“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life – a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient and capable of striking back in unexpected ways.”
– Rachel Carson
100 YEARS FROM TODAY: The use of pesticides has vanished. Agriculture is conducted strictly on the basis of agro-climatic zones and has shifted from monoculture to polyculture. Taking the lead from Odisha, India, where Integrated Pest Management had eliminated the use of pesticides for their rice crop as far back as the year 2015, inter-cropping and biological pest control systems are in place all over the world. In Africa, a parasitic wasp saved the continent’s cassava crop in the year 2090, and the insect is now protected as a sacred symbol of nature’s artifice. More than 80 per cent of all food produced around the world comes from small farm holdings. The sea is now a major source of vegetable protein, obtained from sea grasses and plankton harvested sustainably by all nations. Combining food crops is already yielding returns for countries such as Mexico where inter-planting maize with beans yields 70 per cent more food than when maize is planted alone. With the collapse of intensive agriculture, people have returned to gathering wild fruit and tubers as a supplemental source of food in rural areas around the world. Many such foods also find their way to urban centres that, in return, export fertilisers to the hinterland after composting their own organic wastes.
A pipe dream? Perhaps not. The awareness of the impact of chemicals in our life is increasing at an exponential rate and I believe that it is only a matter of time before the pesticide manufacturers are forced to pay for the lethal impact their products have on our health. I predict that what the cigarette industry faced in courts in the USA, is tiny compared to the law suits that pesticide manufacturers will eventually have to pay to individuals who have contracted cancer, or given birth to genetically injured fetuses.
The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has done India a great service. Not just because they nailed a lie being propagated by sharp communicators about the safety of bottled water and aerated drinks, but because they managed to shake the nation from its stupor and it might be just that much easier now to fight for freedom from pesticide contamination, which affects everything from water to breast milk.
While the Coca Cola and Pepsi spin doctors are predictably up in arms, two agencies that should have been taken to task for their complicity with pesticide manufacturers have thus far escaped media attention – the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) and the Ministry of Health.
Set up with great expectations, today the MoEF in particular has become a glorified rubber stamp for industrial scale projects of all descriptions from chemical factories to dams, mines and even nuclear reactors. I know this ministry well. It is stuffed to the gills with “facilitators” who are said to profit richly from their ability to grant or win environmental clearances for lethal projects. The Health Ministry is equally culpable, however, fortunately for us, both do have some excellent officers in their ranks. But, like many NGOs, such individuals must fight politically powerful interests who profit from bending and breaking the letter and spirit of the law. And very often, these are the very people who are punished by politicians for trying to do right by the nation.
Today, project proponents openly boast that environmental clearances “can be managed”. In such a situation, the chemical and pesticide industries are enjoying a field day in India. Thanks to efforts of NGOs like CSE, Greenpeace and Toxics Link, this may not be possible with as much ease in the days ahead.
To those of us concerned about whether or not to drink pesticides, the words of an organic farmer should ring loud: “As you sow, so shall you reap. If you sow pesticides, you will reap poison.” In Punjab, mothers now feed their children forty times the safe levels of DDT in the breast milk. In the days ahead we will discover even greater dosages of pesticides in wines, fruits, vegetables and fish. Globally, over three million people suffer from acute pesticide poisoning every year, of which 200,000 actually die – most in countries such as India. This is largely because Indians are importing chemicals that have been banned by Northern nations. Ironically, instead of securing our food stocks, such strategies serve to threaten our food security as insects are now resistant to our poisons, while their natural predators such as frogs, mantises and dragonflies have succumbed to our toxins. Pesticides, you see, do not know when to stop killing.
Anil Agarwal would have been proud of those to whose charge he entrusted his precious Centre for Science and Environment. CSE has done us all a great service by exposing Coke and Pepsi. More power to their investigative arm, I would say.
But the battle against pesticides cannot be fought by this organisation or that. It requires each one of us to be involved and the first step is to be aware. Long before they began to show up in breast milk, pesticides had for instance entered the embryos of White bellied Sea Eagles. They had contaminating the habitat of the one horned rhino in Kaziranga. And the food chain of the tigers of the Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve. Had we heeded these early warning signals, perhaps the chemical war being waged against us may have been countered much earlier.
In the words of the famous Rachel Carson: “The chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life”. The next logical step against these lethal “weapons of mass destruction” must be for us to boycott foods that are unsafe and this we can only do if we patronise the produce of an increasing number of farms that now grow organic crops.
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Bittu Sahgal
Bittu Sahgal Editor, Sanctuary magazine[/column]