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Pesticides Pollution

October 31, 2017

PESTICIDES POLLUTION

Pesticides are chemicals that are used to kill or control pests. This includes herbicides that are used for getting rid of weeds, insecticides used to treat fungicides, nematocides used to control nematodes as well as rodenticides used to treat vertebrate poisoning.

WHY PESTICIDES CAN BE HARMFUL

Pesticides contain ingredients such as oxygen, chlorine, sulfur, phosphorus, nitrogen, and bromine as well as heavy metals such as arsenic, copper sulfates, lead, and mercury. Pesticides, being toxic chemicals, can interfere with the environment and cause harms in several ways.

When applied on agricultural lands and domestic gardens, they run off these lands and come in contact with natural resources.

HOW DOES IT POLLUTE THE ENVIRONMENT?

This normally occurs when heavy wind or rain falls on the aforementioned lands, spreading the pesticides, being toxic chemicals, into unintended areas, coming in contact with natural resources such clean air, water, land, plants, and animals, thereby contaminating or harming them.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER CONTAMINATION?

Once the aforementioned natural resources are contaminated or harmed by pesticides, they are deemed unsuitable and harmful to the environment as well as to people and communities.

WHAT ARE THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PESTICIDES POLLUTION?

Some of the environmental impacts associated with the indiscriminate use of pesticides are listed and briefly explained below;

Biodiversity Destruction: The soil contains small naturally occurring organisms know as microbes. They break down organic materials in the soil and absorb water as well as nutrients in the process, and these are then used by plants to grow. As mentioned earlier, the indiscriminate use of pesticides can have unintended consequences, destroying microbes and affecting the growth of plants.

Also, pesticides often stay in the environment long after beening applied on agricultural lands and this means that they could be sent to water bodies by heavy wind or rainfall. Once in water bodies, they can kill aquatic animals such as fish and depopulate fishes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Traces of Pesticides Discovered in 75 Per Cent of the World’s Honey

October 11, 2017

TRACES OF PESTICIDES DISCOVERED IN 75 PER CENT OF THE WORLD’S HONEY

Residue from potentially harmful pesticides has been discovered in 75 per cent of honey sampled from around the world, according to a study conducted by Swiss scientists that was published in the journal Science in October 2017.

The researchers sampled 198 different honeys sourced from every continent, excluding Antarctica, testing for the presence of five unique neonicotinoid pesticides that are frequently applied to crops. These insecticides are so efficient that by 2008, they accounted for one quarter of the global insecticide market – and that rate continues to increase.

According to the study, these neonicotinoids are absorbed by plants and transported to all organs – including flowers, resulting in contaminated pollen. Increasing evidence suggests that large-scale use may lead to significant environmental impacts, leading scientists to start investigating the chemical’s impact on landscapes around the world.

“Despite increasing research efforts to understand the patterns of neonicotinoid uses and their effects on living organisms, we lack a global view of the worldwide distribution of neonicotinoid contamination in the environment to evaluate the risk,” the study states.

To help determine the potential risk of current contamination levels, citizen scientists from around the world sent individual samples of locally produced honey to the researchers’ laboratory in Switzerland. According to the study, the residue level of pesticides found in honey provides a measure of possible contamination in the surrounding landscape.

“Many of our samples were from very remote regions,” said Professor Edward Mitchell with the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, who co-authored the study. “We also aimed to (include) isolated oceanic islands, and places in central parts of continents far away from industrial areas.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto and the Poisoning of Europe

May 18, 2016

Monsanto and the Poisoning of Europe

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This week, a Standing Committee of plant scientists from 28 member states in Europe is likely to endorse the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) findings so that the European Commission (under pressure from Monsanto, Glyphosate Task Force and others) can re-authorise glyphosate for another nine years. This is despite the WHO classifying glyphosate as being “probably carcinogenic” to humans.

An open letter from campaigner Rosemary Mason to Dirk Detken, Chief Attorney to the EFSA, follows the brief background article you are about to read. In the letter, Mason highlights the regulatory delinquency concerning the oversight of glyphosate in the EU. The evidence provided by Mason might lead many to agree that processes surrounding glyphosate ‘regulation’ in Europe amount to little more than a “cesspool of corruption.”

There are around 500 million people in the EU. They want EU officials to uphold the public interest and to be independent from commercial influence. They do not want them to serve and profit from commercial interests at cost to the public’s health and safety. However, what they too often get are massive conflicts of interest: see here about the ‘revolving door’ problem within official EU bodies, here about ‘the European Food and Safety Authority’s independence problem’ and here about ‘chemical conflicts’ in the EC’s scientific committees for consumer issues.

And they get governing bodies that are beholden to massive corporate lobbying: see here about ‘the fire power of the financial lobby’ and here about ‘who lobbies most’ for TTIP, with agribusiness being the biggest lobby group behing this secretive and corrupt trade deal that is attempting drive a policy agenda above the heads of the European people and contrary to their wishes (see this on TTIP as well).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dangers from Pesticides

March 14, 2016

Dangers from Pesticides 

Intensive use of pesticides in California and other agricultural centers presents a risk to farmworkers and their families that is still only dimly understood, writes Dennis J Bernstein.

Industrialized Agriculture is addicted to chemistry in the form of pesticides. The addiction was marketed to the American People, along with other post World War Two miracles such as nylon stockings and the ball point pen. The pen and the nylons, of course, ultimately proved much less dangerous than the chemical fix for company profits.

Between 1947 and 1949, pesticide companies invested nearly $4 billion into expanding their production facilities, and made huge profits. By 1952-53, there were some 10,000 separate new pesticide products registered with the USDA, in what was labeled by journalists and historians as “The Golden Age of Pesticides.”PestSpray1-300x193

Today, well over 33 million pounds of fumigants are used in California agriculture each year with over 9 million of cancer-causing chloropicrin alone. For strawberries grown in the state, fumigants account for 87 percent of all pesticide use. A 2014 report by the California Department of Public Health (DPH) found that fumigants dominate the top five pesticides of public health concern sprayed and spread in close proximity to schools.

A disturbing new study out of UCLA’s Sustainable Technology & Policy Program found, in a case study of three fumigant pesticides commonly applied together in California, that “these pesticides may interact to increase the health risk for California farm workers and residents” and regulators do not exercise their authority to regulate the application of multiple pesticides to prevent or decrease risks to human health.

The UCLA study found that “Each of the pesticides … causes adverse health effects in humans or animals, including acute, developmental, reproductive, and neuro-toxicity, and carcinogenicity and mutagenicity. There is a reasonable likelihood that the three pesticides can interact to synergistically increase the toxicity to humans.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Honeybees Face Global Threat: If They Die, So Do We

October 11, 2015

Honeybees Face Global Threat: If They Die, So Do We

“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the center of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own: and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of honey.” — Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, 1924.

What is the most important animal to humans? In prehistoric times, the dog helped transform early hunter-gatherers into apex predators. Later, human civilization was built on the backs of horses. But starting around 11,500 years ago, when humans began making permanent settlements and invented agriculture, bees emerged as the most critical animal to human survival.

Worker bees on honeycomb cells. Photo credit: Shutterstock
Worker bees on honeycomb cells. Photo credit: Shutterstock

By pollinating crops around the world, honeybees feed more than 7 billion people today. Most of the food that we eat (and all of our cotton) is produced in part by the hard work of bees. In her 2011 book The Beekeeper’s Lament, journalist Hannah Nordhaus described honeybees as “the glue that holds our agricultural system together.”

The importance of bees isn’t limited to humans, of course. By promoting the reproduction of angiosperms or flowering plants, bees are also central to survival of countless other animal species that rely on those plants and their fruits to survive. In fact, Earth’s entire planetary ecology has been shaped by bees. Since they first evolved from wasps some 100 million years ago, bees have driven the evolution of plant life.

Sadly, in recent times, we have not treated our bee friends well. The use of pesticides—neonicotinoids in particular, which are commonly used on corn, soybean, canola and cereal, as well as many fruits and vegetables—have killed an estimated 250 million bees in a just a few years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Rachel Carson’s Critics Keep On, But She Told Truth About DDT

September 11, 2015

Rachel Carson’s Critics Keep On, But She Told Truth About DDT

More than half a century after scientist Rachel Carson warned of the dangers of overusing the pesticide DDT, conservative groups continue to vilify her and blame her for a resurgence of malaria. But DDT is still used in many countries where malaria now rages.

Any time a writer mentions Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring or the subsequent U.S. ban on DDT, the loonies come out of the woodwork. They blame Carson’s book for ending the use of DDT as a mosquito-killing pesticide. And because mosquitoes transmit malaria, that supposedly makes her culpable for just about every malaria death of the past half century.

Rachel Carson

rachelcarson.org
Biologist and author Rachel Carson in 1963.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, devotes anentire website to the notion that “Rachel was wrong,” asserting that “millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.” Likewise former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has declared that “millions of people, particularly children under five, died because governments bought into Carson’s junk science claims about DDT.” The novelist Michael Crichton even had one of his fictional characters assert that “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.” He put the death toll at 50 million.

It’s worth considering the many errors in this argument both because malaria remains an epidemic problem in much of the developing world and also because groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, backed by corporate interests, have latched onto DDT as a case study for undermining all environmental regulation. 

On the ‘Cancer Train’ of India’s pesticides

January 9, 2015

On the ‘Cancer Train’ of India’s pesticides

Bathinda, India – As the digital clock beamed 21:00, the shabby and dimly lit Bathinda train station came to life as frail patients swarmed the platform and jostled for seats on the “Cancer Train”.

Ramkishan, a man of about 50 breathing heavily and coughing, remained seated until the rush died down, then trudged to the train and secured his reserved window seat.

“I am going to Bikaner hospital,” he told Al Jazeera breathlessly. “I have been told I am in the final stages of cancer. I know this could be my final journey, too.”

The 12-coach train has gained its name from a sudden surge in cancer cases in India’s northwest Punjab state that many blame on growing pollution and pesticide use – and an ineffective response by authorities.

Poor patients from across Punjab flock to catch the 9:30pm train to head to the desert city of Bikaner for specialist treatment, arriving early morning after a seven-hour journey. On this occasion, the train’s sole reserved compartment, with a capacity of 72, is occupied by 30 cancer patients.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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