Costa Rica’s regulatory system is widely viewed as the most advanced in the region,
but this is not much of a claim. The country has a tiny, inadequately trained, and
poorly equipped staff to oversee pesticide use. To compensate for its lack of toxicolo-
gists and biologists, Costa Rica, like its neighbors, looks to the north for guidance.
Because many U.S. and European companies have exported pesticides that they are
not allowed to sell at home, Costa Rican law required imported pesticides be
approved for use in the country of origin. In practice, however, what sometimes
passes for the country of origin is nothing more than a trans-shipment point. A pesti-
cide banned for use in the United States can be shipped to an intermediary country
to circumvent these restrictions. For example, U.S.-made haloxyfop has entered Costa
Rica through Colombia.
Because they lack resources, Central American regulators typically resort to copycat
pesticide restrictions. If the EPA bans a pesticide, for instance, it catches the attention
of Costa Rican regulators, especially if it is a pesticide that the U.S. FDA spot-checks
at the border. For example, U.S. regulators rejected shipping containers of Costa
Rican produce for having illegally high residues of aldicarb. But these regulators do
not check for many dangerous U.S.-made pesticides used in Costa Rica.
The 1991 incident just described shows that Costa Rican regulators can crack
down on a pesticide almost overnight. There is something inexplicable, however, in
the fact that they will do so in response to market pressure but not in response to the
death of Costa Rican workers.
Another serious problem involves pesticides not prohibited outright in the United
States, but subject to strict controls. These controls typically get lost in translation to
the developing world. This is the case with many dangerous pesticides that, typically
under industry pressure, are authorized for restricted use in the United States by spe-
cially trained workers who must follow specified safety conditions. While these stipu-
lations and conditions may provide some measure of protection within the United
States, they keep the door open to abuse in the developing world, where the stipu-
lated safety requirements are not met in practice. Monsanto’s alachlor (Lasso), for
example, poses such an elevated cancer risk that it can only be applied in the United
States by workers operating from inside sealed cabins. Such equipment is nonexistent
in all but a few Costa Rican plantations.^19The Human CostsUp to date global estimates are lacking, but there are 1.2 billion agricultural work-
ers worldwide and it is likely that millions of pesticide poisoning cases still occur each
year. In 2000, Brazil’s Ministry of Health estimated the country had 300,000 poison-
ings a year and 5,000 deaths from agricultural pesticides, many of them imported.^20
In an Indonesian study, 21 percent of spray operations resulted in three or more neu-
robehavioral, respiratory, and intestinal signs of symptoms.^21 In a United Nations
survey, 88 percent of pesticide-using Cambodian farmers had experienced symptoms
of poisoning.^22228 | Pesticides