According to Pellow’s study, wide-spread pesticide use has been motivated by the fundamental desire to produce more food for human consumption. Theoretically, pesticide use ought to benefit the global South as a means of feeding otherwise overpopulated and impoverished communities. However, the global South has been largely overburdened by pesticide production in the global North, where pesticides that are banned and highly regulated are simply shipped abroad for profit. According to Pellow, about 30% of the pesticides sold to the global South fail international standards for public health and environmental safety. This ties back into Mills’ study about societal concepts of people of color as indicative of waste.
The author faults economic globalization for this trend, and I agree completely. Transnational free markets are designed to “erase trade barriers” across national borders such that any product—no matter how toxic—can be easily exported from producing nations whose standards forbid its use. This political economy is a profoundly hypocritical and unethical. In principle, public health and environmental safety standards ought to be universal—if a pesticide causes cancer in one country, it’s like to cause cancer in another, and regulations ought to reflect this. Clearly, the Basel Ban has been inadequate at preventing the global North from exporting hazardous materials to the global South if the former can continue to do so illegally. More stringent regulation and oversight is in order.
For all its faults as an organization, I really admire Greenpeace’s “return to sender” approach to the environmental injustices committed against Haiti and Abaco. This is probably one of the more productive things that activists can do to challenge the overwhelming “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that consumers and producers share with regard to hazardous waste. However, it is insufficient as a remedy to the deep-seated racism, classism and nationalism that ultimately drives environmental inequality in the global South.
