In view of the strategic role of agriculture in food security, this article proposes to contribute to the understanding by Brazilian society of the importance of the approval of PL 3200/15, by Luiz Nishimori.
As a doctor, I worked for forty years in the Faculty of Medical Sciences of Unicamp, institution in which I developed all my academic career in the area of clinical toxicology. Specifically, I deepened my studies in the field of so-called pesticides, now agrochemicals or, more correctly, agrochemicals; researching and evaluating the health conditions of farmers and rural workers with exposure and contact with these chemicals.
After years of work, with considerable accumulation of experience, I began to be invited to participate in pesticide product registration evaluations by the Ministry of Health – at a time when even the creation of regulatory agencies was not considered.
Later, in the 1990s, CONAT, the National Advisory Committee on Toxicology, was formed. With several specialists from different areas of toxicology, the agency acted as a collaborator of the Ministry of Health to evaluate the registration of pesticides. It was, undoubtedly, an embryo of what would later be the Toxicology sector of the National Agency of Sanitary Surveillance, ANVISA.
At the beginning of ANVISA’s activities, at the invitation of the toxicology department, I taught a course where I presented the Risk Assessment tool as fundamental for the correct regulatory decision-making for agrochemicals.
I worked for years as an adviser to ANVISA to evaluate new products and reassess others. I have always defended the need for doctors, scholars, and regulatory experts to use the risk assessment tool. Regrettably, however, this was not, and never was, the proposal of the managers of that agency.
Regulating this danger-based technology became the Agency’s underpinning, making the assessments and re-evaluations of logs true “bureaucratic” nightmares. In fact, their decisions concealed a posture and conduct of an ideological nature, averse to toxicological science and directly affecting Research and Development companies.
For the exact understanding of the subject, it is necessary to understand the difference between danger and risk. That is, understand that technologies, for the most part, offer some danger. For example, the production of medicines, alcoholic beverages, automotive – whether with automated machines or not – and several others. All of them, in constant updating and development, allow the life expectancy of Brazilians, as of other world populations, to increase in extraordinary proportions and with a better quality of life. Among these technologies, agrochemicals, together with other techniques, contribute to Brazilian agriculture being the mainstay of the Brazilian economy.
In turn, the risk, which is the probability that a human being or a group of the population will suffer some effect from the use of the technologies, depends on the conditions of how they will be used or administered.
The technology that causes the most deaths in the country is the automotive, with more than 40 thousand deaths / year. What are the reasons? Speeds above regulated, lack of maintenance of vehicles, excessive hours at the wheel and abusive use of alcoholic beverages. Preventing the production of vehicles or prohibiting the production of alcoholic beverages is not really the solution, but improving orientation, enforcement and penalties when necessary. That is, to administer the technology for the reduction of the risk.
The same criteria apply to agrochemical technology. Despite the danger per se – as already mentioned – when used in accordance with the technical guidelines for safe and correct use and good agricultural practices, the risk to both the farmer and the population and the environment is very low.
My theoretical and practical experience of forty years in clinical toxicology, having already evaluated tens of thousands of farmers and workers across the five regions of the country indicates that the health conditions of these populations are similar to those of other non-agricultural regions. There is no incidence of any specific damage to your health caused by the use of agrochemical technology.
The approval of PL 3200/15 substitute, by Luiz Nishimori, will make a major advance in the evaluation and reassessment mechanism for the registration of the products of this technology. At the same time, it will eliminate the biases of visions alien to science, allowing new molecules to be made available to the Brazilian producers in the country in a more agile and safe way, generating food, fiber and renewable in a sustainable way.
However, it is necessary to carry out clinical-epidemiological and exposure studies in different scenarios of the different regions of the country, stimulated and supported by federal spheres and private sector companies. These studies are the tools capable of sustaining the assessments in a scientific way.
In this way, Science will always be the guiding force behind the decisions of regulatory agencies.
Angelo Zanaga Trapé is a member of the Agro Sustainable Scientific Council, doctor and doctor in collective health at UNICAMP, and president of the Institute of Research in Education and Health “Prof. Waldemar Ferreira de Almeida” – INPES