Stop Experimenting on Us! Judicial Stories of Pesticide Resistance in Argentina

Abstract

This paper focuses on two paradigmatic court decisions on pesticide spraying in Argentina´s agricultural zone and offers a socio-legal approach based primarily on legal sources. The first case was brought by a small town in the province of Santa Fe where spraying in the surrounding fields was stopped, and has paved the way for a growing number of similar cases in the last decade. The second case, involved a much larger area, namely the entire territory of the province of Entre Ríos, where more than a thousand rural schools are affected by the use of pesticides. The article proceeds in two sections which analyses each of the cases and identifies the legal innovations involved as well as the challenges that remain.