Soil and human health: Understanding agricultural and socio-environmental risk and resilience in the age of climate change

Abstract

Prolonged monocropping of commodity crops, such as peanuts (Arachis hypogea L.) in West Africa, typically strips nutrients from soils and may exacerbate vulnerability to insects and diseases. In this paper, we focus on aflatoxins, toxic chemicals produced by certain molds growing on moist crops, as one risk of growing importance for its negative impacts on human health, crop yields, and agricultural livelihoods and ecosystems. We link the increased prevalence of this deadly fungus to the long history of peanut monoculture, exacerbated by market liberalization and China's increased investment and export demand for peanuts, climate change, food insecurity, as well as disregard for and displacement of traditional agricultural knowledge. We use a political ecology approach to place the public health threat from aflatoxin in the context of both historical pressures for cash-crop production of peanuts and contemporary soil degradation, food insecurity, climate change precarity and changes within social and economic systems of agriculture in Senegal.