Committing Pesticide
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Organic Food
Date:
Thu, 5 Dec 2002
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
The Ecologist
Agricultural pesticides have been linked to infertility, suicidal depression and the most horrific birth defects imaginable. It is time, insists Moyra Bremner, that we realised that organic food is not simply a 'lifestyle' choice, but a matter of life over death.
Committing Pesticide
Agricultural pesticides have been linked to infertility, suicidal depression and the most horrific birth defects imaginable. It is time, insists Moyra Bremner, that we realised that organic food is not simply a ‘lifestyle’ choice, but a matter of life over death.
Now that organic food has ceased to be a novelty it has become fashionable for the media to carp at it as ‘too expensive’. It isn’t cheap. Yet, if human life is worth anything, organic food is far cheaper than the alternative. For the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction may well be the pesticides being used, indiscriminately, across the world to produce food. The evidence that they are causing brain damage, cancer, infertility and worse to tens of thousands of people involved in farming is devastating and has implications for us all.
In the Netherlands, for example, a typical farmer is four times less likely to father children than most Dutchmen. In America, where pesticide use is even heavier, a farmer is 8 times less likely to father children. A corn-belt farmer told me he was, ‘say ‘just waiting to get cancer like other farmers’. And there are reports of families in which person after person commits suicide to escape the unbearable depression cause by some pesticides.
Yet, if farmers are in the front line, we and our families may only be a step behind. For there is strong evidence that just living near farms using pesticides can threaten you and your children’s health and fertility. Compounding that, four out of 10 of us are genetically vulnerable to widely used organophosphates (OPs). So even the OP residues in food may not only be harming us, but may be causing a ‘selective cull’ of humanity – altering the gene pool and irreversibly changing the path of evolution.
The sheer volume of toxins used in agriculture is staggering. Every year America alone produces enough pesticide to girdle the globe in one-pound flour bags. A deadly circle. For among them – as among pesticides from Europe – are substances that can damage the eyes, skin, immune and glandular systems, cause heart disease, asthma and cancer, and – most insidious of all – harm human sperm and eggs, impair the minds and bodies of unborn babies, and cause miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths.
Yet, many of us have an atavistic feeling that what doesn’t immediately seem to harm us is harmless, or believe that a nanny state is looking after us. However, on this occasion nanny is busy tippling with Uncle Harry. For as oil and chemicals are the main pumps of economic growth (and the prime funders of politicians), governments the world over have turned a blind eye to pesticide dangers. So thousands of pesticides are routinely approved without ever undergoing any safety testing worth the name.
Everyone knows that chemicals can interact in dangerous ways. Yet testing ignores such interactions. Additives in pesticides may be more toxic to people than the main ingredient. Yet their hazards are also ignored. It’s ancient knowledge that poisons can fatally build up in the body. But most tests focus on short-term effects. And the fact that a variation in a single gene can make four people in 10 especially vulnerable to OPs may explain why sheep dip has no effect on some farmers but destroys the lives of others. Yet pesticide regulations ignore the potential for genetic vulnerability.
Indeed, ‘safety’ rules don’t even get the simple things right. It has long been known that the diet and drugs taken by a woman can affect her children and grandchildren. But multi-generational pesticide testing is rare. We all know that animal tests deemed thalidomide harmless. Yet a pesticide’s ‘safety’ is judged on animal tests and on calculating its effects on adult men – ignoring the vulnerability of women, the old, the unborn and children.
Moreover, many chemicals are licensed for carefully calculated use by sprayers wearing moon-suits with waterproof boots, gloves and respirators. Yet such chemicals are advertised in the Third World, and millions of pounds exported there, knowing that most farmers who use them will be illiterate, barefoot and half naked and that some may be pregnant women. As recently as 1994 the US was even exporting chemicals such as DDT, lindane, and paraquat that had been banned as too dangerous to use in the States. America is not alone. And it is surely mass murder.
An assault on fertility Many environmental toxins have been blamed for the massive decline in male fertility over the last 50 years. Non-pesticides probably play their part, but the case against pesticides is damning. Hormones are the body’s chemical messengers and are not only involved in fertility but in the growth and functioning of the brain and body. One of the pesticide industry’s bright ideas was to create chemicals that disrupt these endocrine messengers. Unfortunately, widely differing species use almost identical chemical messengers. So what disrupts a mosquito also damages larger creatures, including man. An own goal which made DDT notorious, and banned.
In 1992 a meeting of scientists from many fields attributed birth defects, infertility, compromised immune systems, behavioural abnormalities, male feminisation, female masculinisation and thyroid dysfunction in fish and birds to 36 endocrine-disrupting pesticides. This was, however, too late for the many Vietnam vets who had been exposed to Agent Orange (a close relative of some modern pesticides) and had proved unable to have normal children.
More recent research has shown that even using certain pesticides during the 65 days it takes sperm to form can affect a man’s fertility and the normality of a child conceived with those sperm. Yet,when banned gender bending pesticides are exported to the Third World they boomerang back to us on imported food, through fish and even rain. They can probably be found in your body and mine, for they are stored in fat. Small wonder then that thyroid dysfunction is rampant, male and female fertility has fallen and a growing number of babies are born with genital deformities.
The unsafe womb If that just meant that women in farming failed to conceive it would bring loss enough. But it isn’t as simple as that. Worldwide, millions of barefoot women and female children work as peasant farmers and migrant labourers – spraying chemicals, working in fields wet with newly sprayed toxins, and picking, sorting and packing fruit coated in pesticides. The palms of hands and the soles of the feet are so absorbent that ancient herbalists painted them with healing tinctures. Today’s toxins enter with equal ease. And, like nutrients stored to feed future babies, build up in a woman’s body fat year by year – then cross the placenta as easily as any nutrient. So, around the world, many farmers’ wives and women farm workers suffer the appaling grief of conceiving again and again only to lose their babies in pregnancy, at birth or soon after – often because of terrible birth defects.
So sensitive are babies to many pesticides that such losses are not limited to those working in farming. Last year a study of Californian women showed that even living within a mile of farms where certain pesticides are sprayed, during critical weeks in pregnancy, increased by 120 per cent the chance of losing the baby through birth defects.
Destroying minds It used to be thought that babies born without obvious symptoms of pesticide poisoning, were unharmed. But research indicates that may not be so. Numerous tests with animals have shown that at critical periods in a foetus’s development even a single small dose of some commonly used pesticides can cause permanent damage to the brain. Recent studies suggests that may be equally true of children. And research in Mexico has shown how profoundly pesticides can damage children’s mind.
Dr Elizabeth Guillette studied pre-school children from the same genetic background to compare those living in a farming valley where pesticides were used with those from the hills where pesticides were not used. High levels of multiple pesticides had been found in the breast milk and umbilical cord blood of people living in the valley. But none of the children had ever shown physical signs of pesticide poisoning. Psychological tests on the two groups produced very different results, however.
The children from the pesticide-using valley had less stamina, less co-ordination, poorer memories and were less creative in their play than those from the pesticide-free hills. And when asked to draw a person, their drawings were dramatically different. The drawings of the 5 year old pesticide-exposed children were fragmentary, jumbled and topsy-turvy. Whereas those from the pesticide-free families drew the stick figures usual for five-year-olds. Equally significantly, the pesticide-exposed children easily became upset and angry and showed unprovoked aggression.
Grave hazards Some experts have linked those findings with the huge rise in children with attention deficit disorder. And such damage may certainly be common in farming families wherever pesticides are used. For when the urine of pre-school children of farm workers in Washington State was tested most samples showed unsafe levels of pesticides. Some samples even contained three times the ‘safe’ adult dose. And a few had been exposed to 20 times the ‘safe’ dose for adults. In another study of farm workers’ children the urine of more than half contained azinphosmethyl (a highly toxic OP) at well above the level at which it is known to damage brain functioning.
If the minds of farmers’ children are put at such grave risk without them even working in the fields, imagine the danger to the 800,000 or so child farm labourers worldwide. For in many Third World countries up to 70 per cent of farm workers are children aged five-15, and many teenagers are actively involved in pesticide spraying. One charity told me that, even in America, farms are probably inspected for child labour just once every 75 years. In the grape and strawberry fields of California migrant children as young as four may work beside their pregnant mothers on land pumped with methyl bromide – a potent nerve toxin known to cause birth defects and brain damage in animals. There are reports of illness, infertility, miscarriages and stillbirths being endemic among such migrant workers, but few like to admit to being sick lest they are laid off. So neither their illnesses, nor the almost inevitable damage to their children’s minds, appear in any statistics.
Inviting cancer Few of the workers who provide chocolate, tea, coffee, spices, and tropical fruit for our tables reach the age of 50. For many pesticides damage the immune system, making them doubly vulnerable to tropical diseases and cancer. As few Third World farmers and labourers can afford medical care we will never know how many die of cancers triggered by pesticides, but the evidence closer to home suggests many must do so. For more and more studies are liking cancer and pesticides.
When the incidence of various cancers in four American states was mapped out the areas with the most cancer coincided with the areas where wheat was grown and specific pesticides were used. While, in Florida pesticide-spraying farmers are far more likely to die from prostate cancer than normal. In Denmark and America they’ve found that the presence of the pesticide Dieldrin in a woman’s blood means she is more likely to contract breast cancer and less likely to survive it. And simply living within a mile and a half of the cranberry fields of Cape Cod has been shown to increase a child’s risk of developing a particular type of brain tumour. Finally, a review of 31 studies of cancer in childhood showed that having a parent who used pesticides increased the risk of children getting Wilms’ tumour, Ewing’s sarcoma, and germ-cell tumours; and that simply living on a farm was associated with an increased risk of several childhood cancers.
Of course, association does not prove causality. However, laboratory research shows that cancer cells multiply faster in the presence of certain pesticides – and when several pesticides even minute amounts foster cancer growth. Yet, in Britain the number of known or suspected carcinogens licensed as pesticides has more than doubled in the past 12 years.
Invisible farmers Cancer is a conspicuous and much studied ailment. Yet the unrecorded torment of farmers whose lives pesticides ruin in other ways may be just as great. British ‘Health and Safety’ figures repeatedly suggest that pesticides harm more passing pedestrians than farmers. However, the bitter truth is that officialdom focuses on sudden reactions and almost totally ignores long-term chronic illness caused by pesticides building up in the body.
John Peters’ story is typical. For years he fumigated grain stores with OPs. He never understood why he got headaches, breathing difficulties, stomach upsets and diarrhoea when using such chemicals, nor why his eyes became sensitive to light. He’d used protective clothing and didn’t know the signs of OP poisoning. Then, after he was accidentally splashed with the pesticide, there came excruciating headaches, palpitations, chest pains, shaking, sweating, hallucinations and serious breathing problems. When the worst symptoms faded he was left with acute light sensitivity, tremors and acute allergic reactions to everyday substances. Even talking exhausts him. Yet he has received no compensation, and neither he nor the thousands of farmers like him appear in the statistics on pesticide damage. Officially, such reactions to pesticides do not exist.
A sea of troubles One of the side effects of the large farm and plantations of the green revolution is that they invite aerial spraying. The villagers of south India’s Kasargod district welcomed the development of large state-owned cashew plantations. Their children used to run from their houses to wave at the helicopters that sprayed endosulfan (a known hormone disruptor) on both trees and villages. Some 20 years later these people are among the world’s most vivid and terrible examples of what pesticides can do. In 183 houses there are 279 cases of serious illness. Since spraying began infertility, gynaecological problems, asthma, suicidal depression and cancer have become rampant. Children with hydrocephalus, or stunted and damaged in body and mind, have become commonplace. Narayan is a man 36 inches tall. His mind is as limited as his height, his hair has largely fallen out and his skin has a geriatric crust. One little girl’s head expanded until it nearly burst, then shrank until she died screaming in agony. In a blood sample taken by a local doctor endosulfan was found at 637 times the permissible limit. Yet when these horrific facts emerged government officials repeatedly insisted that endosulfan was blameless and it took four years to have it banned. So the cashews will be passed around at Christmas parties without anyone knowing children paid for them with their lives.
A culture of denial Such a catalogue of human misery surely calls in question our right to be called civilised. It also provides ample evidence to justify governments ending pesticide proliferation and putting a moratorium on many already in use. But that is unlikely. More than 40 years ago research at London’s Royal Free Hospital showed that the sperm of mice on a non-organic diet were flabby and misshapen. Such evidence, and the ensuing catalogue of harm to wildlife, should have alerted governments to the potential hazards to humanity. For any government to clamp down now would draw attention to the fact that it had knowingly sacrificed the health, fertility, and minds of millions of men, women and children on the altars of growth, globalisation and power.
Personal power That puts the ball in our court. Many Ecologist readers already buy organic food. But a high proportion of the gleaming fruit, out-of-season vegetables, chocolates and coffee that will soon grace festive tables will have been produced using pesticides that damage not just agricultural com-munities but also packers, handlers and processors. So isn’t it time we all began talking about organic food as an ethical and not just a lifestyle choice? And isn’t it time to shout the odds as we did on GM?
With GM we saw that, if enough consumers take a stand, supermarkets listen. The top 10 British supermarkets have an annual turnover equal to the income of the world’s poorest 35 countries. If our supermarkets stopped buying food sprayed with these toxins, farmers, and land and plantation owners, would gradually stop using them. So every time we buy organic or pesticide-free food, lobby our local supermarket to reduce pesticides, or tell others about these issues, we are saving lives. And every word and every purchase counts. For once we can all make a difference, no matter what governments do.
Copyright © Moyra Bremner. Please feel free to send this article to others. Moyra Bremner waives her copyright for all non-commercial reproduction provided the piece is used in full with her copyright, and first publication is attributed to The Ecologist.
Moyra Bremner, is author of the highly acclaimed book GE: Genetic Engineering and You, former presenter of Science Now and of BBC Television's Money Programme and Newsweek
Original Article: http://www.theecologist.org/article.html?article=348
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