Background and Overview
While the EU has made major strides towards banning the use of hazardous chemicals, the global south seems to have inherited the toxic burden of substances deemed too harmful for European countries. South Africa, one of the largest importers of pesticides globally, still has more than 60 pesticides registered for use that are banned in the EU. Many of these pesticides, which fall under the World Health Organisation’s Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) list are also imported from EU member countries.
The Western Cape region, in particularly, faces a unique combination of occupational, historical, structural health hazards. In addition to the disproportionate hazardous chemical exposure due to discrepancies in global pesticide regulations, the Western Cape has the highest levels of foetal alcohol syndrome in the world, there is a history of racist and abusive labour practices, alarmingly high levels of gender-based violence, insecure housing tenure and inadequate access to healthcare.
Objectives
The primary inquiry of this project is how health risks of pesticide exposure intersect with and are potentially exacerbated by a unique set of structural issues facing farmworkers in the Western Cape. This includes subsets of questions and approaches for the various lines of inquiry.
One of the main objectives this study is provide well-researched and strong bases for interventions to improve working conditions and/or resist institutionally abusive practices. By highlighting the intersection of multiple forms of vulnerability, I hope to demonstrate the burden of unequal pesticides regulations on real people that grow our food, rather than abstracted and pitied populations of the global south. By forming relationships with and interviewing policy-makers and farm owners, I hope to form more holist understandings of how effective interventions may work.
Theoretical and Methodological approach
This project will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the interrelated health implications of pesticide exposure to farmworkers in the Western Cape, grounded in a new materialist idea of relations set within a political ecological concept of infrastructure (Murphy, 2015; 2017). I aim to use pesticide exposure as points of entry as a basis for research into the intersection of other structural issues that affect health. While environmental toxicology, epidemiology, and political economy are often studied within separate domains, I aim to bring these together to demonstrate the confluence of issues surrounding pesticide exposure and the value of interdisciplinary research. Bringing other disciplinary approaches into conversation with ethnography facilitates a well-rounded, yet open-ended methodology to understand the intersection of these complex issues.
Project period
The project will run for 4 years and conclude in 2028.
Financing
The project is funded by the University of Oslo.
