Book Reviews

Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MITPress. 296 pp. ISBN: 9780262516280, $23 paperback. Jill Lindsey Harrison.2011.

Conventional wisdom holds that pesticides in the United States are no longer theenvironmental problem they once were. The trend for average application ratesacross the country is down. Today’s pesticides are less toxic and decompose quickly.When applied properly, the thinking continues, they pose little danger. Someobservers have maintained that pesticide-induced farmworker ills occur at anacceptably low rate of a handful per thousand; other analysts even advise we turnour attention to the fact that more fatalities occur from farm accidents than frompesticide exposure.

This narrative of progress, repeated often, shapes perceptions of domestic pes-ticide regulation as a case of environmental policy success. We should not be soeasily misled. Jill Harrison’s timely and important study serves as a scholarly yetstinging rebuke to the conventional wisdom. Bluntly put, some areas of the countryare sacrifice zones where pesticide use has not decreased; where the most toxicchemicals remain in use; where ill-health among farmworkers is common; and,finally, where powerful structural and ideological barriers prevent activist effective-ness and regulatory progress. Pesticide drift, in other words, is a classic case ofenvironmental injustice. Despite the veneer of regulatory and social progress,environmental risk was never reduced for everyone; it was simply reallocated to themost vulnerable.

One might expect Harrison’s general approach to questions of environmentaljustice to mirror much of the existing scholarship. There is a fairly common patternto much of this work: an author identifies an environmental problem, substantiatesthe disproportionate hazard borne by a particular population, and follows thatcommunity’s efforts to inject considerations of racial and social justice into main-stream environmental politics. Harrison’s story not only hews somewhat to thisstandard script but also departs from it in bold and fruitful ways. Taking thesouthern part of California’s Central Valley as her case study, she asks why pesticidedrift remains such a problem in a state with the most developed regulatory struc-ture and containing the country’s most influential alternative agrifood movement.

Harrison argues that an answer to this question requires more than an exami-nation of the economic interests that maintain the pesticide paradigm. It alsorequires that we understand how all the actors in this story—not just the antidriftactivists—appeal to particular notions of political justice. Pesticides remain apublic-health menace because there are competing notions of justice, not becausethe mainstream is devoid of it. To be clear, Harrison does not argue that compet-ing conceptions of justice can alone explain the existence of oppressive socialand environmental relations, only that the ascendance of libertarianism andcommunitarianism in particular have helped deepen environmental inequalities

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Review of Policy Research, Volume 30, Number 3 (2013) 10.1111/ropr.12021© 2013 by The Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.

while at the same time laying claim to ameliorating them. Her source base consistsof a wide range of published works and over a hundred interviews with scientists,regulators, community residents, and drift activists.

First, Harrison assesses the scope and severity of pesticide drift. This task is madedifficult by the paucity of comprehensive data, but by using existing illness, moni-toring, and epidemiological data, Harrison presents a convincing case that drift is apervasive threat to farmworkers and their communities. The southern Central Valleyis ground zero for the application of toxic and drift-prone chemicals, namely soilfumigants and organophosphates, both of which pose serious acute and chronichealth risks. Here, Harrison introduces a fundamental debate over health bench-marks. The scientific and regulatory procedures used to set guidelines for acceptablelevels of exposure—toxicological research and risk assessment—are characterized byimmense methodological and scientific shortcomings. These flawed procedurescannot account for the long-term effects of prolonged and cumulative exposures, orof contact with an ill-timed low dose. This is the scientific case that undergirds driftactivists’ claims to enter the regulatory debate and to counter accusations that theyare simply hysterical or irrational. This critique of risk assessment is also thefoundation for a precautionary policy with regard to chemical registration. Driftactivists’ calls for precautionary policies, and for the redistributive notion of justicethat precaution would embody, are recurrent themes in the book as a whole.

Next, the author turns our attention to the “crop protection industry.” Here shedetails how pesticide manufacturers participate in voluntary sustainability effortswhile vigorously developing new markets and products. Protecting their invest-ments also requires that the chemical companies lobby strenuously against health-protective measures. In California, there is also the pest control advisor (PCA), orthe chemical distributor’s salesperson. Only PCAs can make specific pesticide rec-ommendations, and almost all of them earn commissions on pesticides sold. Moreecological approaches to pest management would require replacing chemical inputswith more labor, so neither PCAs nor the growers whose demands they meet haveany incentive to shift tactics. Harrison finds libertarian notions of justice interwovenwith these actors’ explanations of their positions: drift incidents are the result ofindividual applicator failure; little government regulation is required; private andvoluntary initiatives work best.

The following chapter inspects the history of pesticide regulation at the nationallevel and describes its current structure in California. Harrison explains why somany toxic and drift-prone chemicals remain in use, and why federal and stateregulatory structures systematically privilege the status quo. Actors in the regula-tory state articulate a mixture of utilitarian, libertarian, and communitarian expla-nations for their positions: risk assessment (and cost–benefit analysis) balances theinterest of growers and the public; market opportunities are bringing greenerproducts to the shelves; and local people are best able to negotiate agreements withone another. Harrison devotes the next-to-last chapter to a critique of the commu-nitarian vision of the alternative agrifood movement, which has declined to pursuenew pesticide regulations or farm labor standards. Instead, the food reformersemphasize the development of new markets and the fostering of interactions amongresponsible farmers and eaters. The final chapter puts forward a precautionarymodel of chemical justice.

342 Book Reviews

Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice is impressively researched andpersuasively argued. It deserved to be read by anyone interested in questions ofenvironmental politics, social justice, and public health. While some readers mightnot care for the extended discussion of political philosophy in the book’s firstchapter, they should press on. Harrison has done a careful job taking seriously theclaims of all stakeholders and presenting a clear and comprehensive story.

Sarah T. PhillipsBoston University

Food. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 200 pp. ISBN 9780745649368, $19.95paperback. Jennifer Clapp. 2011.

Jennifer Clapp’s book, aptly and simply titled Food, is the new must-read primer forthose trying to make sense of the suddenly turbulent world of drought and foodshortages, price spikes and financial crises, biofuels and commodity index funds,food riots, and social unrest. Food is part of Polity Press’ interesting “Resources”series with additional one-word titles on, for example, water, oil, fish, timber, land,and coltan. The series sets out to explore the “geopolitics of key natural resources”in a concise and accessible way. With Food, they have achieved that lofty goal.

Clapp gives us a concise analysis of what has changed with globalization, identi-fying four “key forces”: state-led expansion of industrial agriculture and global foodtrade, trade liberalization to open markets, the rise of transnational firms, and thegrowing “financialization” of food with the growing dominance of financial capital.These have brought with them the commodification of food, reducing the staff oflife to one more tradable commodity. Even though the vast majority of food in theworld is not traded internationally, international commodity markets set globalprices that affect even those distant from those markets. These changes have alsoproduced unequal and volatile markets, with the poorest countries increasinglydependent on imports from rich country exporters. Finally, it has deepened the“ecological fragility” of global agriculture, a problem only exacerbated now with theincreasing effects of climate change.

Clapp’s thesis, which is provocative, is that where farmers and consumers used tohave much more say over local, regional, and even global food economies, now vast“middle spaces” have been opened between them. These are being occupied bypowerful economic and political actors, from transnational firms to financial inves-tors. Her book examines, in a remarkably accessible way, how “the evolution of theglobal food system in this direction raises important concerns of a social, economic,and ecological nature” (p. 23). She puts those concerns in context with well-referenced explanatory chapters on each of the four forces she identifies.

The focus on the financialization of the global food economy and transnationalfirms are particularly welcome, as they are formidable actors in the “middle spaces.”The concentrated power of a small number of transnational firms in key agricul-tural markets is an acknowledged fact, but a trend barely addressed in global

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