Door: Renan Zarpellon Gago
Keywords: Behind food production, Contamination, Resistance
https://graduation.kabk.nl/2025/renan-zarpellon-gago
“Since their industrial development, pesticides — synthetic compounds used to eliminate unwanted insects, rodents, fungi, and plants — have been promoted as a technological solution to ensure productivity and feed a growing global population. This narrative, still widely disseminated today, omits a crucial point: hunger in the world persists. The presence of these chemicals in our fields, tables, and bodies continues to be normalized by part of the population, without considering the consequences this entails.
In Brazil, pesticides operate as tools that impose modes of production, territorial control, and resource extraction, all under the guise of modernity and progress. Not unlike the colonial period, the main beneficiaries remain the countries of the Global North, now embodied by major chemical corporations. This is the foundation of this project: to understand pesticides not merely as toxic substances, but as symbols of a broader system of power, and instruments of a chemical colonialism. “
