Technological change and the regulation of pollution from agricultural pesticides

Geofomm, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 19-33, 1995 Copyright @ 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd

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Technological Change and the Regulation of Pollution from Agricultural -

Pesticides -

NEIL WARD,* Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.

Abstract: The paper examines the recent emergence of a water pollution ‘problem’ in Britain associated with agricultural pesticides, and addresses the following ques- tions: (i) how have pesticides become such an important part of arable farming practice in Britain; and (ii) how has the ‘problem’ of pesticide pollution been defined and contested by different groups. Farm survey evidence from the River Ouse catchment will be used to show how farmers decide to use pesticides, how they legitimise and represent their practices; and how they understand the associated environmental risks. The paper concludes that the role of pesticide advisors and the perception of weeds in farming culture remain important barriers to the reduction of pesticide use.

Introduction

Social scientists have long been interested in the

relationships between the economic processes surrounding the production of food and changes in the rural environment. However, in much of the litera-

ture the use of new agricultural technologies has not been problematised, and implicit assumptions about

the inevitability of technological ‘progress’ can often be identified. Technological determinism, or the notion that technological development is autonomous from society, has been cited as “the single most influential theory of the relationship between technology and society” (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985, p.4). It assumes that while technologies shape society, they are not reciprocally influenced. Because social analysis has often concentrated on the impacts of technological change, there has been a tendency to take technological change itself as a given, indepen-

*Department of Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K.

dent factor. Much of the work of social scientists, including rural sociologists and human geographers, in this field in the 1950s and 1960 acquiesced in the prevailing view that new agricultural technologies were to be encouraged. Not only were they represen- tative of technological ‘progress’ and agricultural ‘modernisation’, but they also had profound and positive consequences for agricultural productivity and national self-sufficiency in food production. The rural ‘problem’ was often seen simply in terms of the uneven adoption of technological innovations among farmers and the role of the social scientist became to identify the barriers to adoption, help foster technological change and bring an end to rural ‘backward- ness’; hence the profusion of diffusion-adoption studies within rural sociology and agricultural geog-

raphy.

This perspective was followed in the 1970s and 1980s by interpretations of technological change informed by Marxist thinking which saw the development of new technologies as critically determined by the

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‘logic’ of capital accumulation. In this sense, technological change was wholly determined by society, or at least by powerful elements within society.

An attempt is made in this paper to chart a midway course between these two positions by establishing the reciprocity between the technical and the social. The diffusion of pesticide technologies in British agriculture will be examined in the light of the pesticides in water problem of the 1980s. The focus here is the effects of socio-political factors on technological change and, while not denying that technologies have social impacts, the social shaping of technology itself is central to the analysis.

The Nature and Extent of Pesticide Pollution in

Britain

It is only since the mid-1980s that the pollution of watercourses with pesticides emerged as an issue of public and political concern in Britain. Previously, little evidence of such a problem existed. The EC’s Drinking Water Directive (80/778/EEC), which became law in July 1985, required that water suppliers systematically monitor drinking water supplied to customers for a range of pollutants. This enabled Friends of the Earth (FOE) to analyze monitoring results and provide the first comprehensive account of the spread and levels of pesticide contamination. The Drinking Water Directive set a Maximum Ad- missible Concentration (MAC)-a legal standard- of 0.1 ,&l for any individual pesticide and 0.5 &l for total pesticides in any sample of drinking water. FOE found that between 1985 and 1987 the MAC for single pesticides was exceeded in 298 water supplies and that for total pesticides in 70 supplies (Friends of the Earth, 1988). The study also highlighted the geo- graphical distribution of contamination (Figure 1). The worst affected areas were the East Anglia and Thames regions-the regions most dominated by arable farming, and particularly by cereal production. Using the data that water companies are now obliged to supply to the Government’s Drinking Water Inspectorate, FOE have calculated that during 1992 approximately 14.5 million people were supplied with drinking water in which pesticide levels breached the MAC (Friends of the Earth, 1993). The most commonly detected contaminants are herbicides, particularly pre-emergent cereal herbicides

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Figure 1. The areas of Britain in which pesticides were detected in drinking water above the EC’s standard in 1988. Source: Friends of the Earth (using data provided to the

then regional water authorities).

which are sprayed directly onto, and linger in, the soil killing weeds as they emerge.

Since the mid-1980s it has become increasingly recognised that pesticides enter ground and surface waters not only through accidental or deliberate spillages but also as a result of routine and legitimate crop spraying according to the statutory recommendations laid down on product labels. The ‘normal’ use of pesticides can still leave them vulnerable to being leached through the soil or being washed into streams and rivers. Therefore, in exploring the causes of pesticide pollution, the sets of processes that have encouraged the increasing use of pesticides require consideration.

Conceptualising the Causes of Pesticide Pollu-

tion

Pesticide pollution results from actions on farms, but longer-term processes of technological and policy change and mounting public and political concern about environmental protection also have an important influence. Here the phenomenon of pesticide


pollution will be conceptualised as a ‘pollution production process’ (Lowe et al., 1990) with technologi-

cal change, farm management and environmental regulation providing key areas of enquiry. The start- ing point is that pesticides, like all technologies, must not be seen as purely technological (Bijker and Law, 1992). They are socially-shaped, and under different conditions their use might have evolved in different

ways.

The particular social context surrounding technological change affects not only the study of environmental problems but also the construction of solutions to them. Quite different solutions tend to be provided by the two scientific ‘cultures’-the natural and the social sciences. The public perception may be one of natural scientists being best equipped to form auth- oritative judgements, but environmental problems ultimately arise from human intervention in natural systems. The central role of human agency in environmental change means that environmental issues

cannot be reduced solely to scientific or technological

terms. As Newby argues,

advances in the natural sciences will enable us to estab- lish the parameters of environmental change, but they will describe the symptoms and not explain the causes. The causes lie in human societies and their systems of economic development (Newby, 1991, p. 2, original author’s emphasis).

An over-reliance on natural science approaches to environmental issues has tended to foster technological determinism and the adoption of technical fix solutions to environmental problems. Such approaches, however, often reify technology as exogen- ous to social processes.

Pesticides, like all other technologies, are contingent. That is, their development and use is dependent on other sets of influences. They cannot be said to have developed along a ‘natural’ trajectory. Rather, they have been shaped and reshaped over time by the social world, with their protagonists-such as scientists, manufacturers and so on-seeking to maintain sets of technological arrangements and social, economic and organizational relations in keeping with their aims. The adoption and increasing use of pesticides since the 1940s has been affected by the network of social relations in which they are embedded- together with the various strategies that drive and

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give shape to the network. Understanding the forces

that give rise to the use of pesticides is an important

precursor to understanding why pollution takes place. But what form does the network surrounding pesticides take, and how might it best be examined in the British context in order to understand pesticide use and the resultant water pollution?

Although it is farming practices that cause pesticide

pollution, the nature of the problem and the construction of solutions to it result from more than just the farmer’s actions. How then might the process of pesticide pollution be conceptualised? The relations surrounding pesticide use and pollution are shown in Figure 2. While the farmer’s role is central and the farm is a compulsory location in the story of pesticide pollution, the processes that foster pesticide use and lead to pollution involve many other actors. Studies need to be sensitive to the farmer’s position among this assemblage of actors.

Technologies are produced mainly by scientists in the public and private R&D sectors in the agro-food system. New products enter the technology transfer system where they are subject to regulatory control prior to their clearance. Once authorised for the market, they can be used on farms. Adoption of particular pesticides will be influenced by the advice farmers receive and the marketing strategies of input suppliers.

The use of pesticide technologies within farm management strategies causes pollution. Farm strategies are subject to three main sets of external influences- agricultural policies, technology transfer, and the

regulatory system (which sets maximum pesticide dose rates and prosecutes farmers for pollution inci- dents). Pollution regulation is affected’ in turn by environmental policy objectives, such as, for example, the implementation of the polluter pays principle or the meeting of European environmental standards. Another important influence is the information gathered on environmental change, as obser- vations and measurements of pollution in the environment are used to inform regulatory strategy.

Sociological studies of science and technology have stressed the importance of examining the different but interlocking elements of physical artifacts, institutions and their environments. Technical, social,

22 GeoforumNolume 26 Number l/1995

Agricultural Non-agricultural

support policies pollution

I I ,

Research and Technology Fallll Development c Ecosystem

(R & D) in the e Transfer I e Management

Pollution

Agro-food system techniques

Prescriptions and

Environmcntrl policy

Figure 2. The pesticide pollution production process. Source: Developed from Lowe et al., 1990, p. 64.

economic and political aspects are drawn together within a ‘technological system’. Systems are built, maintained and consolidated by protagonists, and Hughes, who has examined the evolution of different national electricity supply industries, identifies ‘momentum’ as a key characteristic such systems can

acquire.

Technological systems, even after prolonged growth and consolidation, do not become autonomous; they acquire momentum. They have a mass of technical and organisa- tional components; they possess direction, or goals; and they display a rate of growth suggesting velocity. A high level of momentum often causes observers to assume that a technological system has become autonomous. Hughes (1987, p. 76).

Thus mature technological systems “have a quality

that is analogous . . . to inertia of motion” (p. 76) and

this arises from the various groups of actors who may have vested interests in the growth and durability of the system, including managers, owners, politicians, manufacturing corporations, research laboratories, sections of scientific and technical societies, edu- cational institutions and regulatory bodies. Also, communities of practitioners can maintain traditions of technological practice.

Momentum also suggests the notion of a trajectory. This has been the concern of neo-Schumpeterian

economists who have examined technological change from an evolutionary perspective (Dosi, 1982; Nelson and Winter, 1982). Rejecting neo-classical ap-

proaches to technological change with their assumptions about ‘rationality’ and ‘profit maximisation’,

evolutionists see firms as loosely structured clusters of routines, with outcomes being determined by competitive markets or, more usually, by the influence of policy or institutional arrangements. Technological development is often patterned in the form of a technological regime (Nelson and Winter, 1982), or paradigm (Dosi, 1982); a cognitive concept relating to “technicians’ beliefs about what is feasible and at least worth attempting” (Nelson and Winter, 1982, p. 258). A paradigm contains a dominant definition of the relevant problem that must be tackled, the tasks to be fulfilled, a pattern of inquiry, the material

technology to be used, and types of basic artifacts to be developed and improved. These help structure or channel innovation and so give rise to technological trajectories, with existing technologies providing an important set of preconditions for innovation.

Technological paradigms are an extension of Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigms (Kuhn, 1970). In one sense, a paradigm is an exemplar, but it also forms an “entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given [scientific] community” (Kuhn, 1970, p. 175). There is a

Geoforum/Volume 26 Number l/l995

danger of seeing technologists taking one technical innovation and simply developing new versions from

it as part of a simple and mechanistic trajectory.

However, rather than simply being a rule to be followed mechanically, paradigms were always argued by Kuhn to be resources to be used and drawn upon (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985, p. 11). Tra- jectories are never ‘natural’ or predetermined, but are subject to social shaping.

The fact that “technology both creates systems which

close off other options and generates novel, unpredic- table and indeed previously unthinkable options”

(Callon, 1991, p. 132) leads us to ask how systems are created and how options are closed off. Given that pollution occurs because of the employment of pesti-

cide technologies in agriculture, can the development and adoption of pesticides be characterised as a technological system within a particular paradigm with a trajectory or even momentum of its own? If so, how does momentum manifest itself within the networks of actors involved? This question will be addressed in the next section in an examination of the evolution of herbicide use in Britain; herbicides being the most common type of pesticide to breach water quality standards in Britain.

The Evolution of Herbicide Use in Britain

Sixty years ago herbicides were hardly used in Bri- tain. The systematic search for pest control chemicals began in earnest in the 193Os, and events during the Second World War provided a major impetus to research with the concern to increase domestic self- sufficiency in food production and to find ways of destroying the enemy’s crops. ICI produced l- naphthyl acetic acid (NAA) and in experiments in 1940 attempted to kill wheat and oats. Findings in- stead lead to an exploration of the weed control properties of NAA. Public and private sector research effort was co-ordinated under tight wartime security with the aim of developing a crop destruction weapon against sugar beet. After field trials in 1944 and 1945, the NAA derivative MCPA was launched in the U.K. as the first ‘scientifically produced’ selec- tive herbicide (Achilladelis et al., 1987).

Significantly, MCPA and another important herbicide, 2, 4-D, first became available in the immediate

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post-war period. Both helped revolutionise weed

control in cereal cropping, in particular. They

allowed farmers to abandon the use of wide rows and horse hoeing, which until then had been the only means of keeping weeds in cereals under control, and led to important improvements in yields. However, for widespread adoption to take place, much more was required than simply the development of new chemicals. Farmers had to be encouraged to adopt new technologies and practices, and to achieve this a new framework for British agricultural policy was required.

This framework took the form of what Goodman and Redclift (1991) have called the ‘technology/policy model’, constructed in Britain during the period 19451951. It sought to improve Britain’s balance of trade relations through increasing self-sufficiency in agricultural commodities, whilst at the same time providing cheap food for the urban working class in order to underpin the mass production-mass consumption relations of industrial Fordism. The corner- stone of the technology/policy model in Britain was the 1947 Agriculture Act which encouraged agricultural expansion through a system of guaranteed prices. In order to limit the costs of such generous agricultural support to the Exchequer, farmers were

encouraged to improve their efficiency through the adoption of new technologies.

New public institutions were put in place to promote the technological revolution, and research and technical education in agriculture were expanded. The Agricultural Research Council (ARC) directed research in the agricultural sciences, and the National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAAS) was estab- lished as a state advisory service to encourage the adoption of new practices. Through these two state structures the innovation of agricultural technology and its extension to farms combined to provide the technical base for the so-called ‘productivist’ policy framework of the next 40 years. There was strong sense of the public sector orchestrating the flow of technologies from public scientific institutes onto the farm, and nowhere was this more so than in the diffusion of weed control technologies.

The 1947 Act contained a section on pest control to encourage (and even enforce) ‘good farming practice’ which meant the elimination of weeds. The ARC set

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up a Unit of Experimental Agronomy at Oxford in 1950 which, in 1960, became the Weed Research Organisation, and the NAAS stationed a senior advisor there permanently to keep abreast of changes and facilitate the flow of new techniques onto farms

(McCann, 1989, p. 55).

New developments in chemical crop protection were quick to be taken up by farmers. No data exists on the area treated or the volume of pesticides applied, but the number of spraying machines in use over this

period grew rapidly. Between 1942 and 1946, the number of ground crop sprayers in use in England and Wales more than doubled from 1600 to 3455 and the immediate aftermath of the 1947 Agriculture Act saw almost a three-fold increase to 9330 sprayers by 1952, with a further five-fold increase to 49,075, by

1959 (Laverton, 1962, p. 38).

The post-war policy framework operated without

major changes until 1951, when the rising costs of support led to a greater emphasis on promoting agricultural efficiency. After 1951, the annual addi- tions to guaranteed prices were typically less than the increase in the costs of production, and were some- times negative (Bowers, 1985), such that the only way farm incomes could be maintained or improved was through increased efficiency. This ‘cost-price squeeze’ intensified the search for improvements in efficiency at the same time as adopting pesticides became increasingly economically attractive to farmers.

Between 1950 and 1959 the promise of agricultural expansion throughout the advanced capitalist world

also put the agrochemical industry on a sound footing and the rate of innovation increased. During the decade, 140 new agrochemical products were introduced. Of these, 85 were insecticides, 35 were herbicides, and 20 were fungicides (Achilladelis et al.,

1987). The variety of compositions of herbicides also increased and by the 1960s herbicides had become the most important of the crop protection chemicals in terms of both the number of innovations and the value of total sales. One hundred and ten new herbicides were introduced between 1960 and 1969 compared with 96 new insecticides and 50 new fungicides. The strength of market demand for herbicides con- tinues through the 1970s when 70 new products were introduced compared to 60 new insecticides and 42

GeoforumNolume 26 Number 111995

new fungicides. Herbicides were also becoming more widely applied. For example, by 1969, 65% of the U.K.‘s cereal acreage was being sprayed with herbicides, and this rose to 94% by 1975 (Grigg, 1989, p. 74). This ‘demand’ did not materialise from thin air, however, and cannot be used on its own to provide an ‘explanation’ of rising pesticide use. Rather, demand

was continually created and stimulated. The cost- price squeeze provided a push factor, but in addition, during the 1960s agrochemical companies targeted ‘lead’ farmers considered to be local opinion-formers and provided them with pesticides at greatly reduced prices, or even free of charge, in order to encourage

the adoption of new chemical products (Tait, 1976). At the same time, a greater understanding of pesticide efficacy, falling unit costs of pesticide production and the developing infrastructure around pesticide usage fostered ‘increasing returns to adoption’, making the new technology increasingly attractive to farmers as active profit seekers (Allanson et al., 1994,

pp. 20-21).

The 30 years from 1950 to 1980 saw a chemical revolution in British agriculture. Practices were

transformed and pesticides in general, and herbicides in particular, became the mainstay of arable crop protection. A technological system came into being with its own paradigm (and trajectory). Dominant within this paradigm was the view that it was through chemical treatment that pest problems in arable farming could best be tackled, and so scientists were most concerned with continually improving the efficacy of pesticide use in this context. A network of actors had a common interest in maintaining the technologicai system closely associated with the productivist model

of agricultural support. The network included the state-which wanted to contain the costs of price support by encouraging improvements in agricultural efficiency; the agricultural scientists of both the public and private sectors-whose role it was to produce the new chemicals and the optimal means of applying them; and agro-industrial capitals- including those farmers prepared to adopt, moder- nise and accumulate, and the manufacturers of agrochemicals and spraying machinery who saw their markets grow.

Under this productivist policy framework total sales of pesticides in the U.K. rose from f70 million to $542 million between 1948 and 1982 (both at 1982 prices),


almost an eight-fold increase in real terms, and the number of different products rose from 216 to 700

over the same period (Department of the Environ-

ment, 1983, p. 3). By 1982 over 31,000 tonnes of pesticide active ingredient were being applied to over 3.8 million hectares. This was also the year that the loading (or dosage) of pesticide reached its peak at an average of 8.25 kg of active ingredient per hectare (Table 1).

Greater use of pesticides contributed to improvements in yields. Between the late 1940s and the mid- 1970s the average yield of winter wheat, for example, rose from just over 2 tonnes/hectare to approximately 4.5 tonnes/hectare representing an annual increase of around 2%. It has been estimated

that approximately half of this increase was due to improvements in the usage of pesticides (Stanley and Hardy, 1984).

Moreover, applications of pesticide, and especially herbicides, became routinized and prophylactic as farmers simplified and standardized crop management strategies. This was aided by the availability since the 1960s of preemergent herbicides which are sprayed onto the soil killing weeds as they emerge. The growing importance of herbicides in crop production signalled an important turning point in farming practice, and provided a significant trigger to further intensification in the arable sector. Before the availability of herbicides, weed populations were kept down by means of crop rotations and culti-

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vations so that no one weed species could benefit

from a consistently favourable environment. By the

late 1940s arable farmers had generally reached a “high level of efficiency in weed control” using rotations (Lockheart et al., 1990, p. 45). Until the 195Os, the emphasis had been on incorporating herbicides into existing husbandry systems that were basi- cally unchanged. Their use merely replaced the hoe, harrow and sickle. However, during the 1960s herbicides began to be used as part of a far more fundamental change in crop husbandry and themselves became “an integral part of the production process” (Robinson, 1980, p. 299).

This change arose from their unique ability to kill off vegetation on a large scale without relying on cultivations, enabling farmers to grow a succession of cereal crops without recourse to the plough. Seed could be drilled directly into the stubble of the pre- vious crop with weed growth having already been killed by spraying. The move from rotations to continuous cereal cropping profoundly altered arable farming. Until the 1950s it “continued to be regarded as bad farming to grow more than two straw crops in succession” (Elliott, 1980, p. 288) because of the increased risk of weed infestation. The use of herbicides, however, transformed cereals from a ‘fouling’ crop to a ‘cleaning’ crop (Robinson, 1980). As a result, by the late 1960s “rotation was considered an

old fashioned word” . . with many believing that

“farmers could have an almost complete freedom of

Table 1. Pesticide usage on arable crops in England and Wales

(Tonnes of active ingredient)

Chemical Group 1974 1977 1982 1988

Insecticides* (286.7) 520.4 591.8 490.3 Molluscicides* 19.3 203.3 164.7 Seed treatments 540.4 524.1 266.9 388.0 Fungicides 1090.6 1402.1 3542.6 5099.9 Herbicides 13683.3 17275.2 24228.5 16294.5 Growth regulators 71.0 238.9 1109.3 1771.1

Total pesticides 15672.1 20025.8 31390.4 27216.6

Area grown 3839.5 3765.8 3800.7 4025.4 (000 ha)

Loading (kg/ha) 4.08 5.31 8.25 6.76

Note *The 1974 figure combines insecticides and molluscicides. Source: Pitman, 1992.

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cropping so far as weed control was concerned” (Elliott, 1980, p. 288).

Herbicides have meant that there has been little need to return to rotational husbandry for weed control, despite the continued presence of grass weeds (Chan- cellor, 1980). Since the late 1960s and 197Os, farmers have switched from spring-sown cereals to more productive winter cereals-a switch made possible by the ability of herbicides to tackle the increased threat from grass weeds. Cereal producers have also been able to sustain programmes of ‘continuous autumn- sown crops (Makepeace, 1980), using minimum til- lage and direct drilling to speed up sowing, although this strategy has also “entailed a greater commitment

to herbicides for weed control” (Lockheart et al.,

1990, p. 46).

As a result of the favourable economics of pesticide use, the chemical option has become standard practice for pest control. In turn, a series of factors have helped to close off non-chemical options such as mechanical weeding and the use of cultivations. First is the increasing reliance among farmers upon the crop protection advice of technical advisors. Second,

the routinization of spraying strategies, and the widely-acknowledged reliability of pre-emergent herbicides in particular, makes for a much less compli- cated pest control strategy with less risk of subsequent problems in the crop. The preventative use of pesticides as an ‘insurance’ against the risk of pest problems arising saves farmers having to modify crop husbandry strategies in a more reactive sense after problems have appeared.

While the availability and competitiveness of pre- emergent cereal herbicides made the switch to winter cereals technically feasible and economically viable, there has, at the same time, been an increase in

pollution risks associated with their use. Research by Evans (1990) demonstrated how the area of land in England and Wales sown to winter cereals increased by a factor of three since 1969, and found that this land is most susceptible to soil erosion caused by run- off. More erosive rain falls in October and November when poorly covered ground is vulnerable to run-off and herbicides have been recently applied. Indeed, recent studies have detected pre-emergent cereal herbicides in run-off water at up to 500 times the EC


limit for drinking water following autumn spraying (Ends, 1992a).

It was not until the 1980s that the contradictions in the productivist model came to the fore. Concerns about the environmental consequences of an increasing dependence on pesticides were first expressed in the 196Os, but it took the budgetary crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s to expose the technology/policy model to a crisis of legitimacy. This economic crisis was com- pounded by the increasingly sophisticated environmental critique of modern agricultural practices and by the diminishing political power of agriculture locally within rural areas in Britain.

Politics and representations of rural Britain shifted during the 1980s with the dominance by production interests being replaced by consumption interests. A growing awareness of ‘green’ issues and the effects of increased affluence on patterns of consumption together have led to pressure for environmental and ‘quality of life’ considerations to be incorporated into public policy. In rural policy, the result has been to emphasise the importance of demands for housing, leisure and amenity at the expense of the more traditional concerns of food production.

The move towards a ‘post-productivist’ rural Britain in which agriculture plays a diminished role is re- flected in the changing nature of the pesticide pollution production process depicted in Figure 2. The role of policy in stimulating technological change on farms is less pronounced and environmental policy has had a progressively greater influence in terms of the detection and regulation of pollution. It has been in this shifting context that the EC’s Drinking Water Directive first highlighted the problem of pesticide pollution of watercourses.

Contested Definitions of Pesticide Pollution

The EC’s Drinking Water Directive was instrumental in bringing to light pesticide water pollution problems. However, scientific knowledge about the move- ment of pesticides in the environment is far from complete, and little is known about the impact of very small but frequent doses on public health. These scientific uncertainties have left the framing of the issue open to contestation between different groups,

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although two broad bodies of opinion can be identified. These will be briefly outlined below (see also Ward et al., 1993).

The first is held by the EC which argues that pesticides have no place in water. It was as a result of this ‘precautionary approach’ to environmental protection that the EC MAC was first devised as a surrogate zero. Friends of the Earth, consumer groups and the governments of Denmark, Netherlands and Ger- many all share this view. They also argue that there is

uncertainty over the precise nature of the health risks involved. I

Moreover, toxicological standards do not exist for many of the active ingredients in use in Britain and the synergistic effects of consuming water containing a mix of several pesticides, even at low levels, have hardly been investigated.

A second view is put forward by the manufacturers of agrochemicals who argue that the MACs are

‘unscientific’ because they do not relate to the toxicologically-derived health risks associated with the ingestion of different pesticides. In Britain, this argument has won the support of the Government who have pressed for a review of the MACs and the operation of the Directive. Pollution is seen as an

inevitable consequence of pesticide use, but the minute quantities detected reflect an unforeseen technical irritant rather than a fundamental problem with the production system.

The water companies estimate that installing equipment at water works to remove pesticides from drinking water will cost &800 million in capita1 equipment and a further f80 million per year in running costs (Ends, 1992b). Given the arrangements under which the water industry was privatised in 1989, water companies are able to pass these costs on to water consumers. Although this turns the polluter pays principle on its head, the prospect of rapidly rising water bills has prompted OFWAT, the water watch- dog, to press the Government to renegotiate EC standards (OFWAT, 1993). This the Government has sought to do and the EC has agreed to a review of all water quality Directives.

These two views reflect wider perspectives on the use of pesticides in agriculture. Those in favour of main-

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taining the MACs argue that pesticide pollution should be prevented irrespective of any health risks,

and the onus of proof should not fall with those seeking to prove that there is a health risk. According to FOE, for example, the mere presence of unwanted pesticides in drinking water ought to prompt greater controls over their use to prevent pollution happen- ing in the first place. On the other hand, those pressing for the MACs to be relaxed see pesticide use as essential to efficient and competitive agriculture. Any controls on their use which do not arise from any

proven public health risks associated with pesticide pollution will only serve to put British farmers at a competitive disadvantage in global markets. The U.K. Government (1991) tends towards this latter view and a deep reluctance to regulate farmers unless political and public pressures become unbearable currently prevails.

It remains politically difficult for the environmental standards to be relaxed at the European level, however. Moreover, relaxing pesticide standards would be problematic in Britain too. The strength of public concern and the extent of scepticism about scientific assessments of health risks have been highlighted by a recent opinion poll. When asked ‘would you accept more pesticides in your drinking water if you were told that the levels were not dangerous and water charges were lower as a result?‘, 77% of respondents said ‘No’ (Clover, 1993). However, the nature of the current debate surrounding the MACs has tended to frame discussions in public health terms. This, combined with a dearth of scientific information about the

movements and impacts of pesticides in water has meant that the implications of pesticide pollution for aquatic environments and ecosystems have hardly been considered.

It seems likely that the MACs will remain for the foreseeable future. This will leave the use of pesticides in European agriculture open to increased regulation. In Britain, the Secretary of State for the Environment has, since 1974, had powers to desig- nate water protection zones in which land use practices can be controlled for the sake of protecting surface and groundwaters, although none have been designated. However, the National Rivers Authority has begun to discuss how the regulation of pesticide use might operate (Ends, 1990) and the current pilot Nitrate Sensitive Areas provide one possible model.

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Catchment-wide controls in the form of water protection zones would add to the plethora of spatially- oriented policies for the environmental regulation of agriculture.

The Ministry of Agriculture has also recently banned the non-agricultural use of two major pesticide pollutants, Atrazine and Simazine, but only in non- agricultural situations. Both were widely used by local authorities and British Rail for weed control. Although the ban has not involved restrictions on farmers, it is viewed as a precedent because it is the first substantial regulatory decision to be influenced directly by the need to comply with the MACs rather than by conventional toxicological considerations

(Ends, 1992~). Moreover, in 1990 MAFF announced that, in line with commitments given in the Environ-

ment White Paper-This Common Inheritance- older pesticide active ingredients would be reviewed by the Advisory Committee on Pesticides (MAFF, 1990). It was in the context of an increasing interest in controlling the use of pesticides to protect the water environment that a farm survey was conducted in 1991.

Farmers and Pesticide Pollution

The survey examined the ways that pesticide pollution concerns manifested themselves on farms and

the way the ‘pollution production process’ was oper- ating. Sixty-three cereal producers were interviewed in the catchment of the Bedford Ouse 70 miles north- west of London, an area pointed to by regulatory officials in the water industry as a possible future target for restrictions on pesticide use.

The survey revealed how farmers are highly dependent upon advice from technical advisors when decid- ing both what types of pesticide to apply and at what dose rates (Ward and Munton, 1992). Moreover, the most common source of advice was the representa- tives of agrochemical merchants, whose role it was to sell pesticides. Commercial interests often provide ‘free’ advice as part of their service, while farmers have to pay for technical advice from independent consultants or the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service (ADAS). While it is difficult to be sure that merchants’ advisors routinely encourage the greater use of pesticides, a majority of farmers inter-


viewed acknowledged the potential for such advice linked to the commercial sales of pesticides to be ‘biased’, either because higher dose rates or more profitable chemicals are recommended by sales staff. Several farmers, however, seemed to suggest that their own advisor was quite exceptional and was even giving them special treatment. The trust displayed by these farmers is a measure of the success of com-

panies’ strategies for developing farmer loyalty. Hawkins’ research (1991) found that much effort was spent by technical advisors trying to convince farmers of the coincidence of interests between farmer and company. For farmers, the spray advisor is someone who is seen to be ‘on their side: in the fight against pests in crops.

Farmers were extremely reluctant to do other than what their advisor told them. When asked what options they might consider in developing a strategy for cutting herbicide use, almost 70% rejected cultural methods of weed control and over 80% would not consider mechanical weeding. The main reasons were economic and organizational. Likewise, organic farming, defined as applying no agrochemicals and seeking a premium on the price of the crop, was rejected by two thirds of the sample. There was also a marked reluctance to contradict the advice of pesticide advisors. Almost 90% of farmers said that they already undercut dose rates recommended on the product labels, but usually did so only on the advice of their advisor. When asked if they ever undercut the dose rates recommended by their advisor, fewer than

40% of farmers said they did so, in spite of the fact that many recognised that commercial advice poten- tially encouraged a greater use of pesticides. They acknowledged that merchants had an interest in sell- ing pesticides, but felt that their own advisor, with whom they had often struck up a close working relationship, was not biased. Farmers justified their reluctance to overrule technical advice by arguing that they did not have the necessary technical ex- pertise themselves to take such risks. If the pesticide failed, the farmers’ negotiating position with the merchant would be undermined and their oppor- tunity to claim compensation for failure would be jeopardised.

The minority of farmers prepared to apply pesticides at dose rates lower than those recommended by their advisors stressed the preconditions for such action. It

GeoforumNolume 26 Number l/l995

was not something that they would do as a matter of

course, but ‘occasionally’, or after ‘some convincing’, or ‘under ideal weather conditions’, they may decide

to take a chance. As one farmer explained:

If you pick and choose the conditions carefully you can cut dose rates. I would only undercut my advisor if weather conditions are ideal. They give their advice to make sure you’re covered, but with practice and experi- ence, you can identify the weather conditions whereby you can go lower than they say.

The survey shows how external advisors are crucial in influencing how much pesticide is used. This provides one mechanism through which the chemical paradigm can be maintained on the farm, and shows how technological ‘momentum’ in the system of using pesticides may be fostered.

A second finding related to the low profile of pesticide pollution issues within the farmers’ understandings of their farming practices and associated environmental risks. Notions of resource management and conservation are not new to farming, and traditional, mixed systems, in particular, have had resource conservation at their heart, particularly with regards to the productive capacity of the soil. A central idea in the ethos of ‘family farming’ has been to make a living out of the family’s asset (the farm) but also to pass it on to the next generation in sound working order, leaving notions of resource conservation (in a utilitarian sense) strongly linked to norms of family continuity and succession within the ethos of family farming.

Farmers express these notions in terms of their soil, or land being ‘in good heart’. In order to explore such sentiments, the 63 sampled farmers were asked about this notion of ‘improving’ their farms. The question was; “farmers often say that they would like to pass on their farm to the next generation in a better condition than when they took it on themselves. What does the phrase ‘in a better condition’ mean to you?”

The idea meant quite different things to different farmers. To 7 of the 63 (ll%), it meant that the farm should be tidy and well-maintained. This more technical definition of ‘better condition’ involved the tidiness of hedges, the maintenance of yards and buildings and making the farm easier to run. Over half the farmers (34 or 54%), however, talked about

29

the farm being more productive and 18 (28.6%)

thought better condition meant the farm should be

more economically viable. Under the ‘more productive’ category, farmers tended to talk about the land being ‘in good heart’. Any farmer who used this term was further questioned about what it meant. For most farmers, the notion implied that the soil be fertile and productive. It should be capable of sustain- ing high yields. But it also implied a responsibility to

the land. There was broad agreement that a good

farmer “should not take more out of the soil than gets put back in”. The soil should not be ‘robbed’ of its nutrients. As one farmer explained,

[Better condition means] land in better heart, with a better soil structure, and capable of growing better crops. If the soil structure is correct and the land is clean and free from weeds then you’ll get bcttcr yields.

It is within this context of a ‘logic of farm improve- ment’ that farmers’ attitudes to environmental change in the countryside must be set. The survey suggests that farmers have, in the main, become sensitised to environmental issues. Almost two-thirds of the farmers interviewed acknowledged that

modern agricultural practices can have an adverse effect on the environment. However, the types of environmental problem these farmers went on to talk about varied. Fourteen mentioned problems with “the overuse of sprays”, but when questioned further, most were more specifically conceroed about the effects of insecticides on friendly predator species like ladybirds. The threat to water quality from leach- ing and run-off was hardly mentioned. While there is some general unease about heavy usage of pesticides, pesticide persistence and the threat to water is not an issue that looms large in the minds of the farmers interviewed.

Two thirds of farmers acknowledged that environmental concerns had begun to influence the way that they farmed. Eighteen cited the management of environmental features on their farms. They had planted trees, were choosing to keep hedges rather than pull them out, and were building ponds and maintaining footpaths. For these farmers, responding to wider environmental concerns meant ‘managing’ or even ‘creating’ pockets of nature on their farms. This zoning of the farm environment is well illus- trated by one farmer who, when asked how environ-

30

mental concerns had affected his farming practices, said:

I have a two and a half acre conservation area. If we see something nice we transplant it. We see our fields as our factory floor and our little conservation area as our haven.

The art of managing nature is itself the subject of social construction and their is no consensus among the farmers about what a good farming environment

actually consists of. For example, one elderly farmer on a large mixed farm said:

I don’t like to see the countryside as an extension of suburbia, with clinically trimmed hedges. I like to see nature’s shagginess, with blooms at different times, and bushes and young trees in the hedgerows.

On the other hand, a farmer on a small mixed hold- ing, when asked if environmental concerns had impacted upon farming practices expressed a notice- ably different view. He said:

Yes, we keep it neat and tidy. We don’t let it go back to nature. We spray out weeds and make it look nice.

Farmers were also asked if they compared themselves with their neighbours, and if so, on what basis. Almost four out of five (50 or 79%) said they did look at what their neighbours did. One group (20% of farmers) made comparisons mainly based on notions of good farming, the health of stock and tidiness of fields. One farmer explained, [I look at] “how their

farm and crops look . . . if they look as good and healthy as mine. It has to be clean. I don’t like to see weeds”. A second group (20% of farmers) made comparisons mainly based on the timing and methods employed on the farm, such as, for example, who was out spraying and when, and what types of machinery were used. The third and largest group (60% of farmers) made comparisons in terms of yields. A typical response in this group came from a farmer who said; “I try to beat their yields. Man is a competitive beast. I like to feel I’m doing the job at least as well and hopefully better than the competition”.

Production-maximizing values still have strong cur- rency amongst farmers, although notions of good husbandry are also important. The maximization of yields was an important goal of agricultural policy throughout the productivist period and was the cen-


tral feature in farmers’ accumulation strategies. How- ever, the high costs of storing and disposing of surplus agricultural commodities has meant that in Britain and the EC, the goals have been radically altered. By means of co-responsibility levies and compulsory set-

aside, agricultural policy has sought to reduce over- production at the aggregate level. However, at the level of the individual farm, efforts to maximise yields

are an important legacy of the productivist era and remain a powerful economic motive. This is despite

the increasing promotion of strategies which seek to encourage the maximization of margins through increasing the efficiency of input use as the most finan- cially sound strategy for maintaining farm incomes.

Associated with the preoccupation with yields among

the farmers was the concekn with weeds. Whether farmers were drawing comparisons on the basis of

productivity or tidiness, weeds provided a useful

gauge of how they were doing. Half the farmers said that they looked over the hedge to see whether neighbours were winning the battle against weeds,

and many expressed strong aesthetic concerns about ‘clean’, weed-free fields.

The aesthetics of neatness and weed control as a form of care have been studied by Nassauer (1988), who

suggests that the expression of care is an important and powerful motive for people involved in managing landscapes. While the notion of ‘care’ includes a sense of solicitude, protection and nurturance, it at the same time can involve the domination or subordi- nation of nature. The control of weeds is undoubtedly an act of dominance in this sense, although it has a scientific rationale insofar as weeds compete with crops for light, water and nutrients. But because people see beauty in neat, well-kept landscapes, weed control also has a strong aesthetic motive which involves demonstrating care of the land.

The survey suggests that utilitarian notions of clean (weed-free), tidy farm environments dominate farming culture. The farmer who appreciated “nature’s shagginess” in hedgerows held a minority view. The majority saw &air contributions to rural environmental management as essentially having two strands. First, they could plant trees in field corners or on unproductive parcels of land, dig ponds and manage footpaths, thus helping to create ‘pockets’ of nature and facilitate access for walkers to enjoy them.


Second, however, they could ensure that the farmed environment was kept clean and tidy without

scrubby, unkempt land where ‘rubbish’ was growing.

Closely bound up with this second understanding of environment was the farmers (utilitarian) perceptions of weeds. On the heavy soils of the Ouse catchment, where 40 years ago, cereal cropping would not have been viable, it has been the control of

black-grass and wild oat weeds that has made profitable cereal growing possible. Farmers see the presence of these weeds as one of the biggest threats to their farming. Uniformly coloured fields with as few blemishes of weeds as possible and with the crop

drilled in straight lines symbolise their success in the battle against nature’s constraints on production. It is easy to see how these perceptions become deep

rooted, and how farmers come to take pride in their achievements in eliminating weeds. Moreover, these deeply felt convictions and the clear understanding about the role of weeds compared with doubts and uncertainties about some of the environmental impacts of agrochemical use. Because impacts might be unapparent in the short and medium term, farmers find it difficult to imagine that their efforts against

weeds are problematic. In addition, they argue that they would surely not be allowed to use any chemicals

that pose real threats. Their faith in the justice of fighting weeds is mirrored by a faith in the inherent

safety of the chemical weapons they use. As one

farmer said:

You’re using strong chemicals, but if they’re used properly and professionally, they’re advantageous to man- kind. We are guided very much by the chemical companies. We hope and believe that everything’s been properly tested. We buy them in good faith. If you buy a car, you don’t question the research and manufacturing process, you buy it in good faith.

In the trade off between the profitable production of cereal crops and the threats posed to surface and groundwaters, the interests of agronomy transcend those of the water environment because of the relative strengths of the two convictions within the

farmers’ ways of thinking. Weeds are an easily identi- fiable economic threat, whose presence goes against the farmers’ strong convictions in favour of rationa- lized, clean fields. However, there are no such strong convictions about the environmental impacts of agrochemicals. Pollution threats seem doubtful, long

31

term, distant and unproved, and this is coupled with a

relatively strong faith in the registration and approval

of chemicals that have been properly and ‘scientifi-

cally’ tested.

Although environmental concerns have impacted upon farmers’ values, negligible changes in farming practice have ensued, particularly with respect to reducing risks to water. Furthermore, a dominant productivist logic remains. Crucially, concerns about weed control and clean fields are more important to farmers than concerns about pollution of surface and groundwaters by agrochemicals.

Conclusions

This paper has sought to examine the causes of, and influences upon, the emergence of a pesticides in water ‘problem’ in Britain. It has argued from the outset that increasing pesticide use should not be seen as some ‘natural’ process of technological ‘progress’ which operates outside of social and political control. Rather, pollution occurs because of the workings of a ‘pesticide pollution production process’ which has evolved and emerged out of a set of social, political and technological relationships that have been con-

sciously pursued by groups of actors in different locations within the technological ‘system’.

Current pesticide use and the workings of the technological system have been shaped and channelled by past rounds of actions such that we can see evidence of ‘momentum’. Chemical solutions to agriculture’s crop husbandry problems remain the dominant paradigm. Indeed, the chemical industry, which has appropriated the term ‘crop protection’ and uses it interchangeably with ‘chemical crop protection’, sees the move towards a sustainable agriculture as being a simple technical issue of devising more ‘environmentally-friendly’ chemicals. This corre- sponds to the technical fix solution highlighted by

Newby (1991).

However, the current context is very different from that of the 1940s when the technological system was first constructed, with the most important shift being in the relative influences of agricultural support poli-

32

ties and environmental policy (Figure 2). Moreover, the legitimacy crisis brought about in part by the rising cost of disposing of surplus cereals has called into question the reasons for developing a high-tech agriculture capable of producing more surplus stock-

piles.

Technological change is socially shaped, as is the very nature of the environmental ‘problem’ itself. Pesti- cide pollution has been framed as a public health issue and so the scientific controversies around calculations

of acceptable risks to humans have been the focus of debate, rather than any concerns about the effects of

pesticides on aquatic ecosystems-about which very little is known-or the build up of contamination in groundwater sources, which are extremely difficult to

clean up.

Momentum can be identified in the system and three main sets of factors reinforce this momentum. First is the role of technical advisors, particularly those from commercial firms, in influencing decisions about pesticide use: Once an advisor is called onto the farm, non-chemical crop protection options tend to be

closed off and the dominant chemical approach is reinforced. The continuing dominance of the chemical paradigm in agricultural science, education and on farms also reinforces technological momentum. This is despite the fact that the concern of the 1940s to increase output has been replaced by the need to tackle the problem of the over-production of cereals in particular. The chemical approach is also reinforced by the representation of weeds within farming culture. Farmers still value ‘weed-free’ fields as sym- bols of good farming and this remains a barrier to cutting herbicide use. Moving to a system whereby weeds are tolerated up to an economic threshold in order to reduce herbicide use will require farmers to overcome their inclinations to eliminate all weeds from their fields.

Finally, a reluctance on the part of the British Gov- ernment to regulate farming practices until the build up of pressure from environmental and other consumer groups becomes overwhelming is another reason for technological momentum. The Nether- lands, Denmark and Sweden have embarked upon programmes to reduce the amount of pesticides used*, but so far in Britain restrictions have been aimed only at non-agricultural users of pesticides.

GeoforumiVolume 26 Number 111995

Indeed, despite the stated aims of the Government to ‘minimise’ pesticide use (Department of the Environ- ment, 1990, p. 179), under the current regulatory system there are no real incentives to encourage

farmers to reduce their dependence upon chemical technologies for pest control (Ward et al., 1993).

Acknowledgements-This paper represents a development of field research originally conducted under the Pollution, Agriculture and Technology Change (PATCH) research programme, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under its Joint Agriculture and Environment Pro- gramme, and carried out at the Department of Geography, University College London between 1989 and 1992. I would like to thank colleagues on the research programme-Judy Clark, Philip Lowe, Richard Munton and Susanne Seymour-and Les Levidow and Jonathan Murdoch for their comments.

Notes

A recent report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences suggested that the toxicological basis of pesticide standards does not consider risks to particularly vulnerable groups like infants and pointed to the consumption of pesticides in water as “an important potential route of exposure” (National Research Council, 1993, p. 11). Denmark’s policy was introduced in 1985 and aims to reduce the use of pesticides by 50% by 1997. Sweden is aiming for a similar cut over the period 1988 to 1993, and the Netherlands intends to halve pesticide use between 1990 and 2000.

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