The GMO agribusiness regime

Since the mid-1990s, Argentina has supported an agricultural economic development model based on a suite of patented biotechnologies that combine GM seeds and broad-spectrum systemic pesticides (glyphosate) within industrial-scale monocrop systems (Leguizamón 2020). Initially, in the absence of national restrictions on pesticide use, pesticide applications to soybean fields rose exponentially, greatly increasing crop yields (Naturaleza de Derechos 2019). By 1998, Argentina had emerged as the world’s second-largest producer of GM crops (James 1999). Higher exports in turn softened traditional balance-of-payment constraints (Teubal 2008), encouraging broad political support for the GMO agribusiness regime from right- and left-wing governments alike. Various other actors, including seed firms, biotech research organizations, farmers, and village leaders, co-evolved with the regime (Rip and Kemp 1998), supporting GM crops against less-chemical-intensive alternatives (Arza and van Zwanenberg 2014). Within a decade, a new sociotechnical regime had taken hold.

Systematically ignored by government officials, communities from Argentina’s agricultural regions began protesting the use of pesticides in 2001, soon identifying themselves as Pueblos Fumigados (Sprayed Villages) (Arancibia and Motta 2019). Movement activists demanded restrictions on pesticide use, and often encouraged a transition to an agroecological agrarian model, on the basis of communities’ claims that pesticide spraying was linked to the growing prevalence of developmental abnormalities, cancers, and other pathologies (Rossi 2021; Verzeñassi and Vallini 2019). To date, few government officials at the national or provincial levels have formally recognized or addressed the public health crisis or promoted epidemiological and environmental studies to analyze the specific impacts of exposure to pesticides in the country. Doing so would threaten the legitimacy of the GMO agribusiness regime.

Facing conditions of “undone science” (Arancibia and Motta 2019), activists from the Sprayed Villages movement have allied with scientists and health experts to conduct laboratory and field studies of pesticide effects to support their claims (Motta and Arancibia 2016, Frickel and Arancibia 2021). LCS was the first (and to date only) project to systematically produce epidemiological data in the affected rural areas. Importantly, for a time, LCS made some of the invisible infrastructure of the GMO agriculture regime broadly visible by creating a new tool—community health surveys—and publicizing the results with formal support from municipal and village governments and a public university.

The public university system

Argentina has a strong tradition of free and unrestricted public higher education. Public universities are self-governed by a democratic system, which seeks to guarantee political autonomy and implies a high level of politicization of academic life. Universities are organized into different schools (e.g., medical sciences, political sciences, agricultural sciences), with each school governed by a Directive Council and a Dean. The Council, composed of democratically elected counselors representing faculty, college students, graduate students, and administrative staff, makes budgetary and curricular decisions and elects a new Dean every four years (Nosiglia and Mulle 2015). As relatively autonomous organizations, universities differ from one another in terms of research focus and politics.

Enshrined in the educational reform laws of 1918, Argentina’s national universities also embrace a social mission of public outreach focused on identifying and solving local and regional social problems. However, this mission has never enjoyed status or resources within the university system, and since the 1990s, administrators have instead stressed universities’ role in national economic development (Di Bello et al. 2020). This reframing linked the university system politically to the then-nascent GMO agribusiness regime, and some universities have embraced this connection through research investments in transgenic crops and related biotechnologies. Even so, critics—including those at UNR—raised concerns regarding the need to recover the social outreach mission of universities (Arocena and Sutz 2015; Romero et al. 2015). As we will show, the UNR Medical School, for a time at least, supported a social mission approach to environmental health that challenged the biomedical model of health, and directly challenged the regime supporting GMO agriculture. In this way, the medical school functioned as a sociotechnical niche that provided protection and legitimacy to activists and their academic allies employing PK practices designed to draw attention to the hidden pesticide crisis.

Creation (2001–2010)

In its origins, the health camps reflected the growing societal influence of the Sprayed Villages social movement, but they were also a product of institutional opportunities emerging within the UNR. In 2001, the medical school Council approved the creation of a new curriculum requiring additional elective courses and a hands-on practicum experience, the Práctica Final (Final Practice) (FP), as the final requirement for the MD. The actual content of the FP, however, was left for future determination. Seeing an opportunity for creating new courses, in 2004, a group of medical students (hereafter “the group”) developed and received Council approval for an elective course called Socio Environmental Health—the first medical school course to address environmental topics. In 2007, the group proposed a university extension program called Healthy Environment that would provide public hands-on educational activities including organic gardening practices and topical workshops.

Once approved, Healthy Environment became an important outreach and networking mechanism, incubating new connections between the group and state institutions such as the Provincial Ministry of Health and various municipal governments, as well as social movement organizations, many of which were part of Sprayed Villages. Inside the medical school, the course Socio Environmental Health functioned as niche space, providing an organizational setting in which students began promoting a biocentric medical perspective and democratizing the curricula through a new student-run political organization, Frente Independiente. In 2007, students and faculty associated with Frente were elected to Council; another Frente member was elected Dean. Now, the niche had some institutional power as well as an organizational existence.

With this power shift, the school became more inclusive in promoting an alternative medical curriculum. In 2008, the Council scrapped the entrance exam, replacing it with a course based on biocentric, community-based medicine. The following year, the Dean and Council appointed a faculty member and Outreach Undersecretary (DV) associated with Frente to direct the FP, who in turn designed a new syllabus for the FP that, among other things, required students to participate in LCS as the final integrative evaluation of the FP. It was with this move that the project first encountered resistance: from students, who did not want their MD to be dependent on spending five days in a rural village, and from professors and lecturers who preferred a more traditional clinical medicine exam. The conflict at this stage mainly took the form of a professional ideological dispute. At issue were two competing models of medical education and, more broadly, disagreement among faculty and students about the university’s proper role in society. Importantly, the conflict was contained within UNR.

The Frente’s general popularity among the students, in addition to some strategic lobbying and the group’s prior outreach work with Sprayed Villages, revealed the concrete societal demand for community health data in the context of intensive pesticide use by the GMO agribusiness regime. These efforts were sufficient to overcome internal opposition to including the LCS in the FP syllabus, which the Council finally approved in June 2010. Beginning that spring and for each year after, four cohorts of 80 to 90 medical students participated in LCS, conducting the surveys and reporting the results to local communities as the final step in their degree program. With the approval came new legitimacy as well as new resources for buses, travel insurance, computers, and other material expenses, also helped by the new position of the FP Director (Outreach Secretary). Government administrations in the affected communities provided other critical resources, including food and lodging, and the Provincial Ministry of Health (Santa Fe Province) connected LCS organizers with local health centers.

In its origins, LCS grew from efforts inside UNR, led by a small group of progressive students and faculty who pursued a bi-directional organizing strategy. They worked simultaneously to build alliances to powerful interests within the university administration while also developing new connections among social movement and civil society actors outside the university. The two sets of alliances reciprocally reinforced the sociotechnical niche that was emerging within the medical school’s left wing, securing material and political resources sufficient to overcome internal ideological resistance and secure basic institutional support for an innovative curricular model of medical education anchored in a PK approach to environmental health.

Consolidation (2011–2015)

As LCS consolidated over the next several years, opposition grew steadily. Professional opposition within the university continued as before, although the internal challenges during this period were more organizational than ideological. They manifested in students’ reluctance to participate in the camps and difficulties in recruiting and developing a stable group of TAs and lecturers to run the FP. New forms of resistance arose from outside the university, primarily related to LCS’s emerging confrontation with the incumbent GMO agribusiness regime. We describe each conflict in turn.

Internally, not only lecturers and professors resisted the FP promoted by the Frente, but many students as well. Once LCS became a compulsory part of the FP, students’ resistance surged, aided by a negative campaign from oppositional student groups. The oppositional faction insisted that forcing LCS participants to record residents’ health information from doorsteps rather than diagnosing patients in a typical medical clinic setting was inappropriate for medical students. In response, the group stepped up lobbying efforts within the Council to promote additional curricular changes and to extend the niche’s institutional power into the MD.

In 2011, the group designed and received Council approval for a 9-month mentoring program within the FP to support and train students participating in LCS. The mentoring program was an important step in consolidating PK approaches and expanded the sociotechnical niche LCS occupied within the medical school by creating a new space for critical reflection on traditional medical practices. The mentoring program also created a new set of organizational challenges. At this stage, the FP had no paid teaching positions and was carried out by ten ad-honorem TAs. With the new mentoring program, the need for a stable group of paid lecturers and TAs became more pressing. A related problem was that LCS organizers had limited practical experience with community health surveys, since it was a novel project, and no experience training and motivating students. A third problem was that while no advanced students could teach in the FP (as it was the final requirement for the MD), finding recent graduates to run the program was difficult because most preferred to initiate their careers in better-paid clinical positions outside the university. In 2011, the FP Director was appointed Academic Undersecretary of the medical school, a political position that afforded him new power and responsibilities for curricular and staffing decisions. In that role, he created thirty part-time TA positions to support the FP. Now, LCS’s institutionalization was more or less complete, with cumulative capabilities that helped deal with the other issues: LCS activities were managed more effectively and participating students were more motivated.

Beyond the university, other challenges confronted the project. Specifically, the program’s consolidation phase coincided with a rise in the number of protests against the GMO agribusiness regime’s overuse of pesticides. Protests had grown nationally, and included critical voices of several higher-visibility scientists and physicians (Arancibia 2013). A year later, with a few LCS camps completed, their political impact on the larger pesticide conflict became clear. The field studies reactivated long-simmering local conflicts and empowered community activists by providing epidemiological data to press municipal and provincial governments to make and enforce new rulings curbing pesticide use. In the context of escalating social conflict, the Provincial Ministry of Health demanded access to survey results before the group released them to the communities. As LCS denied the request, the relationship between the group and the Ministry deteriorated, and in 2012 the Ministry terminated the supportive agreement (Página 12 Rosario 2012). Subsequently, Ministry representatives mounted pressure campaigns discouraging municipal mayors from hosting camp sessions in their villages and towns (Página 12 Rosario 2012). With the Ministry alliance in tatters, the group worked locally to strengthen relationships with municipal governments in the pesticide-affected regions.

LCS faced another significant challenge to their growing social authority during this phase. Designed mainly as an outreach and pedagogical tool responding to community needs, the organizers had not prioritized research or prepared articles for peer-reviewed publication. Regime interests framed the absence of published research as a weakness that called into question the scientific validity of the community health survey data. Similarly, in lawsuits filed by community activists against unregulated spraying, the lawyers defending the communities insisted that only published data would be accepted in the courts (Cabaleiro 2020).

Because the group had not received prior approval from the school’s Ethics Committee,² the data already collected would not be acceptable for academic publications, and any new data produced would need prior approval. Yet university administration ignored the group’s subsequent request for approval to collect new data. Instead, the still-supportive Council agreed to approve and thus officially certify the final FP reports. According to Argentine law, such official reports constitute valid forensic evidence and therefore are admissible in court. This pivot from scientific to legal authority has since met with considerable success in different successful lawsuits (Cabaleiro 2020), as well as in the media. It shows how a sociotechnical niche strategically manipulates different, intertwining infrastructures—in this case, scientific and legal tools and norms for their use—to further one’s political goals.

With institutional consolidation, LCS gained new organizational resources inside and outside the university. It also attracted new forms of external opposition. Even so, LCS’s new institutional capacity, now including networked connections to social movement actors and to sympathetic lawyers and scientists, provided opportunities for political maneuvering—from Provincial administration to local governance and from scientific authority to legal authority—that allowed the program to continue to grow and extend its reach into society despite new external threats.

Dismantling (2016–2020)

In the third stage, regime opposition fused with heightened internal conflicts to create new institutional obstacles that niche actors promoting LCS ultimately would not overcome. As we show here, the failure occurred in the context of growing international attention to the politics of pesticide use and a changing political opportunity structure inside the medical school.

The two medical school Deans in office during 2007 to 2015 represented Frente and had supported LCS. A new candidate put forward by Frente won the deanery election in 2015, but once in office withdrew his support for LCS. This was an unexpected turning point. The new Dean’s growing opposition began in May 2016 in the context of a proposal to modify the FP syllabus. To reduce delays in the elaboration of the LCS reports and improve the work with sprayed communities, a revised syllabus required students to work with the communities for a longer period (making three trips instead of one) and take a larger role in processing and analyzing the collected survey data. The Dean rejected this modification, arguing that he did not want to incur student opposition (Nidd 2016).

Later in the same year, at the invitation of the International Monsanto Tribunal (IMT) convened in The Hague, the FP Director presented epidemiological data collected during twenty-seven LCS field studies. Five judges heard from thirty witnesses from five continents and passed judgement on Monsanto, which stood accused of ecocide (International Monsanto Tribunal 2018 and 2018). In his testimony, the Director presented empirical evidence suggesting that cancer, disorders of the endocrine system, thyroid conditions, allergic respiratory conditions, chronic neurological conditions, miscarriages, and congenital abnormalities in babies occurred disproportionately in the Sprayed Villages (International Monsanto Tribunal 2018). He also complained about the inaction of the national and provincial governments in addressing these health inequities (International Monsanto Tribunal 2016).

The presentation produced an important echo in national and international media. An article in the provincial newspaper La Capital reported that the cancer rate in the south of Santa Fe Province was twice the national rate (La Capital 2016b), and this sparked intense public conversation. Notably, the spike in media attention coincided with a series of unprecedented administrative actions against the group in charge of the FP (Página 12 2016a).

While the FP Director was still at The Hague, the Dean requested the resignation of two other LCS organizers from their political positions as Extension Secretary and Student Wellbeing Secretary (Nidd 2016). A few days later, campus administrative staff locked the offices where LCS health surveys were stored (Página 12 2016a). Unable to access the surveys, the group published a statement denouncing the confiscation of their research and claiming that the Dean had received strong pressure from the provincial government and agribusiness interests (Integrantes del equipo 2016; Página 12 2016b). In part, the statement claimed that the LCS’s PK approach to “building epidemiological data from and with the communities … [and] disseminating results that belong to the people and no one else, has put many business and political interests in crisis.” Noting that external pressures against LCS had recently intensified from regime actors inside and outside the university, the statement continued:

We have witnessed provincial authorities who are uncomfortable with our work and suggest that we silence/conceal the results of the LCS. The same has been done by representatives of agribusiness. And internal actors of the university have played as their allies, actors who call themselves “revolutionaries” and act with the agribusiness employers’ organizations. (Integrantes del equipo 2016)

The Dean published a response denying actions against the project (Nidd 2016), but also did not initiate an investigation into who instructed the office closure. At about the same time, the Provincial Minister of Health released a public statement to the most important provincial newspapers arguing that the LCS results were not serious (i.e., scientifically valid) because they were based on health surveys, rather than clinical diagnoses, and that it was reckless to publicize the results (La Capital 2016a; Página 12 2016c). Social movements organizations saw the Minister’s statement as defending agribusiness interests (Redacción Rosario 2016).

By now, the conflict had escaped the university. News of the lockout made headlines in a well-known newspaper (Página 12 2016a). In response, the organizing team of the IMT initiated a letter-writing campaign to request the UNR President reopen the office and guarantee the continuity of LCS. Across Latin America, social movement activists launched a signature campaign to encourage international support (Observatorio Petrolero Sur 2016). Under pressure, the UNR President reopened the office and stopped further initiatives against the group. This allowed LCS to continue during 2017–18 while the group’s international recognition continued to grow. In October 2018, the FP Director was invited by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and by the European Parliament to present the LCS data and to discuss the hidden public health crisis in Argentina that the epidemiological data made visible (Giancaglini 2019).

The following May, without warning, a newly elected Dean quickly dismantled LCS. In rapid succession, he replaced the FP Director and canceled the FP mentorship program, leaving the twenty-two lecturers and TAs with no assigned tasks. By February of 2020, a different group of lecturers and TAs led the FP field camp, now reduced to a two-day visit in which students would measure blood sugar levels from neighbors gathered in a public square, but no longer conduct door-to-door environmental health surveys.

Coinciding with the moment of highest national and international recognition, external opposition from actors supporting the regime escalated and penetrated the sheltered niche space of the university, breaking down some of the political networks that had previously supported LCS’s PK approach to environmental health. According to the former FP Director, powerful opponents pushed the allied Dean to withdraw his support from LCS. This implied a strong deterioration of the group’s governance capacity within the medical school. In fact, the loss of internal political power facilitated the formation of a set of institutional obstacles, precipitating the project’s ultimate termination.