Pesticides as a scientific and political issue

What I'm sure was an interesting event took place today at York University: a forum on impacts of and alternatives to systemic pesticides.  Unfortunately research commitments kept me away, but I do want to note a particular aspect of this event that seems noteworthy.

All the speakers listed were scientists.  They included some of leading researchers in this field, particularly representing the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, which has done great work in recent years reviewing and assessing the evidence of the impacts of pesticides.  So I can imagine the talks today were authoritative in scientific terms.

But none of the invited speakers appear to focus on the political or social dimensions of pesticides, or farming, or the use of science in regulatory or policy matters.  This seems odd, and counterproductive, as some of key questions relating to pesticide use aren't really scientific at root, but have to do with how knowledge is used in making decisions, and the role of interest groups in determining appropriate policies for the use of toxic chemicals.  And not to mention perhaps the biggest question of all: How did we come to a point in the history of agriculture that broad-scale pesticides became the answer to the question of how crops and farmers can co-exist with other species?  That the answer to so many questions about food production seems to be "pesticides" is a conundrum that can't only be solved in the lab.

There's a still larger point here: how complicated questions about technology and how they relate to other values -- as encountered in agriculture (such as GM crops) and in many other economic activities - are consistently defined as scientific in nature, even when they are so often really about political, or social, or ethical differences.  (I talk about this quite a bit in my Environmental Science and Politics course.) Ultimately, this redefinition of political questions as scientific problems only makes them more intractable.