizations in Argentina, namely, CASAFE, the Argentine Chamber of Agrochemical Companies; AAPRESID, the largest organization of soybean growers; and “Red de Buenas Prácticas Agropecuarias” (Good Agricultural Practices Network), which connects agribusiness associations, farmers organizations, universities, and public agencies.

We reviewed and examined these texts using the tools of critical discourse analysis, which pays attention to the role of discourse in reproducing social relations of dominance and focuses “on the discursive strategies that legitimate control, or otherwise naturalize the social order.” ¹⁷ We analyzed these documents building on the insights of ethnographic content analysis, ¹⁸ identifying the narratives that these organizations deploy to make sense of pesticides and paying attention to how these actors present pesticides in connection to health and the environment and how they framed pesticides to appeal to nonagrarian actors (e.g., students, journalist, and the general public).

In addition, between October of 2020 and April of 2021 we conducted 14 Zoom interviews with farmers, machine contractors, agronomists, rural journalists, farm insurance agents, and people living in small rural towns in the provinces of La Pampa, Buenos Aires, and Córdoba. We followed a snowball sampling method and sampled for range, ¹⁹ that is, we asked interviewees to refer us to other people who might be willing to talk to us and purposely sought to interview people occupying different positions in the world of agriculture. Interviews typically lasted between 1 and 2 hours, and we conducted two follow-ups.

We coded and analyzed interview transcripts, using open and focused coding ²⁰ to identify patterns in the answers to our questions on pesticides, agricultural practices, the towns where they live, the rural sector, and the state. Our interviewees live in or around farming areas, they benefit from or support conventional agriculture, are embedded in their communities, and breathe the same pesticides they (or their workers) spray. When referring to people benefitting from mainstream agriculture, we include material but also symbolic benefits, as people may feel part of the project of “national progress” involved in GM crops production. Hereunder we will use “farmers” for shorthand, then, in reference to people benefitting from farming in material and/or symbolic terms.

AGRARIAN NEOLIBERALISM IN ARGENTINA AND THE LEGITIMATION OF HERBICIDE USE AT THE NATIONAL SCALE

In this section, we analyze the public discourses of organizations representing Argentine farmers and agribusinesses, and how they legitimize agrochemical use and agrarian neoliberalism at the national scale. Three tropes of these discourses stand out: a rejection of state regulation, trust in corporate self-regulation, and an emphasis on individual responsibility. In addition, widespread ideas underpinning resource extraction are also present in these discourses, that is, a downplaying of the extent and risks of toxic exposure and a sense of patriotism and embeddedness in place that boost the acceptance of contaminating activities.

First, agrarian neoliberalism in Argentina expresses globally widespread ideologies opposing government intervention in markets. These principles guided many of Argentina's public policies in the 1990s, but they were challenged by neodevelopmentalist national governments between 2003 and 2015. ²¹ The latter instated export taxes on agricultural exports, triggering the ire of farmers' organizations and agribusiness associations. They mobilized massively and contentiously in 2008, deploying a “free trade” discourse in a series of protests in rural towns and large cities. ²² Although this conflict resulted in a stalemate, these mobilizations served as a strong legitimation of agrarian neoliberalism (which was also built on the foundational character of agro-exports in Argentina). ²³

Around the same time of the 2008 anti-tax protests, environmental activists and grassroots rural organizations in the Argentine Pampas were organizing less visible collective action, but at the localized scale. They were neither able to garner widespread support in their communities nor to scale up their demands. Even though they launched campaigns registering higher cancer rates in rural towns and gathered in assemblies of “sprayed towns” (Asambleas de Pueblos Fumigados), these networks did not evolve into a sustained creation of sites of resistance. ²⁴

In 2009, the national government responded to their demands with the creation of a National Commission of Research on Agrochemicals, but mostly as an act of “performative governance.” ²⁵ This Commission had meager results; nevertheless, the criticisms of agrochemical use prompted a response from agribusiness actors. A globally widespread discourse of the industry (which “constantly works to legitimize agricultural pesticides—to present them as both necessary and beneficial” ²⁶ ) was expressed in several national forums. Toxicological experts who work closely with agribusiness associations, for instance, denied the relationship between agrochemicals and cancer at a presentation in the national Senate. ²⁷

At the local level, pesticide drifts were naturalized and minimized by presenting them as mere accidents (as Jill Harrison shows in California), ²⁸ and the health effects of toxic exposures were reinterpreted by local elites in terms of victim-blaming, denial, and dismissal. ²⁹

In response to these controversies, agribusiness groups and large farmers organized seminars to improve safety by promoting “good agricultural practices” (referred to by the Spanish acronym, BPA). The discourses disseminated in these seminars and networks resonate with well-established neoliberal ideas of corporate self-regulation, individual responsibility and choice, and the cultivation of self-improvement. ³⁰ The reaction of agribusiness actors also gained traction on the heels of a global controversy over glyphosate, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer research branch of the World Health Organization, recategorized the herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.

The Argentine Chamber of Agrochemical Companies, CASAFE, issued a press release shortly after the reclassification, stating that “the correct use of the product is safe and risk free.” ³¹ CASAFE, together with other business associations, also engaged in a series of initiatives to promote their message among different social actors.

For example, they released a “Handbook for Journalists” exalting the virtues of agricultural biotechnology, ³² organized a contest for high schools to fund “a project where Good Agricultural Practices in the use of phytosanitary products are implemented,” ³³ created content for educational institutions, ³⁴ released a document with recommendations for local governments on how to regulate “phytosanitary products,” ³⁵ and established partnerships between companies and toxicologists to “provide the necessary knowledge for the correct diagnosis and treatment of intoxications caused by the misuse of phytosanitary products.” ³⁶

In the next section, we explore variations across scales by inspecting how some of the discourses of national actors are interpreted, reframed, and deployed in localized settings, in the farming towns of the Argentine Pampas.

FARMING TOWNS AS SITES OF ACCEPTANCE AT THE LOCALIZED SCALE

At the localized scale, four tropes stood out when analyzing our interviews: first, a sense of patriotism and defense of Argentine sovereignty, as farmers feel they have the “right” to pollute as Northern countries did. Second, we identified an ambivalence toward the risks of agrochemical exposure and third, a tendency to dilute risks by pointing out that we coexist with other environmental hazards that do not raise concerns. Fourth, farmers understood the role of the state in ways that contrasted with the typical neoliberal stance.

First, farmers articulate their stance on agrochemicals in terms of patriotism, defending Argentine sovereignty within a frame of global North/global South dynamics. They often argued that Northern countries have already polluted the planet on their way to prosperity and that now it would be unfair to put the burden of avoiding pollution on farmers in South America. In other words, their understanding of EJ is quite different from the established scholarly and activist definition, as their view is based on the autonomy to use their land and produce as they see fit. These ideas were reflected in the press ³⁷ and among our interviewees as well. Hernán, who owns and manages a farm of 1000 hectares, put it in these terms:

Sometimes I hear that the Amazon is the heritage of humanity, I say yes, but it is also the heritage of Brazilians. The great economies of the world that pollute, that put 90% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, such as Europe, the United States, today China, and others, I believe that they should subsidize the Brazilian people so that they do not deforest the Amazon. Otherwise, Brazil is going to have to eat, and it is going to have to cut it down (…)

Because Europe ate the Black Forest, the United States… I have been there, in Iowa, Illinois, there is not a single tree… isn't it true? Well, and today we want the Brazilians to clean the air of the great nations. I agree that the Amazon rainforest should not be cut down, I cannot be so negligent, but let us all think of a system so that Amazon remains there, and the Brazilians have their resources. (…) Because England has been polluting since the industrial revolution and now, they want the Amazon to clean the air for England.

The second trope that stood out when coding our interviews was that farmers expressed ambivalent positions regarding the dangers of pesticide use. On one hand, they expressed mistrust toward the scientific literature showing links between herbicide exposure and cancer or other negative health impacts. They see these findings as biased or having political motivations. They repeatedly shared that they live close to agricultural fields and that “nothing has ever happened” to them. Or they mentioned examples of people who have been working in the fields for decades and, if the claims about the toxicity of pesticides were true, “they would all be dead” by now.

On the other hand, some expressed concerns about exposing their children, their pets, or their workers to the risks of agrochemical exposure. Farmers frequently said that pesticides are harmless if used in accordance with BPAs. As Alina, an agronomist, told us: “you can be sure that what you apply here stays here, it doesn't move…if they are going to apply next to your house you can stay inside, but honestly, it is not something that is toxic.”

Hugo, a medical doctor, who was skeptical about activists' claims that herbicides cause cancer also expressed that “I don't believe in witches, but there are witches indeed.” ³⁸ He also shared that he does not “go out” during herbicide applications, “not even [to] play golf in the field next door” if spraying is taking place. Both interviewees, in short, simultaneously understood the existence and nonexistence of hazards associated with pesticides. They claimed that herbicides are not dangerous when properly used, while also underlining the precautions they need to take or expressing doubts about pesticides' safety.

This ambiguous understanding of toxic exposure is also a way of diluting the negative consequences of spraying pesticides or residing next to sprayed fields. In other words, we see these expressions as ways of making toxic exposure livable and as a means of building acceptance in their communities.

As previous research has shown, risk perception has a limited relationship with knowledge about safety and security and is not necessarily related to self-protective behaviors. ³⁹ This is often glossed over by toxicological or technical risk analyses, which, in following rational choice theory, assume that people make decisions in ideal and isolated contexts, thus missing that “Estimations of risk are affected by the cognitive mapping of the situation.” ⁴⁰ As Mary Douglas argued, what is potentially dangerous or harmful, or what constitutes a risk, is deeply shaped by our cultural milieu. ⁴¹

Third, farmers took for granted that “degradation” is the result of all human action and that it is impossible to return to an initial “pristine state if one wants to sustain the economy,” as Martín, one of the farmers, shared with us. He went on to say: “We are aware that we are applying poison and that we have practices that do not have zero costs, environmentally speaking.” Our interviewees expressed their own understanding of environmentalism, mostly in relation to the health of soils. They readily admitted that it is necessary to “take care” of the soil, which they see as a productive asset and a family heritage at risk of losing value, and extolled the virtues of no-till farming.

They discussed these practices of soil care in terms of crop rotation and the incorporation of cover crops and, when possible, the overall reduction of agrochemical applications and the use of “green label” products. They saw these techniques and practices as encompassed by BPA, good agricultural practices in which “the key is in the management of practices and not in the product [the agrochemical] itself,” as Alina, the agronomist, told us. From this perspective, what may injure the soil is harmless for people.

Farmers also diluted the risks posed by pesticides by explaining that people live surrounded by many environmental hazards. Héctor, who owns a plot of 4500 hectares, mentioned the risks of using lice killers (frequently applied on children) and household insecticides or cleaning products. Manuel, a crop insurance agent, elaborated on this idea by saying that if we are exposed to environmental hazards, it is due to “a series of factors,” and not only because of glyphosate or other pesticides, which he saw as being “blamed for everything.”

This claim that other biocides do not usually generate any safety concerns could be thought as an instance of the fallacy known as whataboutism. ⁴² This attempt to discredit those who raise concerns about pesticides by charging them with hypocrisy is another way of making quotidian toxic exposure acceptable in these kinds of towns.

Some farmers, doubling down on this perspective, said that focusing only on the risks of pesticides on soybeans, a feed that is mostly exported, is shortsighted. Our interviewees mentioned the presence of pesticide residues on vegetables or fruits for direct consumption or the use of hormones in poultry as problems that are more serious than herbicide use in crops that are exported to the other side of the world. For them, exposure to toxic substances in food is equally if not more serious than herbicide use on export crops, but they stress that these issues are little discussed in the public sphere—similar to how the agricultural industry in the United States downplays pesticide drifts, by arguing that “air pollution from agriculture pales in comparison with air pollution from other sources.” ⁴³

Fourth, although the farmers we talked to either participated in or supported the 2008 protests that deployed strong neoliberal views and anti-government claims, they also expressed ambivalent views toward state intervention. Understanding human behavior as naturally undisciplined, they blamed the state for the lack of control over pesticides. As Alina said: “You have to regulate in a certain way and monitor compliance because it is a logical question, human beings are like that, that is, if I know that you are not fined for speeding, I will drive a little faster, and that happens to us, it is a human condition.”

Likewise, farmers explain that within the same province, each municipality has its own laws regarding the application of pesticides, which they say feeds uncertainty. One municipality, for example, established a 2000-m buffer between the city and sprayed fields, whereas other municipalities established a 500- or 200-m buffer.

Farmers criticized the state for not guaranteeing them legal predictability and they bitterly complained about export taxes on agricultural exports, while also demanding agricultural subsidies or support for farming insurance. They explained to us that they have trouble planning their production for 3–5 years in advance because the state “constantly changes the rules.” In other words, they have a selective view of how a “free market” should work and they favor a state that maintains clear and uniform rules. For them, individual responsibility and corporate self-regulation could only work if there is a Leviathan that disciplines the “natural” human condition.

This view contrasts with a libertarian approach that farmers and industry tend to promote in other places, such as the United States. ⁴⁴ And it shows the importance of incorporating different scales into our analyses, that is, the “loudest” voices of corporate farming may not fully reflect what farmers “on the ground” think and feel.

CONCLUSION

In this article, we reconstructed the ideas, discourses, and institutions that legitimize herbicide-dependent agriculture in the Argentine plains. In public discourses and at the national scale, neoliberal ideologies of anti-state intervention justified the use of agrochemicals and downplayed the risks of toxic exposure. In the rural towns where mid-sized farmers live, however, a closer examination of the acceptance of herbicides and agrarian neoliberalism revealed telling differences. First, they show that neoliberal ideas and the support they lend to contaminating activities may be global, but they are reappropriated and recreated at different scales, since “Neoliberal ideologies are variously deployed, interact with different people in various places at multiple scales, and thus manifest in widely divergent ways.” ⁴⁵

Second, those discrepancies also suggest that agrochemical exposure, just like pesticide drifts, are “like so many environmental problems today: diffuse, elusive, hazardous, and invisible.” ⁴⁶ The rural towns we studied are sites of acceptance of neoliberalism and pesticides, but this conformity was not monolithic or univocal when contrasted with national discourses. It was expressed through ambivalence toward the risks of agrochemical exposure, and a tendency to dilute these risks by pointing to other underestimated environmental dangers. In addition, their understanding of the role of the state overlapped with the typical neoliberal stance but also departed from it in significant ways, revealing ambivalent tones as well.

Farmers' assessment of agrarian neoliberalism and herbicide exposure echoed the views of actors “on the top” of the agrarian social ladder, but their views of the state were much more ambivalent. We see this as a specific manifestation of a “triple movement”: the acceptance of toxic exposure as resulting from a situation “in which markets for commodities… become part of community social fabrics and are defended and supported by people as part of local culture and norms,” and where “environmental justice means autonomy over local land use.” ⁴⁷

Although neoliberal ideas underpin the creation of sites of acceptance, there are telling differences between the acceptance of agrochemicals in Argentina and extractive activities in the United States (and probably elsewhere). In the latter acceptance is built on economic desperation and poverty, whereas in the former acceptance is justified as the right to economic prosperity.

Our focus on farming communities reveals the specificities of localized understandings of herbicide use and exposure. Although many studies focus on the victims of pollution (those “at the bottom”) and others zoom in on the role of global corporations or governments (those “at the top”), here we zoom in on a “mid-tier” sector. Their perspectives matter, we argue, because of their social and geographical proximity to those suffering the environmental and health impacts of pesticide exposure (themselves included). Their understandings are hard to explain away by simply arguing that they profit from using herbicides.

When paying close attention to their voices, what becomes clear is that the adamant defense of herbicides that farmers usually deploy in the public sphere is mired with ambiguities, ambivalences, and hesitations that may signal points of access for engaging them in dialogue about less harmful forms of agrarian production. If societies ever transition toward forms of food production that do not depend on an intensive use of agrochemicals, we need to think hard on how farmers currently ensnared in industrial farming could be part of the solution. We believe that, as scholars, a step in that direction is to avoid dismissing them as being duped by corporate interests and taking their views seriously.