In search of Eco-Human solutions (man-environment) in the understanding of complex anthropocentric relationships, social systems and ecosystems, within human perception, as a judgment process (De Ávila Pires, 2020), which lead to actions on the environments in which cohabits; it is necessary to discuss and analyze several elements that are related in the perceptive process, to address the perception of health risks from the use of pesticides in riverside farmers, where the role of social management must command; to control; educate and study these problems in order to solve them.
In the Sub-medium region of the San Francisco Valley, agricultural activities are concentrated in irrigated fruit growing. The economy based on agribusiness has made this region the most prosperous in the San Francisco Valley. The irrigated fruit culture developed in the region is based on a model of agricultural production development, characterized by the intensive use of pesticides, to increase productivity and economic growth. More than half of the economically active population of the Lower São Francisco Valley is employed in agriculture and the indiscriminate use of pesticides in unsafe working conditions compromises the health of riverine farmers (Corcino et al., 2019). Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the relations of perception and the social, cultural and economic conditions present in the agricultural production process and in riverside communities in order to minimize the damage to health resulting from the use of pesticides.
In Fig. 5, the elements of the perceptual process and the relationships between them were presented graphically; and then the discussion of the elements identified in the “Model of human-environment perception relations” will begin.
The Environment
The environment element contains within it different spheres and content that send information between them and the individuals that contain it, such as: types of ecosystems; societies; legal frameworks or jurisprudential systems; health systems with epidemiological surveillance, health care and harm surveys; socio-political and management systems of states and governments; local and mixed cultures; education systems and continuous technological improvement; in general, dimensions in space that transmit information to individuals, along with their socio-ecosystem relationships (Santos et al., 2020).
Also, the resources of the environment can be natural, as they are: the biomass; the flora; the fauna; the soils; minerals; fossil fuels; the weather; or not natural, such as human anthropic activities and their technologies, among others that characterize the Anthropocene, expanding the definition of Santos et al. (2020).
Riverside farmers are seen as cheap labor, which, in addition to having a structure of laws and a network of care management by the SUS, which protect the worker, there is no sharp inspection in all types of culture. Grape production being the most supervised in the São Francisco River hydroterritories in the Vale region (Rodrigues et al., 2022).
In Brazil (Fig. 1) there are four legal frameworks for the regulation and protection of the health impacts caused by pesticides, such as the Ministry of Health (guarantees medical monitoring for the farmer, toxicological assessment and research into occupational and non-occupational diseases). linked to the contact or use of pesticides in the population); the Ministry of Agriculture (does toxicological assessment of pesticide molecules in food and crops) (Oliveira et al., 2022); the Ministry of the Environment (environmental assessment of water bodies, air, soil, fruits and biota in general); the Ministry of Labor (legislates for the use of PPE and for working hours in general); and the Public Ministry that takes the problem to judgment, in the process of labor abandonment of the riverine farmer or damages in general by pesticides, and in some cases until the Federal Supreme Court (STF), (Pelaez, 2010).
Crops such as bananas, onions, watermelon and melons are neglected in inspection, with a high amount of pesticides per planted area. According to the IBGE, the national pesticide consumption index per planted area, calculated from area and commercialization data, grew from 3.2 kg of pesticide/ha in 2005 to 6.7 kg/ha in 2014, (ANVISA, 2019). Today the San Francisco Valley is one of the regions that consumes the most pesticides in Brazil, second only to the southern region.
The increase in the number of new registrations granted to pesticides and the like, reported more recently, points to the accelerated continuity of this trend. If, as of 2016, the number is 277 new records, and in 2017, 2018, and 2019, it reaches 405, 449, and finally 474 new records, respectively. Most of the pesticides released from 2016 to 2019 are products intended for the pesticide industry, bringing, as a potential consequence, increased consumption due to the high resistance of pests in crops to products previously used (ANVISA, 2019).
Another environmental dimension to the contact with riverside farmers due to the increase in pesticide authorizations is the correlation with the number of poisonings. According to the Notifiable Diseases Information System (Sinan), which collects data generated by the National Epidemiological Surveillance System (SNVE), between 2007 and 2017, 41,600 cases of intoxication by agricultural pesticides accumulated, on an increasing scale: in the first year of the period, 2,200 cases had been reported; in 2017, there were 5,100 cases, more than double. Considering all the related cases from 2007 to 2017, 88% refer to acute intoxications and 42% were due to occupational exposure (ANVISA, 2019).
The environment of the riverine farmer in the northeast and everything that surrounds them in the space they inhabit; from their houses, plantations, the water bodies; the ecosystems it invades for any activity; the social system that involves its production dynamics (economy, legislation), accessibility to health care, culture, education and its human relations; the resources of the environment; external forces; human technologies such as agricultural machinery, pesticides and PPE, among other factors that occupy its universe. This interchange between man-environment gives him a lot of information about what happens in his environment.
The Filter, Perceptive Barrier Or Conditioning Factors In Perception
There is a type of filter or cognitive barrier in human beings that conditions these stimuli, “conditioning factors” (individual and cultural in Fig. 1) that arrive from the “environment” to man in the form of information. The conditioning factors in human perception are individual and cultural. The individual factors are the relationships with the self (with spirituality; the body; reason); distance in space; knowledge; motivation; conduct; participation to inclusion. We have cultural constraints such as family relationships; emotional; affective with others; social in general (Guion, 1998; Rogers et al., 2020).
Social, cultural and technological inequalities in production, in the participation or social inclusion of riverside farmers, lead to socioeconomic inequality that intervenes in the level of development that, in the rural environment, is noted in the differences in income, educational and cultural levels of producers. Therefore, identifying the constraints or perceptual barriers that may contribute to reducing socio-technological differences among riverside farmers represents a challenge for the equitable socioeconomic development of the different agricultural regions of the country (Cardoso, 2020).
Fear of personal and family economic shortages, or the lack of other means of income, can make riverine farmers continue to be exposed to the risk of working with pesticides. The relations with the farmer's I (individual conscience that is conditioned by the collective conscience), the perception in space, in the distance from the pesticide problem, the individual motivations previously addressed and the knowledge received during his life constitute the filter to see all his situations (Motta and Ortiz, 2018).
The Perception Of The Human Body
The body collects stimuli from the entire environment, of which it is a part, but only it chooses how it will return what it received (Mendoca and Gullo, 2020). This places the body as a mediator of the information that is in the environment, being able to modify it, before or after its processing, and also give priority according to its critical judgment. But to have an adequate criterion of a situation one needs sufficient knowledge about what happens outside or inside the environment of the body.
Research on risk perception, for self-care and care for others, indicates that when the human body is more intensely perceived as an objective (real) risk, there will be greater awareness of the threat. But, on the other hand, if the exposure is frequent, there is a perception that this risk is more controllable (subjective risk). The proximity and daily coexistence with the risks provoke a denial, as the risks are identified (Mendoca and Gullo, 2020).
In the case of farmers in the Sub-medium do San Francisco, as well as the research by Dos Santos et al. (2021) reveal that they feel that they do not need protection by not using PPE properly. They dispose of containers, gloves and clothes inappropriately, exposing their homes, their loved ones and the entire living environment to risk. They do not focus on self-care and care for the health of the environment, but on their family's economic situation and food production.
Unfortunately, the lack of information, the daily proximity to pesticides without obvious damage in the short term are the causes that lead to the denial of these risks. Most do not believe that they need to protect their body from pesticides (Dos Santos et al., 2021).
The Memory
Memory has a fundamental role within the history of life, in people's memories and especially in riverside communities, since the subject needs to access their memory and bring elements that end up relating the past with the present, given that the present can interfere with the individual's way of reliving their past memories (Callefi and Ichikawa, 2019). Memories are responsible for the subjective character of perception, providing the sensation of perceptual stability (Lima, 2021).
The representation of the environment in memory is the way of perceiving a real or possible action, eliminating from consciousness everything that does not interest the action at that moment regulated by desire. And consciousness, is the memory integrated in the conservation and accumulation of knowledge or representations of the reality of the past in the present. But consciousness also anticipates the future, with the precaution arising from a devastating phenomenon or action in the environment. This can be represented when riverine farmers encounter loss of local flora or fauna in the environment, death of fish or increase in natural bioindicators of environmental pollution (Lima, 2021).
The relationships between perception, memory and action have important consequences for understanding the subjectivity of riverside people who use pesticides on their plantations. If they remembered all the times, they and others got sick or how many people in the environment dies when using pesticides and the knowledge acquired in the farmers' associations. But memory is sustained by what emotionally impacts the time of learning and being constantly in contact with this knowledge (Callefi and IChikawa, 2019).
The Socio-cognitive Processing
The human mentality can act by processing information, prioritizing feelings of love or selfishness, depending on the satisfaction of their desire, which inappropriately can manifest themselves in territorial, competitive and consumerist behaviors (Marques, 2017). Throughout human development, since the first Sapiens, killing for dominance in planetary spaces, already more exacerbated in the mid-20th century, living standards with a high ecological footprint in this 21st century, to the detriment of nature, in addition to social differences in standards consumption, accelerate the depletion of the Earth's natural resources (Pengue, 2021).
The Theory of Trust (due to overconfidence that will not be harmed in health, or lack of trust in scientific social sectors that promote personal and other care) in information processing also influences the minimization of risk (Gigerenzer, 1991).
The public participation of the individual creating social responsibility in the co-creation of social value (Lee, 2021) as well as feeling part of something or a place, flourishes and solidifies the individual and collective feeling of socio-ecosystem love, called Topophilia (Tuan, 2012).
The symptoms of pesticide damage often go unnoticed by riverside farmers in the São Francisco Valley, who generally do not make any association with the symptoms presented to the use of pesticides during or after handling the product, seeming not to recognize them as signs of intoxication. This prevents them from resorting to specialized care, as they associate the symptoms with those of a simple indisposition, a virus or that these are natural processes resulting from their work. Therefore, subjective and constant symptoms of occupational exposure can be an early indication of intoxication (França et al., 2020).
The Automatic Response
Studies in decision making (with assessment of healthy-adequate or inadequate perception) are based on moral judgments, intimate relationships, emotional processes, facial perception and social judgment, motivation and goal pursuit, conformity and behavioral contagion, embodied cognition and the emergence of automatic processes in early childhood. Taken as a set of recent works in these domains, they demonstrate that automaticity does not result exclusively from a process of skill acquisition (where a process always starts as conscious and deliberate, becoming capable of automatic operation only with frequent use), in which there are evolved substrates and learning mechanisms in early childhood also involved (Pinto, 2021), the individual and cultural constraints exposed in Fig. 5.
When farmers work and are thirsty or hungry, they automatically eat fruits such as grapes, mangoes, among other fruits in the region without decontaminating, which can cause intoxications that can lead to death.
The Decision Processes
Without a consequent contemplation of the human relationship, between man and the ecosystem in which he inhabits, it makes the agricultural worker not see the consequences of the damage of these practices, to him as a microsystem and to other systems (Carvalho, 2016).
In order for the individual to react and make decisions compatible with the risk situation in question, these risks have to be perceived and the decisions and behaviors will then be compatible with the safety that the situation requires. If their perceptions were sick or wrong, care in personal, social, public legislative and environmental sustainability protection efforts may fail (Slovic et al, 1982).
Taken as a set of recent works in these domains, they demonstrate that automaticity does not result exclusively from a skill acquisition process (where a process always starts out as conscious and deliberate, becoming capable of automatic operation only with frequent use) in which there are evolved substrates and learning mechanisms in early childhood also involved (Bargt et al., 2012) the individual and cultural constraints exposed in Fig. 5.
Ethics as human conduct is one of the relations of perception in the cultural education of societies that is reflected in the decision-making of conscious thought. Today it would be a question of ethics to see the dangers of using pesticides. The uses of pesticides are potentially harmful in all their forms; but it has great importance in laboratory research on in vitro germination, as auxins (growth hormones etc.) in small doses that are harmless to the environment (Ruthis, 2021).
The Behavior Or Conduct
Within the concept from Moran (1990) to De Ávila Pires (2020) the model of man-environment relations and perception as a judgment process, we can see that there is a direct relationship between capturing information from the environment in which the individual perceives the environment properly or not, and that there are internal logical structures in the human being that process this information that is categorized in relevance and complexity; in addition to a memory of experiences that can condition the evaluation to the decision process that leads to actions, which in this case we will call human behavior.
The inappropriate behavior of riverine farmers when using pesticides are: production agriculture with extensive areas of monocultures; the use of the same pesticides at the same time of the year on crops; repeated and indiscriminate use of pesticides in pest control that increase pest resistance and harm nature; the wrong or late identification of pests and not studying climate changes that favor greater environmental impacts; move plants and cultures to new environments without previous study; consider pesticides harmless, non-toxic; the misuse of a material in any way not described in accordance with the Law, altering dosage rates or violating specific safety instructions, not using protective equipment, or mishandling PPE; the incorrect preparation, storage and disposal of containers and other pesticide residues; eating food without proper decontamination on or off plantations, among others (Bernardi et al. 2018; Petarli et al., 2019; De Souza et al., 2020) constitute personal and collective risk behaviors in riverine farming communities in the face of the problem which is the pesticide in agriculture causing diseases.