Introduction
In the modern age, farmers turn to chemical solutions due to their availability, efficacy, and cost. While these advancements have provided stable and prosperous agriculture, there is a litany of hidden costs. These costs range from environmental damage to large-scale corporate evasiveness. An approach to these problems begins with the government. This article highlights the various systems within government that allow the permeation of these aforementioned chemicals into municipal water supplies. The information within this article has been sourced from news media, accredited scientific journals, and governmental organizations such as the NIH (National Institute of Health). Beginning with the influence of partisanship on voting trends and perceptions of climate change, this research covers liability evasion through “spinoff” companies and the greenwashing efforts of major agricultural chemical manufacturers. It also provides an international analysis comparing the American governmental attitude towards chemical mitigation policy with its global peers. The paper concludes with the effects that these various factors have on people and the environment.
Political Partisanship
Major chemical manufacturers can exploit pre-existing misapprehensions of climate change to gain political leeway. The polarized nature of American politics lays the foundation for companies to avoid climate accountability. Faction has been considered a source of potential democratic erosion since the era of the founding fathers. Madison’s Federalist 10 provides that “[a]mong the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction (Madison, 1787).” In fact, the unique two-party partisan system characteristic of American democracy deviates further from compromise with the recent influx of polarization. A Pew Research Center analysis finds that, on average, Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years (DeSilver, 2022). The effect of this partisan divide is the inability for voters to seek candidates with nuanced responses to environmental concerns, especially when 58% of Americans feel their federal government is not doing enough to help reduce the effects of global climate change (Tyson et al., 2023). The reason for this disconnect lies in the desire to sensationalize environmental issues. Even referring to “climate change” as an issue has become divisive across party lines. A Yale study (Carman et al., 2021) analyzed the comparison of the usage of the terms “extreme weather” and “climate change” and found noticeable differences in responses between conservative and liberal constituents. Political engagement was found to be dramatically increased when the term climate change was used with liberal constituents and reduced when presented to conservative constituents. In a society already polarized on numerous issues, the distinct lack of third-party representations forces voters to prioritize issues they deem to be of greater import. If a voter has strong inclination to oppose governmental interference but is also a proponent of environmental reform, current politics might force them to compromise on a national candidate, which is deeply detrimental to the function of democracy.
Corporate Evasion Tactics
In order to comprehensively understand the impact of agricultural chemicals, it is necessary to consider both the actions of governments that regulate them and of the companies that produce them. In doing so, the practice of “spinoff” companies is shown to be a common and highly detrimental aspect of the American legal system that allows large corporations to offset their assets, liabilities, and debt into smaller companies with the intent of bankrupting them. In essence, these “environmental spinoffs” allow corporations to circumvent culpability for major suits and settlements due to their ability to leverage their assets and finances. With profits approaching nearly two billion per annum (Chatsko, 2016) solely off of the weedkiller “Round-Up,” multi-billion dollar settlements are evidently not a sufficient deterrent to promote safety and warning labels. Still, Monsanto has taken extra precautions, including the creation of the “spinoff” company known as Chemours. “In aggregate, Chemours was responsible for two-thirds of DuPont’s environmental liabilities but received only 19 percent of its business lines—this in addition to $4 billion in assigned debt (Baker et al., 2020).” In addition to only receiving 19% of its business lines, Dupont split off all twenty-seven chemical production plants, thus waiving all liabilities related to worker protections and factory contamination. Due to the stark difference in capital between Chemours and its parent company, Dupont, the legal liabilities will inevitably leave Chemours bankrupt in order to waive the remaining restitution expenses. Eventually, Dupont will begin funneling money back into Chemours to revitalize it and protect its assets. Previously, in 2005, Monsanto split-off the company Solutia due to mounting environmental liabilities totaling up to one hundred and fifty million dollars with an additional seventy million in potential closure costs. The graph and its legend below illustrate the methods used by Monsanto to bankrupt and fully refinance their subsidiary. “Over the following two-year period, Monsanto accrued $600 million for Solutia-related matters. When Solutia finally emerged from bankruptcy in 2005, Monsanto contributed an additional $250 million in investments in the firm, and was given a 30 percent equity stake in the newly capitalized company (Baker et al., 2020).”
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Solutia spun off from Monsanto
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Monsanto merges with Pharmacia and spun off as new Monsanto
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Washington Post publishes article about Monsanto’s environmental practices in Alabama
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Jury rules against Monsanto and Solutia in Alabama environmental case
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Solutia declares bankruptcy
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Solutia emerges from bankruptcy
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Eastman Chemical agrees to purchase Solutia
Still, these companies meet opposition from the states they pollute. In North Carolina, The State argued that “DuPont knew that Chemours was undercapitalized and could not satisfy the massive liabilities that it caused Chemours to assume (State ex rel. Stein v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 2022).” Unfortunately, the availability of loopholes and legal delays within the U.S Government can heavily disadvantage any opposing bodies and prevents equitable resolution.
Greenwashing
In addition to numerous lobbying resources and billions in revenue, many of the referenced companies, including Syngenta, DuPont, and Monsanto (now Bayer), leverage their capital into greenwashing efforts to evade public disapproval. Greenwashing is a practice of large corporations to portray themselves as eco-friendly and to advertise that they contribute to the welfare of the environment. The environmental green-washing initiatives pushed by these chemical companies often serve to tangentially remediate the ecological damage they initially caused. An example of said efforts was the Bayer sponsored Pollinator Week event under their “Feed a Bee Program,” in which Bayer supported a U.S Senate sponsored bee preservation initiative. In reality, Bayer is the largest producer of neonicotinoid pesticides that are the most prominent threat to butterflies and bees (Craddock et al., 2019). Still, the danger of greenwashing extends beyond contradictory conservation efforts. Even the methods of advertising utilized by pesticide companies seeks to downplay the danger of herbicides for residential use. Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer serves as a fitting example. A St. Lawrence University analysis (Severiss, 2014) found that ads for the popular herbicide targeted suburban homeowners and marketed their product as safe to walk and play on after application. In reality, numerous studies (Akerman & Blankinship, 2015) at that point had already proven strong links between Roundup use and several endocrine related cancers. Vakita reports that in 2021, a manufacturer of pesticides paid an Instagrammer with 700,000 followers to defend an herbicide, which the EU was threatening to ban due to its risk to wildlife and the environment. The numerous instances of evading culpability through marketing and media are uniquely damaging in America, and often the partisan divide allows for real ecological damage to pass under the radar due to exaggeration and ideological influence.
International Comparison
In order to comprehensively assess the system of government within the United States and its response to agricultural pollutants, comparison to the rest of the world is essential to convey how America’s situation is markedly worse. An NIH study examining the responses of the U.S and E.U on the contamination of water resources with Atrazine, the second-most used herbicide in the U.S, found:
Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved its continued use in October 2003, that same month the European Union (EU) announced a ban of atrazine because of ubiquitous and unpreventable water contamination. The authors reviewed regulatory procedures and government documents, and report efforts by the manufacturer of atrazine, Syngenta, to influence the U.S. atrazine assessment, by submitting flawed scientific data as evidence of no harm, and by meeting repeatedly and privately with EPA to negotiate the government’s regulatory approach. Many of the details of these negotiations continue to be withheld from the public, despite EPA regulations and federal open-government laws that require such decisions to be made in the open (Sass & Colangelo, 2006).
The appearance of relaxed regulation and the influence of lobbying have resulted in a delayed and biased response to carcinogenic chemicals now banned or being phased out in 44 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America (Donley, 2002). Still, many countries experience similar gridlock on these herbicide curtailment issues. A key example with many identifiable similarities congruous with the U.S is Australia. Like the U.S, Atrazine is a heavily used in Australia. In addition, the boards that manage the regulation of herbicides stand to benefit from their use. The APVMA is paid a levy on all sales of Atrazine, so it is in the regulators interest, to keep sales of this toxic endocrine disruptor persistent (Pask & Cook, 2020). As a result, allowable levels of Atrazine in drinking water in Australia are 200 times higher than those of similar drinking water regulations in Europe (Pask & Cook, 2020). After the devastating effects of recent wildfires in Australia, Atrazine was used to help promote the growth of new shrubbery. When asked about the effects of Atrazine on the local wallabies, wombats, and kangaroos, Andrew Pask, a geneticist, at the University of Melbourne stated “[e]xposure to atrazine is causing major abnormalities in the male reproductive system in many animals, triggering male sterility or even male-to-female sex reversal in frogs (Cook et al., 2020).” Severe consequences such as these underscore the importance of analyzing the impacts of herbicides to preserve endangered ecosystems.
Impact of Chemical Pollution
The combination of partisan delay and lobbying as substantiated by this paper have tangible and far-reaching consequences not only for the agricultural workers of America, but for all people who use municipal water systems. However, the first line of chemical exposure is a demographic that has very limited if any voice in our system of government, those being undocumented migrant workers. The past decades have seen massive decreases in union membership since the time of Cesar Chavez, which has resulted in a collapse of migrant worker protections. Thus, “[t]here are an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 cases of physician-diagnosed pesticide poisoning among U.S. farmworkers (NIOSH, 2012)”. But to truly emphasize the level of exposure that field workers are subjected to, Dr. Tyrone Hayes, Professor of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley references a field worker; “One of these guys could pee in a bucket, and I could dilute the atrazine in their urine 24,000 times, and I could use the atrazine in their urine to chemically castrate and feminize 24,000 buckets of 30 tadpoles each (Flynt, 2018)”. Even diluted several thousand times, agricultural pollutants are incredibly potent in their effects. When fields are irrigated it is these very chemicals that contaminate the water supply. Due to its chemical structure, atrazine increases the presence of aromatase within people and animals that heavily destabilizes the endocrine system. The Breast Cancer Prevention Partners organization finds that, “Atrazine is an endocrine disruptor, and exposure to atrazine has been associated with an increased risk of developing breast cancer (BCPP, 2019)”. The extent of American water insecurity is not limited to agricultural communities nor water-based ecosystems and requires unilateral attention and bi-partisan solutions. As natural disasters become increasingly frequent, preservation of finite water resources is essential to upholding standards of health and safety to sustain future generations.
Conclusion & Discussion
Upon final review and full examination of the evidence analyzed and assembled within this paper, the following conclusions arise: First is that political partisanship has numerous effects on the functioning of healthy democracy. The politicization of issues such as climate change have had severely detrimental effects to agriculture policy, insofar as they create leeway for chemical companies to continue manufacturing harmful herbicides and pesticides. Moreover, said politicization often abandons moderation due to the American bi-partisan system. Second, corporate exploitation of Section 355 of the Internal Revenue Code – which sanctions the formation of shared-liability subsidiary companies – provides chemical manufacturers a heavy advantage within the United States to evade liabilities and lawsuits amounting billions of dollars in environmental debt to spinoff companies. Indeed, the extensive capital at their leverage facilitates the creation of misleading ad campaigns to overstate the safety of their products. This contextualizes the real and present danger of greenwashing, that enables corporations to utilize their funds generated from selling chemicals and pesticides to remediate the very environmental damage they are responsible for. Further, through the analysis of global pesticide regulation efforts, this article demonstrates the unique influences that aid the proliferation of chemicals permeating our drinking water. Within the EU, it can be concluded that divorcing governmental regulation from profits is paramount to maintaining objective and science-based containment measures as evidenced by the EU’s ban of Atrazine nearly 20 years ago. Conversely, the United States system parallels the Australian system wherein APVMA of Australia directly benefits monetarily from the proliferation of herbicides, leading to elevated levels of Atrazine contamination. Finally, the impact of all these gaps in the United States governmental system manifests most severely for people who lack voices in government. For example, migrant workers, often exposed to herbicides in levels dozens of times over the limits sanctioned by the EPA are subject to numerous cancers, birth defects, and a variety of health ailments. Presently, robust new filtration technologies are being developed to harness bacteria as a means to metabolize nitrogen compounds within herbicides and pesticides to reduce them to their natural elements, making them safe for ecosystems and reservoirs alike. The most radical solutions, however, demand decisive governmental action by banning harmful pesticides and herbicides based on scientific recommendation. In fact, an NIH analysis found that, “withdrawal of atrazine would boost farm revenues, while only changing consumer prices by pennies”. Ultimately the impetus needed for progress is a public change in perspective to guide policy towards practical and ecologically conscious solutions (Ackerman et al., 2014)".