Political Ecology And The Pesticide Paradox

This timely Handbook synthesizes and analyzes key issues and concerns relating to the impact of agriculture on both farmers and non-farmers. With a unique focus on humans rather than animals or the environment, the book is interdisciplinary and international in scope, with contributions from sociologists, economists, anthropologists and geographers providing case studies and examples from all six populated continents.

Connecting the massive landscapes of North and South America is Mexico and Central America. An area of fascination and study for geographers and other scholars from around the world, these lands and peoples have played important roles in the discoveries and distributions of civilizations, resources, and nations for millennia. These regions have stimulated a large mass of research and publications across the many sub-disciplines of geography. The Geography of Central America and Mexico: A Scholarly Guide and Bibliography by Thomas A. Rumneycollects, organizes, and presents as many of these scholarly publications as possible to help and encourage efforts in the teaching, study, and continuing scholarship of the geography of this area, which covers Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, as well as the region as a whole. Beginning with the region as a whole, each chapter that follows, one per nation, is divided by specific sub-disciplines of geography: cultural geography, social geography, economic geography, historical geography, physical and environmental geography, political geography, and urban geography. Each section is then further divided into by document type: atlases, books, book chapters, articles from scholarly journals, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations. Although the majority of entries recorded focus on English-language works, selected entries written in Spanish, as well as French, German, and other languages are also included (with these entries’ titles then translated into English and noted accordingly).

The Global Politics of Pesticides explores the varied, and often conflicting, interests involved in the formulation of international policies on chemical pesticide manufacture and use in each of the main areas of environmental pollution, trade, development, public health, food security, biotechnology and industrial safety and explains why some aspects of pesticide use are subject to strict international guidelines whilst others are not. The book breaks new ground in objectively examining the competing viewpoints of food producers and other pesticide users, the chemical industry, health officials, traders, environmental/consumer pressure groups and the public. It also considers how international regulation can occur in spite of the fundamental differences of opinion and seemingly opposing interests held by the key actors.

This study of banana contract farming in the Eastern Caribbean explores the forces that shape contract-farming enterprises everywhere--capital, the state, and the environment. Employing the increasingly popular framework of political ecology, which highlights the dynamic linkages between political-economic forces and human-environment relationships, Lawrence Grossman provides a new perspective on the history and contemporary trajectory of the Windward Islands banana industry. He reveals in rich detail the myriad impacts of banana production on the peasant laborers of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Grossman challenges the conventional wisdom on three interrelated issues central to contract farming and political ecology. First, he analyzes the process of deskilling and the associated significance of control by capital and the state over peasant labor. Second, he investigates the impacts of contract farming for export on domestic food production and food import dependency. And third, he examines the often misunderstood problem of pesticide misuse. Grossman's findings lead to a reconsideration of broader debates concerning the relevance of research on industrial restructuring and globalization for the analysis of agrarian change. Most important, his work emphasizes that we must pay greater attention to the fundamental significance of the "environmental rootedness" of agriculture in studies of political ecology and contract farming.

This book deals with past legacies and emerging challenges associated with agriculture production, water and environmental management, and local and national development. It offers a critical interpretation of the tensions associated with the failures of mainstream regulatory regimes and the impacts of global agri-food chains. The various chapters include conceptual and empirical material from research carried out in Brazil, India and Europe. The assessment takes into account the dilemmas faced by farmers, companies, policy-makers and the international community related to growing food demand, water scarcity and environmental degradation. The book also questions most government reactions to those problems that tend to reproduce old, productivist approaches and are normally under the powerful influence of global corporations, mega-supermarkets and investment funds. Its overall message is that the trajectory of agriculture, rural development and environmental management are integral elements of the broader search for justice and novel socio-ecological thinking.