TL: PESTICIDES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SO: Greenpeace Mediterranean Campaign (GP) DT: not dated Keywords: greenpeace reports pesticides gp toxics agrichemicals agriculture alternatives risks safety chlorinated europe / The Promise of Pesticides After World War II, pesticides were touted as a miracle of modern science, destined to eradicate pests and end world hunger. The scientific advances from chemicals developed for warfare during this war had ramifications far beyond the battlefield. The discovery that organic chemicals could also effectively destroy insects and weeds held out to the post-war world the possibility of an agriculture freed from destructive "pests". Since 1945, more than 45,000 different pesticide formulations have entered the global market. Pesticide use has skyrocketed to more than six billion pounds used every year; more than one pound for every person living today. But the vision of an agriculture free from pests has never materialized. The legacy of the 40- year-old war on pests is poisoned water, soil, air, food and people. The pesticide revolution, rather than improving living conditions in the world, is making them worse. Greenpeace is working to reverse these trends by stopping the export of dangerous pesticides from industrial to developing countries. Greenpeace is also pressuring the World Bank and other international lending institutions to end their support of pesticide use in developing countries, where the most acute effects of this use are felt. Ultimately, Greenpeace is promoting sustainable agriculture that is environmentally sound, safe for farm workers and consumers, economically viable for farmers and free of destructive and expensive chemicals. Environmental and Health Effects Chemicals potent enough to destroy insects and weeds cannot at the same time be harmless to people and the environment. Widespread pesticide use is having both short-and longterm harmful effects. * The World Health Organisation estimates that 25 million people are affected by pesticide poisoning annually; 220,000 die as a result. Other organisations monitoring international health believe these figures could be much higher. * Long-term health effects of pesticide exposure include cancers, birth defects, genetic damage, respiratory ailments, neurological disorders, liver and kidney damage and reproductive problems. * The poisoning of farmers, farm workers and consumers is wide- spread. One study in Malaysia revealed that 54% of agricultural workers surveyed had been seriously poisoned by pesticides. In Perth, Western Australia, heptachlor levels in the breast milk of women, whose homes had been treated with the pesticide for termites, were up to 12 times what the World Health Organisation considers "acceptable" levels in cow's milk. * Water runoff and leaching from pesticide-treated agricultural lands pollutes lakes, rivers and underground aquifers with dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals. Pesticides contaminate groundwater in 38 states. * Pesticide residues in plants consumed by humans and animals have introduced toxic chemicals into the food chain. Pesticide compounds accumulate in the tissues of humans and animals until they reach dangerous levels. Birds in the Great Lakes have levels of some pesticides, including DDT, 10,000 times greater than the concentration found in water. * Every year, countless birds and animals sicken or die from exposure to pesticides that are applied to crop lands. Normal reproduction can be severely affected. Habitat is often reduced or degraded by the elimination of natural food sources. * Pesticides are indiscriminate toxic chemicals -they kill not only the pest but also nontarget, beneficial species of natural predator and parasite insects. By eliminating natural systems of checks and balances, pesticides often make pest problems worse. * Carried by wind, water and soil, pesticides can move throughout the global environment. Antartic seals and penguins have traces of pesticides such as DDT in their systems, even though the pesticides were used on other continentes thousands of miles away. * The effects of pesticides do not end when their use is banned. Several remain in the food chain for years. Pesticides such as DDT, chlordane and heptachlor are among the most persistent of all chemicals; they can be found in soils more than 20 years after their application. Other pesticides decompose to breakdown compounds more toxic than the original chemical. An Expensive Chemical Addiction The pesticide revolution, promising cheap plenitude, has delivered instead an expensive chemical addiction. One irony of the steadily increasing worldwide use of pesticides is the continued increase in crops lost to insect pests. Since the late 1940s in the U.S.A., crop losses due to insect pests have almost doubled -from 7 to 13 percent- while pesticide use has increased 11 times. Almost one-quarter of all pesticides are used to destroy pests that affect only the appearance of foods. However, minor cosmetic imperfections affect neither the taste nor the nutritional value of foods. Pesticide use in developing countries has increased dramatically with the spread of "Green Revolution" varieties of rice, wheat and other grains and the expansion of crops such as cotton, fruits and vegetables grown solely for export. The promotion of this chemical-dependent agriculture has eliminated traditional, ecologically appropriate farming practices throughout the world. Farms producing a variety of crops have been replaced by larger, more mechanized single-crop farms that are more likely to be overrun by pests. The introduction of high-yield crop strains has required large amounts of expensive water, fertilizer and pesticides to achieve the greater yields for which they were developed. Too many of these "miracle" crop species have had their natural defences against insects bred out of them and must be doused with increasingly greater amounts of pesticides. Pesticide use often makes pest problems worse. While the presence of any insect is frequently considered a problem for the farmer, in fact most species are not pests, and many are beneficial. Beneficial insect predators and parasites attack many potential pest species, preventing them from reaching "pest" levels. The indiscriminate destruction of insects with pesticides upsets the ecological balance, destroying beneficial insects and other natural control agents along with the pests. Populations of otherwise harmless insects surge to become serious problems when their natural enemies are eliminated. Pest resistance is another alarming consequence of pesticide use. Pesticide applications never completely eradicate the target pest, and survivors are often genetically predisposed to tolerate the pesticide. With their ability to quickly reproduce, insects, diseases and even weeds can rapidly evolve, "fixing" the resistance genes within the population; insects may hatch several generations in one growing season, each more immune to pesticides than the last. After over four decades of escalating pesticide use, close to 500 insect species have been found to be resistant to between one and five main pesticide types, with 17 species resistant to all insecticides. At least 100 species of fungi and 48 species of weeds have also become resistant to pesticides. Exports: Profits from Poisons Since the 1960s, industrialized countries have banned or strictly regulated more and more of the most dangerous pesticides because of their impact on public health and/or the environment. At the same time, these countries allow pesticide manufacturers to export these restricted chemicals to developing nations, which often do not have the regulations or technical resources to prevent pesticide misuse. In the U.S.A., the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) allows U.S.A. manufacturers to export pesticides that have been banned or have never been registered for use in the U.S.A. In 1989, the U.S.A. government reported that one-quarter of the chemicals sent abroad were not registered domestically. Many other pesticides are severely restricted, which means that they can only be used by trained applicators, under certain strictly regulated conditions. The U.S.A. law requires only that importing countries be notified of a pesticide's regulatory status when an unregistered pesticide is exported. This mechanism has proven grossly inadequate in protecting farmers, farm workers and consumers in both the U.S.A. and importing countries. Ironically, the principal use of 70% of the pesticides in developing countries is for crops grown for export to industrialized countries. This sets the stage for what is known as the "Circle of Poison": pesticides not used in the U.S.A. but manufactured here are exported, used on food crops overseas and then return to U.S.A. consumers as residues on imported foods. The export of these pesticides thus undermines the protection to U.S.A. consumers that banning the pesticides was supposed to provide in the first place. The U.S.A. Food an Drug Administration (FDA) has found that over 6% of the imported produce randomly tested between 1979 and 1985 was contaminated with unacceptable levels of pesticide residues. Despite this high figure and the threat to public health, only one to two percent of the 43,000 million pounds (??) of food imported into the U.S.A. each year is inspected for pesticide residues. Even so, the FDA only looks for certain pesticides, and many others can slip through undetected. Beyond the threat to consumers, it is farmers and farm workers in developing countries, producing crops intended for the export market, who are in the greatest danger. Farm workers and their families live next to sprayed fields, work beneath the path of crop duster planes, drink and bathe in contaminated water and eat poisoned produce. Due to inadequate regulations and poor enforcement in many developing countries, too few precautions are taken in the sale, handling and disposal of pesticides and their containers. Moreover, given widespread illiteracy, education on safe pesticide handling is difficult, and cultural and language differences contribute to the danger of poisoning. The skull and crossbones, a danger signal in Western countries, is isued as the trademark of a popular pesticide in southeast Asia. In parts of South America, pesticides are given the innocuous name "plant medicine." Sometimes label information is not in the language native to the country of use and doesn't provide adequate precautionary statements. Many farmers use old pesticide containers to transport water or store foodstuffs. The pesticide manufacturing process has also proven lethal. Many international chemical companies have located their factories in developing countries where costs are lower and environmental and safety regulations are fewer or not enforced. Manufacturing- related accidents have proliferated as a result. The most serious to date has been the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, when a Union Carbide plant released a pesticide fog that drifted into nearby residential areas, killing at least 2,500 people and injuring thousands more. Despite all of these problems, the pesticide industry continues irresponsibly to promote dangerous products and technologies in a world that is unprepared to handle them. Financing Disasters Much of the expensive, chemically dependent agriculture in developing countries is made possible by massive loans for agricultural development. Multilateral and bilateral lending institutions are powerful economic forces that loan development capital, provide grants and promot high-technology agricultural research, thus guaranteeing markets for pesticide producers. One aim of multilateral development banks (MDBs) in recent years has been to encourage the expansion of export crop production. The intent is to supply produce for industrial countries while at the same time generating cash to pay the developing countries' foreign debts. Instead, the result has been glutted international markets, burgeoning foreign debt and reduced self-reliance of basic food production in developing countries. Providing more development assistance than any other MDB, the World Bank plays a key role in influencing pesticide use in developing countries. The Bank finances hundreds of millions of dollars of pesticide purchases each year. While the Bank's own guidelines specify that alternatives to pesticides should be used whenever possible, the Bank has yet to effectively implement this policy and continues to emphasize pesticide use when funding agricultural development projects. Many projects funded by the World Bank illustrate its irresponsible lending practices. In Egypt, for example, the Second Agricultural Development Project (ADP) is anticipated to lead to a ninefold increase in pesticide use over six years. Another project in Mexico supports up to 16.4-fold increases in pesticide spending by targeted farms. And in Yemen, the Wadi Al- Jawf project will introduce pesticides into an area of traditional farming where no pesticides had been formerly used. Getting Off the Treadmill Farmers in every part of the world have shown that it is possible to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, pesticide use while at the same time maintaining or increasing crop yields and profits. To do so, they use a variety of alternative approaches to farming and pest control that are environmentally safe and economically viable. By combining different ecological pest management techniques that utilize natural ecological processes, farmers can prevent the buildup of pest populations to the point where they would require chemical control. Effective ecological pest management methods include introducing and conserving beneficial insects, rotating and diversifying crops from year to year, changing tillage practices, selecting resistant plant varieties, timing the planting of crops to avoid attacks by pests or simply planting crops in their appropriate climate. These methods are safer, more effective and less expensive than the annual use of billions of pounds of chemicals. They would save much of the $17,000 million a year spent internationally on pesticides, a critical fact for a debt-ridden world that can ill afford an expensive chemical addiction. The International Greenpeace Pesticides Campaign * Greenpeace is calling on the industrialized countries to prohibit the export of pesticides that have been banned, canceled, severely restricted or never registered in the country of origin. * Until such a ban is accepted, Greenpeace, along with governments of developing countries, is calling for the international acceptance of the principle of "prior informed consent." This requires that restricted products not be exported unless the importing country has been informed of the reason for any regulatory action and has given consent to the shipment of the controlled product. * Greenpeace is closely monitoring the actions of the World Bank and other MDBs to ensure that environmental concerns expressed by the banks translate into changes in policies and lending priorities. Greenpeace will continue to publicize the banks' dangerous and short-sighted policies until the financing of chemical-dependent agriculture stops. What You Can Do 1. Let the President of the World Bank know of your opposition to their practices. Ask him to end the Bank's role in financing chemical-dependent agriculture: President The World Bank 1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433 2. Support organic farming by purchasing produce grown without the use of pesticides or other chemicals. Not only is it safer to eat, but consumer habits send a message to national and international food producers. Ask your store to stock organic produce (if they don't already) or patronize those stores that do. 3. Contact Greenpeace Action for more information on pesticide export legislation and for more details about the International Pesticides Campaign. FOOTNOTES: Note pg. 1:"Pesticides are an ideal product for big business: like heroin, they promise paradise and deliver addiction." - Paul Erlich, Stanford University, 1980- Photo 1: Kay Treakle/Greenpeace This unprotected Guatemalan Indian with leaking backpack sprayer is using two pesticides, metasystox and fenvalerate, on his potato crop. Recommended protective clothing for both chemicals is rubber gloves, goggles and face shields. The Farm Chemical Handbook warns, "Avoid contact with mouth, eyes and skin." Photo 2: Kay Treakle/Greenpeace Children in developing countries are frequently exposed to toxic chemicals. This indian boy in Guatemala has sprayed his family fields, will eat pesticide-laden food an ddrink water contaminated by poison runoff. Photo 3: Douglas Watts, Christopher Brady With no protection, these Mexican farm workers are fumigating a field before crops are planted. Migrant agricultural workers in Mexico are exposed to massive quantities of pesticides during each growing season. Photo 4: Kay Treakle/Greenpeace This billboard in Guatemala advertising in a cartoon-like fashion the insecticide Methamidiphos is typical in Third World agricultural areas. The recommended protective clothing for this extremely hazardous chemical is a rubber suit, including gloves and shoes, and a respirator. Such protective clothing is too expensive for most Third World farmers and inappropriate for the hot tropical climates. ------ ENDS