Amidst a hurricane of lawsuits that the agrochemical multinational Bayer-Monsanto faces in America and elsewhere over its herbicides Roundup and Dicamba alleged link to cancer, a joint investigation by Unearthed, a journalists research group founded by the Swiss NGO Public Eye and Greenpeace UK found that India tops the global chart with nearly 59 per cent of the pesticides sales being of ‘Highly Hazardous Pesticides’. Japan follows up with 52 per cent; Brazil with 49 per cent; US with 36 per cent and UK sells only 11 per cent of these.
As per a report in The Guardian agrochemical companies haves disputed this data. Bayer has specifically termed it ‘misleading’ but has still not countered it with its own data. Meanwhile, CropLife International, a powerful lobby group of the agro-chemical industry, claims only 15 per cent of its products are Highly Hazardous, 10 per cent that can be ‘used safely and responsibly’. Nevertheless, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHT) are defined as “pesticides that are acknowledged to present particularly high levels of acute or chronic hazards to health or the environment according to internationally accepted classification systems.”
This reminds me of a discussion I had with Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug sometimes in the mid-1980s. To a question what he had to say about Rachel Carlson’s path-breaking book Silent Spring, considered to have spearheaded the environment movement, Borlaug said that she was an ‘evil force’ and ‘these are the kind of people who don’t want hunger to go away’. He then explained that pesticides are like medicines. Farmers have to use them carefully taking all the precautions. What Borlaug said could be debated at length but it certainly formed the basic strategy for the Green Revolution wherein pesticides were used to save crops from pest damage. But over the years, as pesticides became more pervasive in environment, innumerable studies have shown the use and abuse of chemical pesticides leading to environmental damages, ecological imbalances, pest resistance and contamination of the entire food chain. More recently, the UN Human Rights Council has said that pesticides have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole.”
“It’s a myth,” Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food told The Guardian: “Using more pesticides has nothing to do with getting rid of hunger. According to FAO, we are able to feed 7 billion people today. Production is definitely increasing, but the problem is poverty, inequality and distribution.” The report further said: “Chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.”
After the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a report linking Glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp herbicide) to cancer in humans, a flurry of lawsuits in America were unleashed against the use of the toxic pesticide. While Monsanto (which has since been bought over by Bayer) claimed that regulatory agencies worldwide, including European Commission and US Environment Protection Agency, do not point to a link between Glyphosate and cancer, a large number of cancer victims nevertheless began filing legal cases. As per the latest count, an estimated 42,000 (and still counting) lawsuit have been filed so far, several legal sources say that the number of plaintiffs may have already swelled to over 100,000 by now.
Not only against Glyphosate, the lawsuits now have also moved on to another herbicide Dicamba. On Feb 15, a US federal court awarded a Missouri farmer $ 265 million in damages for the destruction wrought to his peach orchard. The farmer charged the two big agrochemical companies – Bayer and BASF – for wrecking havoc to his orchard from Dicamba herbicide sprays done by his neighbour that drifted to his field. The herbicide was being used by his neighbour for Dicamba-resistant cotton that drifted to his peach orchard ‘curling leaves and killing trees’. Another more or less similar 140 lawsuits against Dicamba now await the companies.
But it’s the legal action against Glyphosate that is being keenly watched. So far, in three trials against Glyphosate, the jury has awarded $2.3 billion in damages to four plaintiffs. Although the damages were later reduced to $ 190 million, the judgements mostly pertain to the failure of the company to adequately warn consumers of cancer risks posed by the herbicide. It was first in Aug 2018 that a San Francisco jury had awarded Dewayne Johnson, a gardener, $ 289 million in damages, which was later, reduced to $ 78 million. He suffered from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and claimed that he used different Glyphosate formulations in sprays. Since then three more plaintiffs have been awarded in two cases heard.
In India, a Down to Earth magazine says on an average 10,000 pesticide poisoning cases are reported every year. The National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) had recorded 7,060 deaths from accidental pesticide poisoning in 2015, which highlights the grave danger pesticides poses. The fact that the nearly Rs 20,000-crore pesticides industry is expected to grow at a rate of 8.1 per cent till 2024, clearly shows how crucial it is to fix the regulatory holes. The proposed Pesticides Management Bill 2020 expected to be placed in Parliament will perhaps not only tighten the regulations, and make industry pay for the health damages it causes; but also look beyond keeping the tens of thousands of lawsuits in mind.
If only the world had listened to forewarning that the eminent Prof David Pimental of the University of Cornell had issued five decades back, in mid-1970s, perhaps much of the damage could have been averted. I still recall the title of his scientific paper: “99.9% pesticides go into environment. Only 0.1% hits the target pest.” Knowing that pesticides are poisons, and with less than 1 per cent of chemicals effective against pests, the world could have certainly evolved safer alternatives. Who will take that blame?
But equally important, if 90 per cent of all food eaten in the city of Copenhagen is organic, there is no reason why city dwellers cannot opt for healthy pesticide-free food. That’s a true smart city. #
The hazards of pesticides. The Tribune. Feb 26, 2020
https://www.tribuneindia.com/
The hazards of pesticides. The Tribune. Feb 26, 2020
https://www.tribuneindia.com/
0 comments:
Post a Comment