ZONIFICACIÓN PIS

Our tool aims to address the health and environmental impacts resulting from the misuse of glyphosate and other agrochemicals in large-scale agricultural production. We start from numerous scientific studies correlating exposure and/or intoxication to agrochemicals with various health issues such as cancer, leukemia, infertility, aplastic anemia, and other diverse disorders with genotoxic potential. Alongside these studies, reports highlight the high presence of agrochemicals in human samples in Argentina.

The international report called SPRINT (Sustainable Plant Protection Transition), which surveyed blood, urine, fecal matter, and other environmental samples, indicated that Argentine participants had a range of 2 to 10 pesticides in their blood with a median of 5.5, while in Europe the range was 0 to 10 with a median of 2. This information suggests a global-scale problem, but one that manifests more prominently in areas with poor regulation and control over these products. While we can't pinpoint an exact number of affected individuals, our studies indicate that approximately 20% of the population tested (in various populations in Buenos Aires) have pesticides in their bodies. When considering other studies that cross-reference different sources of information (like SPRINT), the positivity rate could be close to 100%.

One contributing factor to the scale of this issue is the regulation of these products' use in the field. There are laws at various levels of government, which sometimes overlap, contradict each other, and are not clear about where these products can be used, where they definitely cannot, and where they can be used with certain precautions to prevent product drift. In the province of Buenos Aires alone, there are 135 such laws, each with different restrictions. This creates confusion among rural community members, complexity for producers who seek to comply with the law, and challenges for local government authorities to effectively enforce legislation. Furthermore, it's not just the regulation of applications that contributes to the issue, but also the wording of these regulations, which often use abstract terms like distances for permits or prohibitions that are unclear when applied on the ground. For example, phrases like "zone of environmental protection" can be ambiguous and difficult to understand in practical terms.

Our solution, called ZONIFICACIÓN, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) map designed to visually display areas protected by various regulations in each district. Users can select their municipality to view territorial restrictions and protection zones in their area. It includes different layers to show populated areas, schools, rivers, and other assets protected by municipal ordinances. Additionally, it provides a clear summary of the regulations so that everyone can understand what compliance entails in their district, along with other relevant data and contacts for taking action if necessary. The tool aims to prevent the misuse of pesticides and serve as a resource for addressing specific issues such as inaccuracies in the shape and location of buffer zones, the inaccessibility of contacts for rural establishments, understanding jurisprudence, or accessing means of reporting non-compliance.

Marketing Campaign & Demo product VideoLink (Spanish Version): https://www.instagram.com/reel/C02VtZ2PUrx/

Link to ZONIFICACIÓN v1.0: https://zonificacion.pis.org.ar/

Our solution serves three main target groups, each with distinct use cases and objectives. Firstly, it aims to provide rural communities with easy access to the laws and jurisprudence that protect them, presented in a clear, simple, and visual format instead of complex legal documents. Additionally, it provides instant access to necessary contacts, such as those needed to report non-compliance. For producers, the tool allows them to identify which of their lots require transitioning to alternative non-chemical products and which may only be treated on weekends with prior notice to the contacts of rural schools provided. It also serves as a platform to access regulations from other districts, inspiring local authorities to improve their own regulations and policies to ensure compliance.

For the V1.0 version, we worked with the population of "Mar Chiquita," a coastal municipality with mostly rural territory in the Province of Buenos Aires. This district showed a 22% positivity rate for glyphosate in our urine tests. Despite having protection under provincial law, municipal ordinances, and current jurisprudence, dialogue and coordination with local organizations indicate that these restrictions are not being adhered to. Therefore, we incorporated their input throughout the design, planning, and development process of the tool to ensure it addresses their needs and recommendations effectively, leveraging their firsthand knowledge to create a useful tool with potential widespread and territorial use.

Democracia en Red (DER) is a Latin American NGO based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, comprised of activists, programmers, and social science professionals. For the past ten years, we've been creating citizen participation solutions with activists aimed at empowering communities, redistributing power, and strengthening democracy. We believe that at DER, we are well-suited to provide this solution not only because of our specialization in civic technology development and our track record in fostering citizen participation but also due to our network-based working methodology with various organizations, territorial assemblies, and scientific entities. Thanks to this methodology, we have diverse connections with stakeholders, enabling a virtuous synergy between technical development and the participation of the solution's beneficiaries in the creation process, generating tailored solutions based on specific territorial realities.

For v1.0, we started by working with a community with which we had previous closeness, to kick-start the project, and now with the pilot functioning, replicate and scale it to all other districts (the stage we are currently in). Don Powa, co-director of Democracia en Red and leader of the project, has years of experience in territorial activation projects and is also the founder of an organization promoting sustainability in the territory. ZONIFICACIÓN is a tool that falls within the framework of PIS (Pesticides Introducidos Silencionamiene), a "citizen science" project, so both the planning and development of the tool are enriched by the contributions of the communities, intervening in all phases of its creation process. They are present proposing ideas, providing feedback on progress, and having a voice in various meetings to decide how to proceed with the solution's work. There is also the possibility of accessing all the sources of information used since it is an open tool that makes all its data available, enabling future transformations and improvements in its use.

We consider ZONIFICACIÓN to be in a pilot stage because, although it is already available for various communities in Mar Chiquita and has a consistent design and focus, there is still a long way to go to represent the reality of many more territories. So far, we have developed the mapping of the entire municipality of Mar Chiquita, which has just over a dozen settlements, including towns and rural areas, and has over 33,000 inhabitants. We are working on a strategy to replicate v1.0 but visualizing a greater number of districts, and we are also progressing in the creation of new layers and optimizing some of the existing ones. Additionally, ZONIFICACIÓN is still in a pilot phase because it does not yet have an established set of donors or stable sources of funding.

While ZONIFICACIÓN is a project carried out by Democracia en Red, the spirit of the project it embodies is to empower municipal governments (the third level of government in Argentina) to have greater power and sovereignty in combating the impacts of agrochemicals on environmental and human health. To achieve this, we aim to provide vast amounts of systematized information and equip the territory with technological tools. These are things that different municipalities lack the financial and technical capacity to address. While we can do this on a relatively small scale, the challenge that leads us to apply to Solve is accessing funding to enhance our work and scale up the tool.

Additionally, the proposed focus on providing partners and support motivates us because we believe that this type of guidance could be crucial in helping us expand into other communities and achieve widespread adoption of the tool. We would like to explore the possibility of forming direct partnerships with government entities, finding effective ways to reach communities without existing contacts, and determining the best strategy for making an impact with the tool. We are also interested in considering which indicators would be useful for measuring the impact and evaluating the use of the tool.

1 Project Leader ~ Full-time

1 Project Assistant ~ Part-time
1 UX Designer ~ Part-time
1 Software Developer and a small team of hired data scientists
(Some tasks are accomplished with assistance from community allies)

Since around to one year and a few months