[Agrotoxins: new and old challenges for collective health].

The mechanisms for exploiting nature and human beings and the consequences they bring to health and the environment are recurrent issues of perpetual importance. Nonetheless, despite all the evidence of their detrimental effects, the public health problems derived from the use of agrotoxins increase at an unsustainable rate, especially in Latin America. The monopolistic and export-oriented production of agricultural commodities, based in a model dependent on chemicals and biotechnology, has heightened this noxious policy to intolerable levels. Agribusiness has installed itself in our countries, corrupting our political, economic, and social structures. Brazil, for example, has been the largest consumer of agrotoxins worldwide since 2009: the country purchases 84% of all agrotoxins sold to Latin America (1). The major companies manufacturing these poisons, such as BASF, Bayer, Syngenta/AstraZeneca/Novartis, DuPont, Monsanto and Dow, established themselves in the country thanks to a policy aimed at protecting the interests of agribusiness and the ruralist seats in the Brazilian Parliament. Those occupying these seats paradoxically support a government that had proposed structural changes such as agrarian reform, changes which have thus far never been implemented. By way of their companies, the US, Switzerland and Germany jointly control 70% of agrotoxin sales to Brazil (1). Worldwide sales of agrotoxins (in dollars) increased by 53.8% between 1990 and 2008 (1). In 1976, during the military dictatorship, the National Policy of Agricultural Protection was launched in Brazil. This policy forced farmers to use part of their rural credit for the compulsive purchasing of poisons. Rapidly, in less than 40 years, the hegemony of an agrotoxin-dependent production was established. In the present, only the movements that support agroecology and organic agriculture fight to keep alive the ancient knowledge of agricultural production, seeking to protect the soil, the water, the biodiversity and the culture of rural communities in relation to the climate and the improvement of seeds. There exists a true state of exception involving the legal-institutional framework that sustains the abusive practices of agribusiness. Although some specific rights and laws regulating the production and consumption of agrotoxins have been gained, the wide variety of amendments made to the legislation render them ineffective, undermining the legal institutions and making the practical application of the laws more flexible (2). The enormous scale of present-day monopolistic agricultural production also comes at the cost of intensive hydroenergetic inputs, expansion over protected natural areas, the destruction of family farming and the expulsion of rural populations. This context has brought about a situation never before experienced. Augusto, Lia Giraldo da Silva1