Role of agribusiness in protecting sales of blockbuster pesticides: My experience with Syngenta

Public health research suggests the industrialized U.S. food system is “at odds with the health of children”. Industrialization refers to the fact that it is a food system reliant on chemical and fossil-fuel intensive inputs, including synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. In terms of the latter, public health concerns include contamination of foodstuffs with pesticide residues, direct exposure of farmers and farmworkers to pesticides and the impact of pesticides on biologic organisms in the farm ecosystem that are not direct targets of those pesticides. The speaker is an ecotoxicologist and biologist at UC-Berkeley who specializes in frog development and reproduction. Over the last several years, his research and advocacy has highlighted the role that pesticide companies like Syngenta may play in terms of science and public health policy in protecting sales of their blockbuster products. Syngenta makes atrazine, an endocrine disrupting herbicide that until recent years was the most widely used in the world, as its primary use is on corn and corn is the most widely planted crop in the U.S.