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In December 2002, I completed four years of multidisciplinary field surveys in the Dominican Republic, that included anthropological, geographical, and epidemiological testing, observation and analysis of communities exposed to pesticides. The Constanza Region, located in the intermountainous region of central Dominican Republic, offered an ideal location for evaluating the relationship between culture, human health, and the environment. The region is the center for temperate vegetable crop production in the country. Several of the valleys that compose the region are dominated by agribusiness farms, and a large number of farm worker families living in close proximity to pesticide sprayed fields.

The Constanza Region is well known throughout the Dominican Republic as an agricultural showcase - a marvel of modern agricultural technology. Dominicans speak proudly of their “Little Switzerland, its mild climate, and it production of temperate crops. However, underneath the surface, the Constanza region is an environmental disaster. With the rapid development of commercial agriculture, the rural landscape of mixed landuse has been transformed by large agribusiness corporations producing a few nontraditional export crops. The Dominican government hailed the agricultural transformation of Constanza as an economic miracle and a rural development model for the rest of the country.

What the government failed to take into consideration were the potential changes that would occur with the development of commercial agriculture in an environmentally sensitive area. In their mad rush to transform the region into the country's premier vegetable producing center, little consideration was given to understanding the region’s biogeophysical characteristics. In addition, they failed to take into consideration the health impacts of commercial agriculture on communities located in close proximity to pesticide sprayed fields. This understanding would have allowed government agencies to develop and implement mitigating strategies and policies to limit or lessen the negative impacts of commercial agriculture on both the environment and community health.

Accordingly, the research devotes a great deal of time to the analysis of multidisciplinary variables in the evaluation of pesticide exposure in the Constanza Region. By embracing methods emerging from anthropology, geography and epidemiology, I examine how the combination of biogeophysical processes, culture, human activities and behavior, and political-economic structures influence pesticide exposure and community health. The multidisciplinary approach offered is holistic and complimentary, and allows for equal treatment of the exposed population and causing agents. I use four perspectives to examine this relationship. The biogeophysical perspective examines how location and meteorological factors influence pesticide exposure. The epidemiological perspective examines how pesticide exposure impair the health of community members by contaminating environmental resources (water, air and soil); and how their behavior and activities serve as pesticide exposure pathways from work place and schools into the homes The anthropological perspective examines: (1) community members’ perception of risks and implications of working and living with toxic agrochemicals; (2) how they integrate ideas about these chemicals into preexisting beliefs of health, illness and healing; (3) how they conceptualize symptoms associated with pesticide exposure and other health threats; (4) how they integrate supernatural (folk medicine) with biomedical alternatives for improving health and healing; (5) how they interpret symptoms associated with pesticide exposure and other health threats as caused by supernatural forces, and how these interpretations threaten their health by preventing or impeding proper and timely treatment. The political economy perspective examines how the agribusiness sector, via their manipulation of political-economic structures, maintain their control over landuse, agricultural production, and the sale and use of toxic agrochemicals.

Finally, the research was guided by two premises. First, there is no quick technical fix or easy solutions to environmental problems caused by pesticides. In a much larger sense, environmental problems are problems of human activities, behavior and choice. They are the results of choices made by farm workers, agribusiness executives, school teachers and government officials, locally, nationally as well as globally. They are the results of human activities and behavior in the farm fields, near schools and in the home. Second, there exists a need to understand this interrelationship if we are to develop a capacity to predict the consequences that human agency is imposing on the environment, and prepare a sound basis for improving environmental quality and community health.

Carlalynne C. Melendez, Ph.D. (Anthropology)

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