Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South.

Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South. By Pete Daniel. The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. (Baton Rouge: Published by Louisiana State University Press in association with Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 2005. Pp. xiv, 209. $26.95, ISBN 0-8071-3098-2.)

World War II marked the starting point for an abrupt shift in the composition and use of agricultural chemicals. Companies involved in government-sponsored war research on synthetic pesticides like DDT were quick to establish postwar markets for highly toxic insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides. In this effort they found assistance from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), agribusiness stakeholders, and a regulatory environment tilted in favor of corporate interests. Indeed, as Pete Daniel's timely new book argues, the very agency charged with the regulation of these substances--the Agricultural Research Service--labored largely to promote them and to hide their dangers, even in the face of damning evidence often collected in its own files.

Those familiar with Daniel's work will no doubt recognize the familiar strains: the march of capital-intensive agriculture across the land, the power of southern planter elites, and a rogue government bureaucracy engineering these trends and sustaining these economic relations. Yet Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South deserves our close attention, for Daniel carefully presents the evidence for an unambiguous case of regulatory failure and government malfeasance.

Three families of synthetic chemicals entered farms and homes with little or no testing for either acute or chronic health effects: chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT and endrin, organophosphates such as malathion and parathion, and herbicides such as 2,4-D. Most Americans falsely believed the federal government protected them from harmful products; the 1947 Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act required manufacturers to affirm a product's safety but contained more loopholes than safeguards. While the long-term results to human and environmental health are still being debated, certain effects were immediate: numerous incidents of poisoning (some resulting in death to humans, livestock, and wildlife), almost all due to aerial spraying, toxic drift, and false or misleading labeling. A few farmworkers and duster pilots began to take notice; so too did a growing number of medical professionals and other scientists. The ground was well prepared for Rachel Carson's Silent Spring of 1962 (Cambridge, Mass.), which assembled the available evidence and resonated with an already alarmed section of the public.

As evidence of adverse consequences mounted and as Congress opened hearings on the subject, agribusiness interests and the chemical companies sprang into action to downplay the risks of synthetic chemicals. Enlisted was the help of expert testimony and of scientists who testified in some cases that these substances posed no more harm than driving an automobile or taking an aspirin. One of the most effective defensive maneuvers was the claim that modern agriculture so depended on these inputs that to remove them from the market without conclusive proof of danger was to threaten the nation's food supply and its standard of living. The USDA attempted to present a face of informed neutrality, but, as Daniel argues, this public-relations position "no more addressed faulty labels, falsified data ... or safety concerns than it did the growing worries that agricultural chemicals created more dangers than benefits" (pp. 103-4).

Daniel has produced an engaging cautionary tale that ends around 1970. Those looking for an interpretation of pesticide regulation after the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency will not find it here. However, the book's analysis of this formative period does suggest reasons why the contemporary regulatory process has limited only the most persistent agricultural chemicals and why it has failed to rally public support for precautionary policies.

SARAH T. PHILLIPS

Columbia University