From Field to Planet: The Hidden Impacts of Pesticide Use
Sustainability Dialogue
During Utrecht Science Week, Utrecht University hosts the exhibition De verborgen impact van bestrijdingsmiddelen at the University Library USP. To go deeper on this topic, Pathways to Sustainability organizes this Sustainability Dialogue, bringing together researchers to explore how the consequences of pesticide use play out across local, regional, and global scales — and what this means for sustainable futures.
Starting from the history of Dutch agriculture and its public health legacies, the conversation zooms out to examine how the burdens of pesticide use are unevenly distributed across regions and communities worldwide. A key thread running through the dialogue is inequality: who bears the hidden costs of pesticide use, and why? The dialogue closes by connecting these patterns to occupational and environmental health, asking what a truly sustainable approach to agriculture requires at every scale.
More speakers to be announced.
Julia Swart | Utrecht Unversity, Economist | Tackling Gender Inequality and Sustainability in Agribusiness
Julia's research traces the economic connections between diverse actors across the global cut-flower market and what these connections reveal about power, pesticide use, and sustainability. At first glance, the colour and shape of a flower may seem purely aesthetic; in reality, they reflect suppliers' responses to production methods shaped by buyer demands. Decisions made by buyers in countries like the Netherlands directly affect the lived realities of small farmers in places like Colombia. To better understand these dynamics, Julia and her team have visited cut-flower farms in both Colombia and the Netherlands, and are currently preparing research that illuminates the experiences of farmers and workers on small to medium-scale flower farms, particularly around pesticide use.
Anna Teijeiro Fokkema | Utrecht University, Environmental Historian
Anna is an environmental historian currently completing her PhD on agricultural affiliated industries in the Netherlands (1970–present), with a focus on debates around environmental problems and the growing influence of the pesticide and animal feed industries. From October 2026, she will join Floor Haalboom on the project Feeding Climate Obstruction: Agro-Industrial Environmental Obstruction Networks, Far-Right Politics and Public Debate in the Livestock-Dense Netherlands at Utrecht University. She is also co-founder and co-organiser of the Food and Agricultural History Network Netherlands.
Hans Kromhout | Utrecht University, Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences
Hans Kromhout is an occupational hygiene and epidemiology specialist, based at the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences at Utrecht University. Kromhout’s work has covered the health effects of chemical and physical (electromagnetic fields) agents in the workplace and general environment. He has been the (co-)PI of large international studies in among others the asphalt industry, rubber manufacturing industry, industrial minerals industry, health sector and agriculture as well as community-based studies on cancer, respiratory diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, and reproductive health effects. Recent projects concerned occupational exposure to chromium-6 and ultrafine particles in the defense and transport. In one of his current projects, Kromhout focuses on occupational exposures to pesticides and the risk of prostate and breast cancer.
- Start date and time
- End date and time
- Location
- Boothzaal, Utrecht University Library Science Park (Heidelberglaan 3, Utrecht)
- Registration