Atrazine: A lively chemical journey

Abstract

Atrazine is a widely used pesticide, particularly effective on corn plantations for its herbicidal properties of killing and preventing the growth of certain weeds and grasses. Evidence of its neurotoxicity, hormone disruption and reproductive toxicity led the EU to ban the chemical in 2003. Despite long standing evidence of its harmful effects, South Africa, along with many countries in the global south, continue to use atrazine, the majority of which is imported from the EU. Drawing on South Africa as a case study and entry point, I situate atrazine as one of numerous manifestations of the skewed distribution of toxicity globally, highlighting the deeply political nature of chemical-induced harm.

In this research, I have employed biochemical, epidemiological, historical, social, political, and scientific lenses to collate an interdisciplinary understanding of atrazine’s biochemical, ecological, and economic effects; how its harm lands unevenly on poor and marginalized people, often in the global south; and how commercial and governmental institutions enable and maintain its use. This interdisciplinary understanding of atrazine’s unevenly experienced effects as well as its varied socio-political figurations illustrates how and why regulatory processes have proved vastly inadequate to curtail the harmful effects caused by atrazine and other pesticides.

To situate this broad network of connections, this paper works with the concept of chemical relations. This draws on new materialist principles, affording atrazine a sense of liveliness to accurately annotate how it relates both as a chemical compound and as an unruly regulatory entity. The chemical relations are unpacked within a concept of infrastructure, providing the necessary context to begin to grapple with the scale of material and social networks intertwined with the proliferation of harmful chemicals and their unevenly experienced effects.