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Lessons learned from pesticide drift: a call to bring production agriculture, farm labor, and social justice back into agrifood research and activism

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Abstract

I use the case of pesticide drift to discuss the neoliberal shift in agrifood activism and its implications for public health and social justice. I argue that the benefits of this shift have been achieved at the cost of privileging certain bodies and spaces over others and absolving the state of its responsibility to ensure the conditions of social justice. I use this critical intervention as a means of introducing several opportunities for strengthening agrifood research and advocacy. First, I call for increased critical attention to production agriculture and the regulatory arena. Second, I call for increased attention to ‘social justice’ within the food system, emphasizing the need to rekindle research on the immigrant farm labor force.

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Notes

  1. See the paper by Worosz et al. in this issue for an interrogation of US food safety regulation, which shares many of the problems plaguing US pesticide regulation (e.g., reactionary regulatory process, dislocation from public health, lack of knowledge in spite of a tremendous scientific apparatus, etc.).

  2. See, for example, work by Bill Friedland, Ernesto Galarza, Carey McWilliams, Don Mitchell, Robert Thomas, Miriam Wells, and Don Villarejo and others at the California Institute for Rural Studies.

  3. For example, note the title of many presentations throughout 2006 and 2007 by Anna Lappe, co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen: “Eat Grub! Putting Justice on Your Plate” (Lappe and Terry 2006). This correlation of local food systems and social justice appears frequently throughout academic and activist literature, as in the following statement: “The development of a local sustainable food system provides not only economic gains for a community but also fosters civic involvement, cooperation, and healthy social relations” (Feenstra 1997, 28, quoted in Born and Purcell 2006). The development of ‘healthy social relations’ from local food systems is a laudable goal but one whose realization is debatable.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Jess Gilbert, David Goodman, Dustin Mulvaney, and Steven Wolf for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. My California research was supported in part by funding from the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment, the UC Santa Cruz Environmental Studies Department, and the UC Santa Cruz Graduate Division. My Wisconsin research has thus far been supported in large part by the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies (PATS) at UW-Madison.

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Harrison, J. Lessons learned from pesticide drift: a call to bring production agriculture, farm labor, and social justice back into agrifood research and activism. Agric Hum Values 25, 163–167 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9121-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9121-5

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