In 1962, Rachel Carson published her landmark Silent Spring, which documented the ravages of agricultural pesticides, particularly DDT, on wildlife. The book inspired wide outrage and helped spark the modern environmental movement. It eventually led to a (now-controversial) ban on DDT. But since then, use of other pesticides has boomed.
Sign of the times?
Photos: iStockphoto
According to a USDA report, between 1964 and 1982, pesticide use in the U.S. jumped by a factor of almost three, peaking at nearly 600 million pounds annually. The USDA is shockingly casual about releasing current pesticide statistics. The freshest data I can find show pesticide use hovering at 500 million pounds in 2002 -- more than double the 1964 level.
This annual avalanche of toxins onto our crops and soils has been accompanied by mounting evidence of their ill effects on public health -- particularly that of farmers and farmworkers. The latest entry: a study from Canada showing that women who had worked on farms were nearly three times as likely as other women to develop breast cancer.
The Agricultural Health Study, a joint venture of several public-health agencies, has revealed direct links between chemical-intensive farming and both prostate cancer and retinal degeneration. A link has also been established between pesticide use and Parkinson's disease.
Shifting the Burden
If Carson's book had a limited effect on the rising tide of pesticide use, it probably did affect the types of agricultural poisons used.
In 1990's The Death of Ramon Gonzales: A Modern Agricultural Dilemma, Angus Wright argued that Silent Spring sparked a backlash against so-called "persistent" pesticides, which build up over time in soil, groundwater, and the bodies of animals. These dangerous chemicals also tend to cling in residue form to fruits and vegetables in the supermarket.
The agrichemical industry's response -- embraced by farm owners, government regulators, and global aid institutions -- was to promote pesticides that break down rapidly. But these alternatives, known as "non-persistent" chemicals, are much more dangerous at the time of application. The strategy, Wright says, was to placate public fear about pesticide poisoning by shifting as much of the risk as possible onto farm ecosystems and farmworkers, and away from consumers and the broader environment.
The shift occurred later in Mexico and other developing nations than in the U.S., Wright shows. That's because the chemical industry's first reaction to U.S. public anger about DDT and other "persistents" was to shut them out of the U.S. market and push them on farmers in the global south, which had weaker regulatory regimes. But muckraking journalists exposed a "circle of poison": chemicals that had been banned in the United States were reappearing in U.S. supermarkets heavily stocked, particularly in winter, with Mexican fruit and vegetables.
Farm at your own risk.
As a result of public outcry, use of the quicker-to-break-down but highly toxic non-persistent chemicals then exploded in the global south, particularly in areas characterized by export-oriented farming. This early-1980s switch had "immediate and tragic consequences for farmworkers," according to Wright. Despite strong industry-backed standards requiring that anyone handling such poisons be protected by respirators, rubber coveralls, and other gear, Wright observed such requirements being routinely violated by large, export-minded landowners.
Such violations remain routine -- and not just in Mexico. A 2002 report [PDF] spearheaded by the Pesticide Action Network summarizes findings from California's Department of Pesticide Regulation. The agency surveyed a sampling of pesticide-reliant farm operations between 1997 and 2001. Fully one-third violated regulations involving protective equipment, washing facilities, and fieldworker access to pesticide use information. The agency claimed that 88 percent of the protective-equipment violations stemmed from employer negligence.
In Death, Wright traces the fate of one young farmworker who died in 1981, most likely from exposure to a class of non-persistent insecticides known as organophosphates. Many products from this pesticide class -- which came upon the world stage as a nerve gas developed by German engineers during World War II -- remain legal in the United States. Two months ago, after contemplating the matter for 10 years, the U.S. EPA approved use of 32 organophosphates -- a decision so egregious that it prompted a public outcry from hundreds of agency scientists who claimed their leaders had been swayed by industry influence.
Like the oil industry, agribusiness survives on its ability to privatize profits and socialize costs. Heavy pesticide use helped bring about short-term gains in crop yields, which has meant billions in profits for grain traders, food processors, agrichemical giants, and other food-related multinational corporations. To these firms, pesticide-related deaths and maladies are what economists call an "externality" -- a cost that lands in someone else's ledger.
That the burden has been engineered to fall most heavily on farmworkers -- a group not known for its access to high-level health care -- is particularly galling.
Farmworker health has quietly become a kind of human sacrifice at the altar of cheap food. Consumers in the U.S. benefit from -- and low-income people rely on -- the world's cheapest food system. They owe it to farmworkers to demand an end to, or at least a severe reduction in, pesticide use. Consumer hell-raising helped ban DDT and other persistent pesticides in the 1970s. More than 40 years after the publication of Silent Spring, it's time to finish the job.
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Comments
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wiscidea Posted 7:35 am
18 Oct 2006
Consider the following three chemicals used for controlling late blight infecting potatoes: Maneb, Mancozeb, and Chlorothalonil. All three are recognized carcinogens and each is suspected of three or five of the following: Developmental Toxicant, Endocrine Toxicant, Immunotoxicant, Neurotoxicant, Reproductive Toxicant, Skin or Sense Organ Toxicant, or Respiratory Toxicant. Information from http://www.scorecard.org/index.tcl (a pollution information site).
A list of other chemicals used for controlling late blight can be found at
http://www.uidaho.edu/ag/plantdisease/plbclst.htm. Please look up a few of those at the pollution information site.
I would prefer to consume a GMO potato over those treated with fungicides. I would prefer to live next to a GMO potato field. I would prefer not dumping fungicides into our water supply. I would prefer not to poison the people growing food. GMOs can help us solve many problems. They are not the ultimate solution. And any technology can be abused. But they are not entirely evil either.
Is there any common ground between GMO and organic people? Can they work together to reduce pollution and improve human and environmental health?
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SMLowry Posted 6:22 am
19 Oct 2006
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wiscidea Posted 7:25 am
19 Oct 2006
"In fact, as I stated in another discussion, Round-up ready GMO crops are engineered to specifically to withstand being treated with this pesticide."
I pointed out that the technology can be abused. I am not comfortable with Round-Up Ready crops because they demand additional inputs. I'm interested in GMOs that reduce chemical use. The example I present allows a farmer to avoid using fungicides. Even the copper compounds approved for organic crops are hazardous. I tried to find information demonstrating that potatoes can be grown organically, using relatively resistant varieties, using the copper compounds, and not using GMOs, but control of late blight is not possible and yields are substantial reduced. To me, a GMO that permits growing more food on less land without chemicals is better than expanding the area cultivated land, especially in developing countries, at the expense of natural ecosystems.
SM Lowry also writes...
"Genetic engineering takes genes from totally unrelated species and forces them into corn or potatoes or rice or wheat or whatever."
The GMO in question is a potato containing a gene that confers resistance to late blight. The gene was isolated from a related wild plant in the Solanum genus. We are not putting a fish gene in a plants. The gene could be moved into cultivated varieties through semi-convential breeding, but the complexity of the potato genome makes this extremely difficult and still maintain desirable traits. It would be much more efficient to put the gene directly into the cultivars preferred in Mexico, cultivars prefrred in India, cultivars preferred in Europe. We are not creating a new monculture for the globe, but modifying potato varieties already adapted for specific cultures and climates.
Regarding...
"We already know how to farm, how to feed people, how to reduce pollution. We just don't do it. We don't need to screw around with an organism's basic DNA in order to feed people."
We could have said this at the dawn of agriculture, but we have modified most of our food organisms to the point where they would never survive long in the wild. And we continue to modify our farming practices to feed more people and reduce pollution. We substantially "screwed around" with the basic DNA of many organisms before even knowing what a gene is just so we could feed people.
And...
"We've become so used to corporate style agriculture it's hard to imagine another kind..."
GMOs can be used by the smallest farms. I propose fighting corporate domination over the technology, not the technology iteslf. I am not an apologist for the corporations.
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Teresa Binstock Posted 6:04 am
20 Oct 2006
The context of these findings is that more than 20 studies have documented a large number of intra-body toxins in humans. Those findings will be presented elsewhere in these webpages.
Teresa Binstock
Researcher in Developmental & Behavioral Neuroanatomy
References (two available free online):
1: http://www.seedcoalition.org/downloads/autism_study_UTHSC...
Palmer RF, Blanchard S, Stein Z, Mandell D, Miller C. Environmental mercury release, special education rates, and autism disorder: an ecological study of Texas. Health Place. 2006 Jun;12(2):203-9.
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio Department of Family and Community Medicine, 7703 Floyd Curl Drive, San Antonio, Texas 78229-3900, USA. (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:59 am
23 Oct 2006
If the Libs hadn't ruined our ability to use DDT, we wouldn't have lost 10s of millions of starving and diseased Africans.
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Tom Philpott Posted 4:58 am
23 Oct 2006
P.S. Thanks Theresa Binstock for an informative post.
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atreyger Posted 3:48 am
24 Oct 2006
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