Abstract
Pesticide smuggling may intensify public health, occupational health, and environmental risks associated to the use of agrochemicals. Yet, there is little scholarly research about this crime. Using data from around 1,300 forensic reports made by Brazil’s Federal Police between 2008 and 2018, this article demonstrates that the market for smuggled pesticides in Brazil is probably small, smuggled pesticides are rarely counterfeit, smuggling of prohibited pesticides is uncommon, and petty smugglers – rather than organized criminal groups – prevail. For pesticide manufacturers, campaigning against pesticide smuggling – framed as a threat to human health, the environment, and public safety – is important though. Corporations’ emphasis on the problem of pesticide smuggling may be driven not only by concerns about market losses but also by other reasons: interest in improving corporations’ legitimacy, expanding their networks with government officials and police agencies, or preventing tax increases. This can work as a diversionary tactic in response to criticisms against intensive pesticide use or low levels of taxation. This article’s findings indicate that corporations can increase the political salience of a crime alongside police agencies.
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Notes
The dataset is available at: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/v9892ppf46/1 .
A good indicator would be the ratio measuring the price of a given quantity of agricultural production (a tonne of sugarcane, for example) in terms of the price of a unit of pesticides (10 L of glyphosate, for example). Data on this is produced by the Institute of Agricultural Economics (Instituto de Economia Agrícola – IEA), a research institute affiliated to São Paulo’s state government. Yet, there is data only for a few combinations of agricultural products and types of pesticides, as well as missing values for various years. Data are available at http://ciagri.iea.sp.gov.br/nia1/RelaTrocaDefensivos.aspx?cod_sis=20.
A few of these items were probably not pesticides, but the information was not in forensic reports because chemical tests were not done on all items. This is therefore the upper limit of the number of smuggled pesticides confiscated during the analysed period. In any case, the proportion of counterfeit pesticides was small, as showed earlier in the article.
Data not available for 2008.
Interview 6: Officer at Federal Revenue of Brazil (Receita Federal), Santana do Livramento, 7/6/2019.
This is based on the abovementioned estimate of 358 tonnes of confiscated products.
Interview 1: Federal Police officer, 20/9/2018; interview 4: Federal Police forensic expert, 21/1/2019; interview 5: Federal Police forensic expert, 12/2/2019; interview 6: officer at Receita Federal, 7/6/2019.
Interview 3: representative from Sindiveg, an industry body, 19/10/2018.
Interview 1: Federal Police officer, 20/9/2018.
Interview 1: Federal Police officer, 20/9/2018; interview 2 (via telephone), representative from Sindiveg, 17/10/2018.
Interview 2: representative from Sindiveg, 17/10/2018.
Interview 2: representative from Sindiveg, 17/10/2018.
Interview 1: Federal Police officer, 20/9/2018.
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Acknowledgements
The research for this article has benefitted from discussions with and suggestions from Acir dos Santos Almeida, Adriana Dorfman, Alexandre dos Santos Cunha, Daniel Cerqueira, Eduardo Uliana, Elvio Dias Botelho, Luis Felipe Giesteira, Marcus Peixoto, Paulo de Tarso Linhares, Rafael Francisco França, and Rosany Boechner. Kamila Mesquita Rodrigues Corrêa and João Pedro Oliveira dos Santos helped creating the dataset.
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de Moraes, R.F. Constructing a transnational crime: pesticide smuggling in Brazil. Crime Law Soc Change 78, 379–404 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10026-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-022-10026-1