Glyphosate, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world in agriculture, has devastating and dramatic effects on the health of people who are forced to live in contact with it. This time the claim is not being made by an environmental organisation or, better still, by some agency under the umbrella of the World Health Organization. It is demonstrated, through images and testimonies, by a reportage produced by Pablo Ernesto Piovano, an Argentine photographer who in 2014 decided to document the condition of the population of his country that works or lives near GM soya fields where massive doses of weedkillers are used.

The human cost of pesticides

The reportage is called El costo humano de los agrotóxicos, the human cost of pesticides, and was exhibited at the 2015 edition of the Festival della fotografia etica di Lodi. Piovano's photographs are an unsparing indictment of Monsanto, the multinational that invented the GM-Roundup combination — that is, the cultivation of genetically modified soya paired with the use of the weedkiller Roundup (to which the soya is resistant) containing glyphosate.

"This work was driven by my love of nature. I worked to find evidence of this situation, spending endless days alone with my camera, travelling more than six thousand kilometres in my twenty-year-old car, to make my contribution so that all this comes to an end," Piovano told Burn, the magazine dedicated to emerging photographers.

A brief history of glyphosate

The history of glyphosate begins in the 1950s, but its commercialisation under the name Roundup by Monsanto started in 1974 in the United States as a tool for clearing agricultural fields of weeds. Then things "got out of hand" when glyphosate began to be permanently paired with genetically modified cereals engineered to resist the pesticide. Today it is sold all over the world and the patent has expired almost everywhere, including Italy, where it is one of the best-selling plant protection products. In Europe, fourteen companies produce it.

Argentina's choices on glyphosate

The Argentine tragedy began in 1996 when the government decided to approve the cultivation and commercialisation of transgenic soya and the use of glyphosate without conducting any internal investigation, basing its decision solely on research published by Monsanto — as reported by Piovano on Burn. Since then, land under GMO cultivation has come to cover 60 per cent of the total, and in 2012 alone 370 million litres of pesticides were sprayed across 21 million hectares of land. In those same areas, cancer cases in children tripled in ten years, while cases of malformations recorded in newborns increased by 400 per cent. The cases of skin diseases and respiratory problems found for no apparent reason in young people and adults alike are, to say the least, incalculable.

A third of Argentines suffer because of glyphosate

A recent investigation, again as reported by Burn, calculated that 13.4 million Argentines — a third of the total population — have suffered the negative effects of glyphosate. In the face of all this, Argentina has taken no decision to halt this tragedy, nor has it commissioned new studies to understand what is happening to its population. On the contrary, Argentina today is home to 22 of the 90 million hectares of GMO soya cultivated worldwide, according to the German weekly Die Zeit.

The photo reportage has not, however, gone unnoticed, winning several awards including the Festival internacional de la imagen, in Mexico, and placing third in the POY Latam competition, in the category "Carolina Hidalgo Vivar el medio ambiente". But the silence and the power of a multinational of Monsanto's calibre are formidable enemies to overcome — far more powerful than evidence and suffering.