Responsabilidade civil por danos à pessoa decorrentes da aplicação de agrotóxicos na atividade agrária: estudos teórico e jurisprudencial de decisões dos Tribunais de Justiça dos estados brasileiros

Abstract

This thesis assesses the civil liability to pesticides’ users in Brazil for damages to the person that this activity effectively and potentially causes. The main objective is to analyze theoretical aspects and the judicial decision regarding civil liability for the pesticides’ application, whose damages caused directly to the person are increased with the increasingly flexible standardization of pesticides in all its production stages as a Brazilian trend. To elaborate the situation analysis, this work first used theoretical and qualitative research based on a bibliographic survey and legislation related to pesticides and civil liability, while the second step involved quali-quantitative Brazilian Courts judgement’s documentary survey, with the deductive reasoning’s juridical method in both stages. The theoretical reference’s result points to the need for consideration and evaluation civil liability following functions: reparative / compensatory, punitive, preventive and precautionary, as well as this circumstance as a harm’s state and conduct damage, added to the legal or normative causality notion, causality’s presumption and integral risk theory application. In the second stage results in demonstration that in Brazil the tendency is that the Judiciary does not impose civil liability on the pesticides’ users if the evidence for direct and immediate damage and causal link is not present in terms of the causal nexus in generalizing and individualizing causality’s theories. The conclusion is that in Brazil the doctrinal evolution does not follow accompanied by the judicial decision evolution, observed the difficulty to civil liability’s judicial imposition for the pesticides application. This difficulty is coupled with the current legislative tendency to facilitate from registration for manufacture to the product’s use, production, storage, transportation, distribution, commercialization and application of the product – that culminates in the excessive pesticides’ application in crops, which will allow the expansion of agro-environmental damage. Thus, there is a need to reinforce agro-environmental protection through strict legal restrictions and the consequent civil liability recognition amplitude in judgments, to promote the pesticides responsible application.