By Michael Warren and Natacha Pisarenko, AP, Oct 20, 2013
BASAVILBASO, Argentina (AP)—Argentine farmworker Fabian Tomasi was never trained to handle pesticides. His job was to keep the crop-dusters flying by filling their tanks as quickly as possible, although it often meant getting drenched in poison.
Now, at 47, he’s a living skeleton, so weak he can hardly leave his house in Entre Rios province.
Schoolteacher Andrea Druetta lives in Santa Fe Province, the heart of Argentina’s soy country, where agrochemical spraying is banned within 500 meters (550 yards) of populated areas. But soy is planted just 30 meters (33 yards) from her back door. Her boys were showered in chemicals recently while swimming in the backyard pool.
After Sofia Gatica lost her newborn to kidney failure, she filed a complaint that led to Argentina’s first criminal convictions for illegal spraying. But last year’s verdict came too late for many of her 5,300 neighbors in Ituzaingo Annex. A government study there found alarming levels of agrochemical contamination in the soil and drinking water, and 80 percent of the children surveyed carried traces of pesticide in their blood.
American biotechnology has turned Argentina into the world’s third-largest soybean producer, but the chemicals powering the boom aren’t confined to soy and cotton and corn fields.
The Associated Press documented dozens of cases around the country where poisons are applied in ways unanticipated by regulatory science or specifically banned by existing law. The spray drifts into schools and homes and settles over water sources; farmworkers mix poisons with no protective gear; villagers store water in pesticide containers that should have been destroyed.
Now doctors are warning that uncontrolled pesticide applications could be the cause of growing health problems among the 12 million people who live in the South American nation’s vast farm belt.
In Santa Fe, cancer rates are two times to four times higher than the national average. In Chaco, birth defects quadrupled in the decade after biotechnology dramatically expanded farming in Argentina.
"The change in how agriculture is produced has brought, frankly, a change in the profile of diseases," says Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez, a pediatrician and neonatologist who co-founded Doctors of Fumigated Towns, part of a growing movement demanding enforcement of agricultural safety rules. "We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects, and illnesses seldom seen before."
A nation once known for its grass-fed beef has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1996, when the St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. promised that adopting its patented seeds and chemicals would increase crop yields and lower pesticide use. Today, Argentina’s entire soy crop and nearly all its corn and cotton are genetically modified, with soy cultivation alone tripling to 47 million acres (19 million hectares).
Agrochemical use did decline at first, then it bounced back, increasing eightfold from 9 million gallons (34 million liters) in 1990 to more than 84 million gallons (317 million liters) today as farmers squeezed in more harvests and pests became resistant to the poisons. Overall, Argentine farmers apply an estimated 4.3 pounds of agrochemical concentrate per acre, more than twice what U.S. farmers use, according to an AP analysis of government and pesticide industry data.
Government officials insist the problem is misinformation that plays on people’s emotions.
"I’ve seen countless documents, surveys, videos, articles in the news and in universities, and really our citizens who read all this end up dizzy and confused," Agriculture Secretary Lorenzo Basso said. "I think we have to publicize the commitment that Argentina has to being a food producer. Our model as an exporting nation has been called into question. We need to defend our model."
Argentina was among the earliest adopters of the new biotech farming model promoted by Monsanto and other U.S. agribusinesses.
Instead of turning the topsoil, spraying pesticides and then waiting until the poison dissipates before planting, farmers sow the seeds and spray afterward without harming crops genetically modified to tolerate specific chemicals.
This “no-till” method takes so much less time and money that farmers can reap more harvests and expand into land not worth the trouble before.
But pests develop resistance, even more so when the same chemicals are applied to genetically identical crops on a vast scale.
So while glyphosate is one of the world’s safest herbicides, farmers now use it in higher concentrates and mix in much more toxic poisons, such as 2,4,D, which the U.S. military used in “Agent Orange” to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War.
Molecular biologist Dr. Andres Carrasco at the University of Buenos Aires says the burden from the chemical cocktails is worrisome, but even glyphosate alone could spell trouble for human health. He found that injecting a very low dose of glyphosate into embryos can change levels of retinoic acid, causing the same sort of spinal defects in frogs and chickens that doctors increasingly are registering in communities where farm chemicals are ubiquitous.
This acid, a form of vitamin A, is fundamental for keeping cancers in check and triggering genetic expression, the process by which embryonic cells develop into organs and limbs.
"If it’s possible to reproduce this in a laboratory, surely what is happening in the field is much worse," Carrasco said. "And if it’s much worse, and we suspect that it is, what we have to do is put this under a magnifying glass."
His findings, published in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology in 2010, were rebutted by Monsanto, which said the results “are not surprising given their methodology and unrealistic exposure scenarios.”
For three years, Tomasi was routinely exposed to chemicals as he pumped pesticides into the tanks of crop-dusters. Now he’s near death from polyneuropathy, a debilitating neurological disorder, which has left him wasted and shriveled.
"I prepared millions of liters of poison without any kind of protection, no gloves, masks or special clothing," he said. "I didn’t know anything. I only learned later what it did to me, after contacting scientists."
"The poison comes in liquid concentrates, in containers with lots of precautions to take when applying it," Tomasi explained. "But nobody takes precautions."
With soybeans selling for about $500 a ton, growers plant wherever they can, often disregarding Monsanto’s guidelines and provincial law by spraying with no advance warning, and even in windy conditions.
In Entre Rios, teachers reported that sprayers failed to respect 50-meter (55-yard) limits at 18 schools, dousing 11 during class. Five teachers filed police complaints this year.
Druetta also filed complaints in Santa Fe, alleging that students fainted when pesticides drifted into their classrooms and that their tap water is contaminated. She is struggling to get clean drinking water into her school, she said, while a neighbor keeps a freezer of rabbit and bird carcasses, hoping someone will test them to see why they dropped dead after spraying.
Buenos Aires forbids loading or hosing off spraying equipment in populated areas, but in the town of Rawson, it’s done directly across the street from homes and a school, with the runoff flowing into an open ditch.
Felix San Roman says that when he complained about clouds of chemicals drifting into his yard, the sprayers beat him up, fracturing his spine and knocking out his teeth. He said he filed a complaint in 2011, but it was ignored.
"This is a small town where nobody confronts anyone, and the authorities look the other way," San Roman said.
Sometimes even court orders are ignored. In January, activist Oscar Di Vincensi stood in a field near a friend’s house waving a ruling against spraying within 1,000 meters (1,100 yards) of homes in his town of Alberti. A tractor driver simply ignored him, dousing him in pesticide.
Dr. Damian Verzenassi, who directs the Environment and Health program at the National University of Rosario’s medical school, decided to try to figure out what was behind an increase in cancer, birth defects and miscarriages in Argentina’s hospitals.
"We didn’t set out to find problems with agrochemicals. We went to see what was happening with the people," he said.
Since 2010, this house-to-house epidemiological study has reached 65,000 people in Santa Fe province, finding cancer rates two times to four times higher than the national average, including breast, prostate and lung cancers. Researchers also found high rates of thyroid disorders and chronic respiratory illness.
"It could be linked to agrochemicals," he said. "They do all sorts of analysis for toxicity of the first ingredient, but they have never studied the interactions between all the chemicals they’re applying."
Dr. Maria del Carmen Seveso, who has spent 33 years running intensive care wards and ethics committees in Chaco province, became alarmed at regional birth reports showing a quadrupling of congenital defects, from 19.1 per 10,000 to 85.3 per 10,000 in the decade after genetically modified crops and their agrochemicals were approved in Argentina.
Determined to find out why, she and her colleagues surveyed 2,051 people in six towns in Chaco, and found significantly more diseases and defects in villages surrounded by industrial agriculture than in those surrounded by cattle ranches. In Avia Terai, 31 percent said a family member had cancer in the past 10 years, compared with 3 percent in the ranching village of Charadai.
It’s nearly impossible to prove that exposure to a specific chemical caused an individual’s cancer or birth defect. But like the other doctors, Seveso said their findings should prompt a rigorous government investigation. Instead, their 68-page report was shelved for a year by Chaco’s health ministry. A year later, a leaked copy was posted on the Internet.
BASAVILBASO, Argentina (AP)—Argentine farmworker Fabian Tomasi was never trained to handle pesticides. His job was to keep the crop-dusters flying by filling their tanks as quickly as possible, although it often meant getting drenched in poison.
Now, at 47, he’s a living skeleton, so weak he can hardly leave his house in Entre Rios province.
Schoolteacher Andrea Druetta lives in Santa Fe Province, the heart of Argentina’s soy country, where agrochemical spraying is banned within 500 meters (550 yards) of populated areas. But soy is planted just 30 meters (33 yards) from her back door. Her boys were showered in chemicals recently while swimming in the backyard pool.
After Sofia Gatica lost her newborn to kidney failure, she filed a complaint that led to Argentina’s first criminal convictions for illegal spraying. But last year’s verdict came too late for many of her 5,300 neighbors in Ituzaingo Annex. A government study there found alarming levels of agrochemical contamination in the soil and drinking water, and 80 percent of the children surveyed carried traces of pesticide in their blood.
American biotechnology has turned Argentina into the world’s third-largest soybean producer, but the chemicals powering the boom aren’t confined to soy and cotton and corn fields.
The Associated Press documented dozens of cases around the country where poisons are applied in ways unanticipated by regulatory science or specifically banned by existing law. The spray drifts into schools and homes and settles over water sources; farmworkers mix poisons with no protective gear; villagers store water in pesticide containers that should have been destroyed.
Now doctors are warning that uncontrolled pesticide applications could be the cause of growing health problems among the 12 million people who live in the South American nation’s vast farm belt.
In Santa Fe, cancer rates are two times to four times higher than the national average. In Chaco, birth defects quadrupled in the decade after biotechnology dramatically expanded farming in Argentina.
"The change in how agriculture is produced has brought, frankly, a change in the profile of diseases," says Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez, a pediatrician and neonatologist who co-founded Doctors of Fumigated Towns, part of a growing movement demanding enforcement of agricultural safety rules. "We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects, and illnesses seldom seen before."
A nation once known for its grass-fed beef has undergone a remarkable transformation since 1996, when the St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. promised that adopting its patented seeds and chemicals would increase crop yields and lower pesticide use. Today, Argentina’s entire soy crop and nearly all its corn and cotton are genetically modified, with soy cultivation alone tripling to 47 million acres (19 million hectares).
Agrochemical use did decline at first, then it bounced back, increasing eightfold from 9 million gallons (34 million liters) in 1990 to more than 84 million gallons (317 million liters) today as farmers squeezed in more harvests and pests became resistant to the poisons. Overall, Argentine farmers apply an estimated 4.3 pounds of agrochemical concentrate per acre, more than twice what U.S. farmers use, according to an AP analysis of government and pesticide industry data.
Government officials insist the problem is misinformation that plays on people’s emotions.
"I’ve seen countless documents, surveys, videos, articles in the news and in universities, and really our citizens who read all this end up dizzy and confused," Agriculture Secretary Lorenzo Basso said. "I think we have to publicize the commitment that Argentina has to being a food producer. Our model as an exporting nation has been called into question. We need to defend our model."
Argentina was among the earliest adopters of the new biotech farming model promoted by Monsanto and other U.S. agribusinesses.
Instead of turning the topsoil, spraying pesticides and then waiting until the poison dissipates before planting, farmers sow the seeds and spray afterward without harming crops genetically modified to tolerate specific chemicals.
This “no-till” method takes so much less time and money that farmers can reap more harvests and expand into land not worth the trouble before.
But pests develop resistance, even more so when the same chemicals are applied to genetically identical crops on a vast scale.
So while glyphosate is one of the world’s safest herbicides, farmers now use it in higher concentrates and mix in much more toxic poisons, such as 2,4,D, which the U.S. military used in “Agent Orange” to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War.
Molecular biologist Dr. Andres Carrasco at the University of Buenos Aires says the burden from the chemical cocktails is worrisome, but even glyphosate alone could spell trouble for human health. He found that injecting a very low dose of glyphosate into embryos can change levels of retinoic acid, causing the same sort of spinal defects in frogs and chickens that doctors increasingly are registering in communities where farm chemicals are ubiquitous.
This acid, a form of vitamin A, is fundamental for keeping cancers in check and triggering genetic expression, the process by which embryonic cells develop into organs and limbs.
"If it’s possible to reproduce this in a laboratory, surely what is happening in the field is much worse," Carrasco said. "And if it’s much worse, and we suspect that it is, what we have to do is put this under a magnifying glass."
His findings, published in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology in 2010, were rebutted by Monsanto, which said the results “are not surprising given their methodology and unrealistic exposure scenarios.”
For three years, Tomasi was routinely exposed to chemicals as he pumped pesticides into the tanks of crop-dusters. Now he’s near death from polyneuropathy, a debilitating neurological disorder, which has left him wasted and shriveled.
"I prepared millions of liters of poison without any kind of protection, no gloves, masks or special clothing," he said. "I didn’t know anything. I only learned later what it did to me, after contacting scientists."
"The poison comes in liquid concentrates, in containers with lots of precautions to take when applying it," Tomasi explained. "But nobody takes precautions."
With soybeans selling for about $500 a ton, growers plant wherever they can, often disregarding Monsanto’s guidelines and provincial law by spraying with no advance warning, and even in windy conditions.
In Entre Rios, teachers reported that sprayers failed to respect 50-meter (55-yard) limits at 18 schools, dousing 11 during class. Five teachers filed police complaints this year.
Druetta also filed complaints in Santa Fe, alleging that students fainted when pesticides drifted into their classrooms and that their tap water is contaminated. She is struggling to get clean drinking water into her school, she said, while a neighbor keeps a freezer of rabbit and bird carcasses, hoping someone will test them to see why they dropped dead after spraying.
Buenos Aires forbids loading or hosing off spraying equipment in populated areas, but in the town of Rawson, it’s done directly across the street from homes and a school, with the runoff flowing into an open ditch.
Felix San Roman says that when he complained about clouds of chemicals drifting into his yard, the sprayers beat him up, fracturing his spine and knocking out his teeth. He said he filed a complaint in 2011, but it was ignored.
"This is a small town where nobody confronts anyone, and the authorities look the other way," San Roman said.
Sometimes even court orders are ignored. In January, activist Oscar Di Vincensi stood in a field near a friend’s house waving a ruling against spraying within 1,000 meters (1,100 yards) of homes in his town of Alberti. A tractor driver simply ignored him, dousing him in pesticide.
Dr. Damian Verzenassi, who directs the Environment and Health program at the National University of Rosario’s medical school, decided to try to figure out what was behind an increase in cancer, birth defects and miscarriages in Argentina’s hospitals.
"We didn’t set out to find problems with agrochemicals. We went to see what was happening with the people," he said.
Since 2010, this house-to-house epidemiological study has reached 65,000 people in Santa Fe province, finding cancer rates two times to four times higher than the national average, including breast, prostate and lung cancers. Researchers also found high rates of thyroid disorders and chronic respiratory illness.
"It could be linked to agrochemicals," he said. "They do all sorts of analysis for toxicity of the first ingredient, but they have never studied the interactions between all the chemicals they’re applying."
Dr. Maria del Carmen Seveso, who has spent 33 years running intensive care wards and ethics committees in Chaco province, became alarmed at regional birth reports showing a quadrupling of congenital defects, from 19.1 per 10,000 to 85.3 per 10,000 in the decade after genetically modified crops and their agrochemicals were approved in Argentina.
Determined to find out why, she and her colleagues surveyed 2,051 people in six towns in Chaco, and found significantly more diseases and defects in villages surrounded by industrial agriculture than in those surrounded by cattle ranches. In Avia Terai, 31 percent said a family member had cancer in the past 10 years, compared with 3 percent in the ranching village of Charadai.
It’s nearly impossible to prove that exposure to a specific chemical caused an individual’s cancer or birth defect. But like the other doctors, Seveso said their findings should prompt a rigorous government investigation. Instead, their 68-page report was shelved for a year by Chaco’s health ministry. A year later, a leaked copy was posted on the Internet.
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