“The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is
essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a
dead or inert mass.”
—
Albert Howard, The Soil and Health,
1947

In October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted temporary
approval for use of methyl iodide, a highly toxic fumigant favored by
large-scale strawberry and other fruit growers to sterilize soil ahead
of planting.

The move generated outrage among scientists, though it didn’t get much play in a news cycle dominated by the presidential election and high oil prices.

About a year before the unfortunate decision — one of the most
disputed in the EPA’s history — EPA director Stephen Johnson appointed
a woman named Elin Miller to a high post within the agency. Before
swinging through the revolving door to work as a regulator, Miller
worked as CEO of the North American arm of Arysta, the Japan-based
chemical giant that markets methyl iodide under the brand name Midas.
Before
that,
Miller worked at Dow Chemical, “overseeing the company’s public
affairs, global pest management, and Asia Pacific operations,” an EPA press release states, without an ounce of shame.

Coincidentally or not, weeks after the EPA gave methyl iodide the thumbs up, Arysta got snapped up by a European buyout firm for a cool $2.2 billion. Talk about the Midas touch.

In this age of Halliburton and Blackwater, none of this counts as
remarkable or generates much discussion. Like a toxic fumigant,
unchecked crony capitalism spreads a cynical haze over the political
landscape. If we’re powerless to stop the slow-motion calamity in Iraq,
what can we do for a bunch of migrant farmworkers?

Yet each bite we take ties us to the people who grow our food. The methyl iodide situation deserves more thought.

Dirty Deeds

For most of agriculture’s 10,000-year history, farmers have succeeded or failed based on their ability to nurture life
within
soil. The microorganisms and earthworms that thrive in healthy soil
metabolize nutrients and make them available for crops. They also
convert animal and vegetable waste into humus, thus regenerating their
own habitat and maintaining that thin layer of topsoil on which all
terrestrial life depends.

In modern agriculture, however, soil operates as a medium, not a
habitat: It exists to transfer synthetic, pre-metabolized nutrients
from factories to crops. In this regime, any life form found in soil is
at best innocuous — and at worst a threat. When a vast field is
planted in the same crop year after year, its pests concentrate in the
soil, waiting to strike.

No longer an ally to farmers, life in the soil becomes a problem in
need of solution. Rather than nurture it, the farmer’s task becomes to
eradicate it.

That’s where the nation’s industrial strawberry farmers — as well as
Florida’s large-scale tomato growers — find themselves. They literally
fear their soil, fretting that it harbors microscopic roundworms called
nematodes that feed on the roots and leaves of plants, endangering the harvest.

For decades, the preferred answer for large-scale fruit growers has
been to literally sterilize soil with methyl bromide, a highly toxic
fumigant sprayed onto soil before planting. Methyl bromide kills
everything it contacts, turning the soil into an inert medium.

But sterilizing dirt turns out to be a dirty business: methyl bromide’s
death-dealing powers aren’t limited to microorganisms. It has proved
extremely toxic to humans and is one of the globe’s most powerful
ozone-depleting substances.

Way back in 1987, the United States agreed to phase out methyl bromide
by 2005, under the Montreal Protocol — a pact largely credited with
saving the ozone layer. Since then, evidence of gruesome harm to farmworkers and their offspring caused by methyl bromide has piled up.

And yet, U.S. farmers still spray millions of pounds of methyl bromide onto fields each year, under exceptions to the Montreal Protocol strenuously negotiated
by the Bush administration. In 2006 — the year after the Montreal ban
was supposed to become complete — California strawberry farmers
actually
increased
their methyl bromide use by 5 percent, applying it to an additional
2,200 acres. At a recent meeting of Montreal pact signees, Bush secured
approval for U.S. farmers to use 11.8 million pounds in 2008 — more
than a third of the pre-treaty level.

The compound attacks the central nervous system, and damages the lungs
and kidneys. It has been linked to reproductive disorders, including
birth defects. Since farm fields directly abut subdivisions in
California’s agriculture-heavy counties, its use imperils not only
farmworkers but also nearby residents. Clean Water Action of California
cites
395 cases of methyl bromide poisoning between 1999 and 2004, the years
when the phaseout should have been entering its final stage. And that
number may be wildly low, since most migrant farmworkers, particularly
undocumented ones, have at best limited access to medical care.

Bad Seeds

The U.S. government’s official opinion on methyl bromide has been: we
can’t fully ban it until we find a suitable alternative. Yet methyl
iodide, hailed as the answer, might be yet
more toxic.

Just before approving methyl iodide in October, the EPA received a blunt letter
[PDF] signed by 54 prominent scientists, including the Nobel chemist
Roald Hoffman, laying out the case against the compound. “Alkylating
agents like methyl iodide are extraordinarily well-known cancer hazards
in the chemical community because of their ability to modify the
chemist’s own DNA,” the scientists warned.

Susan Kegley, senior staff scientist for the Pesticide Action Network
of North America, told me that methyl iodide is so carcinogenic that
scientists have used it for years to induce cancer in lab tissue.

Do we really need to subject farmworkers as well as people who live
near farm fields to this stuff, in order to secure a steady supply of
industrial — and flavorless — tomatoes and strawberries?

To perform the bit of mental gymnastics that makes sterilizing soil
with highly toxic substances seem not only necessary but desirable, you
have to see agriculture as an industrial process whose main goal is
maximum yield.

But the PANNA website lists all sorts of low-tech solutions
to the nematode problem, including good old-fashioned crop rotation.
And Kegley also recommends a return to old seed varieties that
developed before this era of sterilized soils.

“The ‘giant red’ — but tasteless — strawberry variety that’s popular
now doesn’t do very well in non-fumigated soil,” she says. “But the
smaller, less perfect-shaped strawberries that organic farmers are
using now are very resistant to soil pests and fungi.” As a bonus, she
adds, such strawberries actually taste good. “That’s the direction
we’re going to have to move in if we want to get beyond fumigants.”

Indeed, back when farmers grew strawberries that could fend for
themselves, the chemical companies had to scramble to get them to
accept fumigants in the first place. Farmers had no idea that nematodes
existed, much less that they might be reducing yields. Methyl bromide
originated as a byproduct of the process for making leaded gasoline in
the 1940s, and the petrochemical industry strained mightily to sell it
to farmers. This firsthand account
by a man who worked as a sales rep for Shell Oil at the time documents
the elaborate machinations he went through to demonstrate the benefits
of fumigation.

Even then, the government pitched in. The man credits “the generous
help of [the USDA] Extension Service” with helping him convince farmers
to sterilize their fields.

Of course, in the decades since, hybridized seed varieties have been developed that literally
need
sterile soil: and thus sacrifice farmworkers’ health to bring us
tasteless strawberries. It’s the mind-set that got us to this point,
not microorganisms in the dirt, that needs to be attacked.

Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.