The Death of Ramon Gonzales, by Angus Wright, is a prophetic book that may impact world food policies by the year 2000 the way Rachel Carson's Silent Spring stimulated environmental consciousness 25 years ago. At first glance this appears to be a report on the pesticide poisoning of farm workers, including Ramon Gonzales, in central Mexico. In fact, it is a profound and moving essay on the belief system that allows technology to destroy both human culture and natural environments.
There are good books that critique the Green Revolution and modern agriculture's dependence upon pesticides. What makes this a great book is Wright's regard for the victims: the peasants forced from traditional homelands to labor in the fields of agribusiness, the places and ecosystems where farming is practiced, and the cultures that once flourished on the land.
Professor of environmental studies at California State University, Sacramento, Wright has a doctorate in Latin American history, speaks Spanish fluently, and has spent time with the people about whom he writes, both in the fields of Culiacan in central Mexico where they tend vegetables for the American market, and in their mountain Mixteca homeland south of Mexico City. He indicts a worldwide agricultural system with moral authority derived from the experiences of people in particular places.
Yearly, five billion pounds of agricultural pesticides are used worldwide, roughly one pound for every human being alive on the planet. The United Nations estimates that 20,000 people die annually from accidental pesticide poisoning, most of them farm workers, and one million people each year suffer acute poisoning short of death.
Industry standards suggest that workers exposed to such chemicals should wear rubber clothing and boots as well as a mask or respirator, but Wright reports that in two seasons of careful inspection in Mexico "I never observed workers using any of this protective gear." A migrant farm worker, speaking from his Mixteca home, explained:
You have to understand what it is like in Culiacan. We don't get sick while here in San Jeronimo, not often. And we usually don't get sick in California. There's usually good food, good water, a clean place to sleep. But in Culiacan we only drink from the irrigation ditches. The water is all foul. One person washes in the ditch and a meter away someone draws a bucket of water for the family. And yes, the chemicals, the liquids they use in the fields, they drain into the water and we drink them. We work with these liquids in the field. So, we get sick.
A public health doctor adds, "They have so little to eat that they often go to the vegetable fields to have something to put in their stomachs. Often the vegetables are heavily contaminated, and they die from eating them. They are not paid enough to eat regularly, you see."
Silent Spring inspired policies to curb the use of DDT and other persistent pesticides that accumulate in the food chain and threaten predatory species as well as human health. Responding to regulations, agribusiness did not decrease use of pesticides but switched to chemicals that break down into harmless compounds more quickly.
Ironically, these chemicals are far more toxic at the time of application and so threaten those who work the fields or live nearby. Organophosphate insecticides were developed originally as nerve gas for warfare, while the weed-killer Paraquat, "in the quantities to which farm workers may easily be exposed is capable of killing people in a matter of hours or days after contact."
BEGINNING IN 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a sustained research project in Mexico intended to develop seeds that might produce more abundant crops for agriculture in "underdeveloped" countries. By the 1960s seeds had been perfected that achieved dramatically higher grain yields, and they were vigorously promoted by U.S. aid agencies and by Third World governments, leading to the Green Revolution of increased grain production in the 1970s. The problem is that these seeds need artificial fertilizers and more water to produce the yields of which they are capable, and, being fragile and more vulnerable to disease than traditional seeds, they need intense cultivation and increased pesticide protection.
In Mexico and throughout the Third World, peasant farms were consolidated, often by force, into larger, more "efficient" units, while government subsidies were withdrawn from traditional agriculture and invested in irrigation and equipment for the consolidated farms that would utilize the new seeds.
Yields soared, but costs were high. Farm managers discovered that this new infrastructure could be employed more profitably to grow vegetables for export to the United States than corn for workers' tortillas. Food production for domestic consumption declined. Hunger and dislocation grew. This Mexican pattern was repeated in dozens of "developing" countries where agricultural revolutions were stimulated by American aid and research.
Without romanticizing peasant culture, Wright explores developmental alternatives. In Mixteca the traditional lama y bordo (terrace) agriculture was perfected a thousand years ago when families of nobility controlled the valleys while peasants labored to cultivate the steep hillsides. The harder the peasants labored, the more soil eroded to the valleys where it was captured behind an elaborate system of silt dams. There the nobility grew lush crops using labor gangs from the hillsides.
This system collapsed following the Spanish conquest when diseases so decimated the population that sufficient labor was not available to maintain the silt dams. Survivors have retained their language and a strong sense of culture.
Mixtecas farmed communally until the mid-19th century, when government reforms aimed at clerical holdings outlawed "corporate" ownership of land. "Most formerly Indian land was purchased by mestizo and white ranchers, commercial farmers, and real estate speculators." As population grew in the 20th century, most youth were forced to migrate.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920 promised land reform to restore the peasant collectives. It was not until the mid-1930s, however, that significant land reform was achieved under President Lazaro Cardenas, who expropriated 49 million acres of land and reconstituted thousands of peasant collectives that eventually included half of the Mexican population. Mexico experienced cultural renaissance during this period.
Cardenas met his match, however, in 1938 when he expropriated foreign oil facilities including the Rockefellers' Standard Oil of New Jersey. American business interests organized such intense pressures upon Mexico that the ruling party chose a conservative candidate for the 1940 elections. Reform was brought to a halt.
Franklin Roosevelt dispatched Henry Wallace, former secretary of agriculture, to be special emissary to the inauguration of Avila Camacho, the new president. This move alarmed American conservatives because Wallace had such a reputation for progressive politics. However, Wallace had helped his father develop Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Co., the leading innovator of commercial corn seeds, and he liked to think of himself as the "father of industrialized agriculture." Ironically, it was Henry Wallace who, upon his return, urged the Rockefeller Foundation to begin a seed-development research program for Mexico.
WRIGHT WISELY avoids conspiracy theories of historical development. He shows that peasant agriculture had developed techniques of companion planting and cultivation that, supported by government research, marketing infrastructure, and social services, might have improved life for rural Mexicans without the vast dislocations required by the Green Revolution.
He argues that alternatives remain to sustain far more people on the land in satisfying cultures that protect the environment and reduce dependency upon fossil fuels and chemical killers. He shows how cultural wisdom and social alternatives were systematically ignored--not by evil individuals pursuing secret plots, but by well-meaning researchers and government officials who consistently chose the undemonstrated promises of new technology over the wisdom of communities with experience and the desires of plain people.
A culture that idolizes human technique and lifts science above moral criticism, that subsidizes the rich and disempowers the poor, that isolates scientists and decision makers from the consequences of their actions is destined to the type of folly perpetrated by modern agriculture. In Mexico and throughout the world, land and people suffer its consequences together.
Richard Cartwright Austin was an environmental theologian with the Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center (AMERC) and farmed organically with workhorses in the mountains of southwest Virginia when this review appeared.
The Death of Ramon Gonzales: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma. By Angus Wright. University of Texas Press, 1990. $29.95 (cloth); 1992, $11 (paper).
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