A Public Eye Report | April 2019 31
Love in time of monocultures: motel behind transgenic crops in Sinop, Mato Grosso, Brazil. | © Lunaé Parracho
partly be explained by high indices of development and urbanisation, it might also be linked to the elevated use of agrochemicals in the state.239 In 2010, researchers found that cancer mortality rates were particularly high in the region of Ijuí, a major agro-industrial area of the state. Cancer mortality correlated with cropped areas, the number of farms using pesticides and the proportion of agricultural workers in the municipalities.240 Fábio Franke, oncologist at the Charity hospital of Ijuí, observed a “high number of agricultural workers among his cancer patients"241 and a direct relationship between pesticides and those cancer cases.242 Of particular concern is the effect of pesticide exposure on the incidence of cancer in children and adolescents. In Mato Grosso, Brazil’s top soy producer and pesticide user, two recent studies have found a correlation between pesticide use and cancer mortality and morbidity among children and adolescents.243 According to Dr. Wanderlei Pignati, who conducted the studies, childhood cancers were four to six times more frequent in regions with intense pesticide use than regions with low pesticide use.244 Similar observations were made in the main areas of industrial fruit production in the northeast of Brazil. Local research-
ers showed that childhood cancer hospitalisation rates in Petrolina and Juazeiro, the two main fruit growing centres of the northeast, increased significantly from 2004 to 2013, reaching 60 cases per one million inhabitants, compared to 44 cases in Brazil and 43 cases in the Northeastern Region.245 And an extensive case control study carried out in hospitals in 13 Brazilian states from 1999 to 2007 found that children whose mothers were exposed to pesticides during pregnancy were more likely to develop leukemia in their first year of life compared with those whose mothers did not report such exposure.246
The Brazilian National Cancer Agency (INCA) marked its position against pesticide use practices and warned of the increased risk of chronic diseases.
“We are not only concerned with cancer”, says Marcia Sarpa de Campos Mellos from INCA. “Several studies indicate that