Pesticides, People and Power in Ecuador's Banana Industry: Participatory Epidemiology and Political Ecology Approaches to Occupational Health and Safety

Occupational and environmental health risks in Ecuador’s export-based banana industry – the world’s largest – demonstrate many of the contradictions inherent in the global food system, and the model of development within which it fits. Banana workers in Ecuador tend to be young, proletarianized, and vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy elites; farm-owning elites are in turn contractually engaged by multinational banana exporters to sell bananas, with financial risk being shifted downward by all parties in the supply chain (Striffler, 2002). The extremely precarious nature of banana industry employment is reinforced by disregard for Ecuador’s labour laws, meaning that workers who attempt to join unions or ask for better pay or working conditions are often summarily dismissed (Pier, 2002). Bananas are a pesticide-intensive monoculture due to their low genetic diversity and vulnerability to fungal diseases (Henriques et al., 1997); among other occupational hazards, this combination of ecological and social risk leads to exposure to several classes of hazardous pesticides, with neurotoxic, carcinogenic, reproductive and dermatological effects. Agro-industrial exports such as bananas, produced using “Green Revolution” technologies, have been key components of compulsory economic restructuring plans imposed on countries such as Ecuador by international financial institutions and development agencies. Overall,