LIMOEIRO DO NORTE, Brazil (Reuters) – The farmers of Brazil have become the world’s top exporters of sugar, orange juice, coffee, beef, poultry and soybeans. They’ve also earned a more dubious distinction: In 2012, Brazil passed the United States as the largest buyer of pesticides.
This rapid growth has made Brazil an enticing market for pesticides banned or phased out in richer nations because of health or environmental risks.
At least four major pesticide makers – US-based FMC Corp, Denmark’s Cheminova A/S, Helm AG of Germany and Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta AG – sell products here that are no longer allowed in their domestic markets, a Reuters review of registered pesticides found.
Among the compounds widely sold in Brazil: paraquat, which was branded as “highly poisonous” by US regulators. Both Syngenta and Helm are licensed to sell it here.
Brazilian regulators warn that the government hasn’t been able to ensure the safe use of agrotoxicos, as herbicides, insecticides and fungicides are known in Portuguese. In 2013, a crop duster sprayed insecticide on a school in central Brazil. The incident, which put more than 30 schoolchildren and teachers in the hospital, is still being investigated.
“We can’t keep up,” says Ana Maria Vekic, chief of toxicology at Anvisa, the federal agency in charge of evaluating pesticide health risks.
FMC, Cheminova and Syngenta said the products they sell are safe if used properly. A ban in one country doesn’t necessarily mean a pesticide should be prohibited everywhere, they argue, because each market has different needs based on its crops, pests, illnesses and climate. Helm, based in Hamburg, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“You can’t compare Brazil to a temperate climate,” says Eduardo Daher, executive director of Andef, a Brazilian pesticide trade association. “We have more blights, more insects, more harvests.”
Public-health specialists here reject that argument. “So what if the needs of crops or soils in Brazil are different?” says Victor Pelaez, a food engineer and economist at the Federal University of Parana, in southern Brazil. “What’s toxic in one place is toxic everywhere, including Brazil.”
Widespread violations
Screenings by regulators show much of the food grown and sold in Brazil violates national regulations. Last year, Anvisa completed its latest analysis of pesticide residue in foods across Brazil. Of 1,665 samples collected, ranging from rice to apples to peppers, 29 per cent showed residues that either exceeded allowed levels or contained unapproved pesticides.
Since 2007, when Brazil’s health ministry began keeping current records, the number of reported cases of human intoxication by pesticides has more than doubled, from 2,178 that year to 4,537 in 2013. The annual number of deaths linked to pesticide poisoning climbed from 132 to 206. Public health specialists say the actual figures are higher because tracking is incomplete.
The pressures are clear here in Limoeiro do Norte, a town in the arid northeastern state of Ceara. The state used to be anything but a breadbasket. But since the 1990s, Brazil has built a system of irrigation canals in the area, and farming has flourished. So, too, has pesticide use.
In November, a federal court upheld a ruling that forces Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc, the global fruit giant, to indemnify the widow of a worker whose liver failed after repeated handling of pesticides. In Limoeiro do Norte, a state court is weighing charges against a landowner accused by police of ordering the murder of an anti-pesticide activist.
“This is a giant laboratory for the worst of industrial-scale agriculture,” says Raquel Rigotto, a physician and sociologist at the Federal University of Ceara in Fortaleza, the state capital. Rigotto says her research team has found traces of many pesticides in water taps in the area, and a higher rate of cancer deaths there than in towns nearby with little farming.
The world has much riding on Brazil’s food boom. The population is expected to rise nearly 30 per cent over the next three decades, leaving 2 billion more mouths to feed. Brazil’s booming agricultural sector will be a critical source of nourishment. But with its equatorial sunlight, steady temperatures and year-round harvests, Brazil is also a fertile place for insects, fungi and weeds. To keep them at bay, farmers are applying more and more pesticides.
A powerful lobby
In 2013, the last year figures are available, Brazilian buyers purchased $10 billion worth, or 20 per cent of the global market. Since 2008, Brazilian demand has risen 11 percent annually – more than twice the global rate.
One factor blocking more forceful safeguards is Brazil’s increasingly powerful agricultural lobby.
In last year’s elections, agribusiness trailed only the construction industry as a source of donations for the re-election of leftist President Dilma Rousseff. Brazilian food and agricultural companies accounted for about a quarter of the money she received from big donors, or 89.5 million reais, electoral filings show. That figure is based on an analysis of the 118 largest donations to Rousseff’s campaign, equal to 1 million Brazilian reais ($300,000) or more each.
In Congress, nearly half the 594 lawmakers identify themselves with the “rural bench,” a legislative faction that has relaxed laws banning genetically modified crops and loosened limits on the clearing of rainforest and other woodland. The rural bench has also proposed legislation to streamline pesticide regulation under one agency, instead of current laws that empower Anvisa and the agriculture and environment ministries.
Rousseff’s press office declined to comment, referring questions to the agriculture ministry. Decio Coutinho, a senior ministry official, said in an e-mail that the use of pesticides follows “rigorous laws” in Brazil and is overseen by technicians, scientists and public servants who “enjoy the respect and total confidence of the domestic and international scientific community and Brazilian and foreign consumers.”
The relationship between agribusiness and the government, including campaign donations, is “ethical and transparent,” he said. There is nothing improper about the sector’s voice in Congress, he added, saying that representation “is defined by the free and sovereign vote of the electorate.”
The industry’s influence, and tight budgets for regulators, limit Brazil’s ability to enforce pesticide rules.
‘Farmers love it’. Consider the time it takes Anvisa to evaluate a proposal by a manufacturer to sell a pesticide in Brazil. By law, the agency is supposed to analyze a new chemical in no more than 120 days. Anvisa can take years. With fewer than 50 scientists, compared with hundreds at comparable agencies in the United States or Europe, it has a backlog of more than 1,000 chemicals awaiting review.
It can also take years to get dangerous chemicals off the market.
An effort to re-evaluate 14 controversial pesticides used in Brazil, most of them banned elsewhere, is now in its seventh year, slowed by lawsuits from manufacturers and opposition by many lawmakers. “If it’s not a court case, it’s a congressional hearing,” says Vekic, the toxicology chief at Anvisa.
So far, the re-evaluation has led to bans of four pesticides. In December, Anvisa said it would prohibit methyl parathion, an insecticide banned in the United States and Europe. But Anvisa hasn’t yet said when or how it will act.
As a result, Cheminova, the Danish company that sells methyl parathion, has “not changed plans regarding the business with this product,” says Lars-Erik Pedersen, a spokesman. He adds that demand is now high because of boll weevil attacks on cotton. “The farmers love it,” he says. The delays at Anvisa, farmers and pesticide companies say, force growers to keep using older, potentially more harmful chemicals because safer, more efficient pesticides are awaiting approval.
“We have new products, but there is a backlog to get them to market,” says Antonio Zem, president of the Latin America unit of FMC, the American manufacturer of Furadan, an insecticide. Furadan is based on carbofuran, a compound for which the US Environmental Protection Agency, after a review beginning in 2006, “concluded that dietary, worker, and ecological risks are unacceptable for all uses.”
FMC says that it has been trying to limit sales of the potent chemical to big farms and to sectors, such as sugarcane, where application can be handled mostly by machine.
Death of a farm worker
Furadan is one of the many pesticides used on farms along the Chapada do Apodi, a fertile plateau in eastern Ceara. There, thanks to 40 kilometres of canals fed by the nearby Jaguaribe River, more than 4,500 farmhands work fields on 324 properties.
The farms have brought jobs and some prosperity to a once-destitute region. The town of Limoeiro do Norte was once known as the “land of bicycles” because residents couldn’t afford cars. Today it hums with the tread of pickup truck and SUV tyres.
But little other public infrastructure has followed the canals. As a result, many of the region’s residents get their water from the same open-air canals that irrigate the farms.
Problems along the plateau emerged as early as 2008. Agricultural workers and neighbours of farms began complaining to local church officials and labour organizations that they were developing rashes after taking showers, while their farm animals were getting sick.
That July, Vanderlei Matos da Silva, a 31-year-old employee of Fresh Del Monte Produce, reported suffering headaches, fevers, a swollen belly and yellow eyes. For the previous three years, he had worked for the company stocking a pesticide warehouse at its pineapple plantation on the plateau.
The job, according to documents and testimony by fellow workers submitted to a federal labour court, included mixing chemicals and preparing backpack dispensers for those who sprayed them. Silva also cleaned the warehouse and often stored unused chemicals in open containers, workers testified.
The fumes often made him and colleagues dizzy. “Dust from the agrotoxicos stayed in the air,” testified Jose Anaildo Silva da Costa, one of the workers. Another worker, Francisco Ricardo Nobre, testified that plantation managers ordered employees to hide certain pesticides when they got wind of a pending inspection.
Fresh Del Monte, based in Coral Gables, Florida, declined to comment.
A receipt for paraquat
One of the pesticides, according to worker testimony, was paraquat. A decades-old herbicide, paraquat is banned in the European Union and restricted for most uses in the United States. In Brazil, Syngenta, Helm and three other companies are licensed to sell it. The chemical is among those under review by Anvisa.
Paraquat is “highly poisonous,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among other ills, according to the CDC, paraquat causes kidney, heart and liver failure.
At least some of the paraquat sold to the Fresh Del Monte operation during Silva’s employment there came from Syngenta, according to a 2007 sales receipt for 25,840 reais worth ($8,160) of the chemical. The receipt, obtained by prosecutors, was reviewed by Reuters. Syngenta declined to comment.
By August, Silva could no longer work. In October, he was admitted to a clinic in Limoeiro and moved three weeks later to a bigger hospital in Fortaleza. He died a month later, leaving a one-year-old son and a widow, who began a years-long effort to win back pay and damages from Fresh Del Monte.
The official cause of death was listed as liver and kidney failure and digestive haemorrhaging. Fresh Del Monte declined to comment on Silva’s death. In court, the company’s lawyers alleged that Silva had been diagnosed with a viral form of hepatitis unrelated to his work. The judge rejected that argument.
