Rain That Kills - "Pestisuicides"
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Rain That Kills - "Pestisuicides"
Date:
Fri, 16 Aug 2002 14:21:44 -400
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
Summerside Journal-Pioneer - August 15, 2002 - Rain that kills By John Hopkins.
"Of the 23,000 chemicals used in Canada, including food preservatives and household pesticides, only 70 will be (were) assessed by the year 2000," noted a story published in the Calgary Sun, May 26, 1999.
Environment Canada studies state that lethal farm chemicals are unequivocally being carried in our air and rain. Prince Edward Island, a popular tourist destination, is a vivid example of what is wrong with pesticide regulation in Canada.
According to Earth Action, expanded potato acreage supplying the arrival of gigantic Irving and McCain french fry factories has led to a 632 per cent increase in farm pesticide applications since 1984.
Increased insect and fungus chemical resistance has made spraying more intense. Dozens of pristine Island rivers have recently been poisoned, deformed frogs are abundant and the bee population is in trouble. Images of dead brook trout, salmon, gulls and half-dead bald eagles flopping around on the river's edge are commonplace.
The last remaining forests are being clear-cut for potatoes. As a result, spawning grounds and shellfish estuaries are being choked by topsoil siltation. Yet there is little political will to study the effects of these lethal chemicals on hundreds of Island communities surrounded by potato fields.
The very survival of Island's unique ecology is at the mercy of the simple fast-food french fry and people who cannot imagine change in our toxic system of potato production for political and economic reasons. It's an uncomfortable Third World story happening right in our own back yard, but this time we are the "ignorant" bunch that are seemingly too helpless.
Change is needed and the challenges are perplexing. As one P.E.I. minister of Environment found out, it is extremely difficult to ban particularly offensive chemicals. Toxic sprays that even the government admits are hazards cannot be easily dispensed with, due to the private industry's nondisclosure of chemical formulas policy needed to protect corporate "trade secrets".
In P.E.I., farmers are not required to report to the government how much chemical is being applied to their fields. All the government statistics as to chemicals released into the P.E.I. environment are supplied as confidential reports by the chemical companies to the government. When investigated further, the shocking fact is that a myriad of confidential deals exists between the powerful chemical industry and government agencies plaguing the regulation of environmentally dangerous chemicals.
Many of these pesticides presently used are cancer causing and known hormone disrupters. Chemical companies have been clever in their strategy with government regulators to continue to make billions from their toxic farm products, even in the face of wide public disapproval, environmental disasters and presumed regulation.
Brian Emmett, the commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, documents the nature of these assertions in his annual report concerning pesticide use in Canada: "Of 22 industrial countries surveyed, only Canada (federally) and the Slovak republic don't collect data on pesticide sales."
Emmett's report was highly critical and said Ottawa "has no idea what Canadians and their children are being exposed to".
P.E.I. is small geographically. Activists say it is no surprise that cancer in the population is abundant and P.E.I. has one of the highest rates of asthma per capita in the world. Yet heavy chemical spraying for the Colorado potato beetle, aphids and fungus continues. The truth is that few real solutions are in sight or even wanted in a place so heavily dependent on agriculture.
Global warming has affected our weather patterns. It rained hard again recently and I am afraid to read the paper. My favourite fly-fishing rivers such as the West, the Dunk and Morell are at high risk. A fellow fly-fisher told me the other day he saw dead fish floating down the Morell River after that last rain but it was never reported.
But this problem is much bigger than my love of fishing. Who knows how much of this stuff is getting into the human food chain through mussels, oysters, lobsters and fish. They have never been properly tested, although mollusks such as mussels are powerful filtratration organisms that are likely to pick up anything that comes into our bays and estuaries.
Houses here are literally surrounded by potato fields and people who live near them are, without doubt, being exposed a nasty cocktail of deadly sprays. Stories about chemical kills on P.E.I. are being reported on the CBC National News, the Toronto Star and to newspapers in the United States. If Islanders are wondering why tourism numbers seem to be withering away, well ... wake up and smell the roses! (that's if they are organic of course).
What's happening here is an extreme wakeup call for the rest of Canada: this place is collapsing in an environmentally catastrophic way. It should be clear by now that our politicians, despite public announcements of preventative measures and presumed "action plans", are steadfastly reluctant to properly regulate these dangerous chemicals.
Today Islanders, as a society, have become complete chemical addicts: pesticides are too associated with profits and a "healthy" economy. The potatoes we planted before the war and "chemical era" have had their natural resistances bred out of them. The weaker the strains are, the more chemicals you need and the more chemical companies such as Monsanto, Bayer and Dupont are happy making billions while we are all being put at risk.
Back then, before all this happened, we didn't call it "organic farming," we just called it "farming".
Our soil was healthy, structured, robust and the potatoes were strong. Crop rotation was standard and nobody was hooked on chemical fertilizers being sold to them by the same owners of an obese french fry factory. Mussel mud was great stuff.
If you take a pinch of our chemicalized Island soil today, it runs through your fingers like dust. You see it blowing off the fields like a ghost on a windy day. Meanwhile politicians are re-elected who support farmers who have, in order to feed their families, sold their souls to the banks, McCains and Irvings. They have no will to make or find the real changes needed. It's been bred out of them.
We have a major problem and the solutions are not at all clear. The fact remains that the government has not even completed or begun the proper baseline research on these chemicals or has any idea as to what the extended effects are of regularly releasing farm poisons into our environment.
Do we or one of our kids have to first contract cancer or some other "unexplained illnesses" before something is said and done? Dead fish all over the place is a bad omen worthy of a story from the Bible.
Farmers who have been identified as culprits in killing fish should be barred from growing potatoes in those areas of fields that are particularly dangerous, and thick protective trees replanted instead. Every river system and waterway, including ditches, should be studied using satellite technology for weaknesses as far as being at risk from potato related fish kills.
Every single potential field in these "high risk" areas should be the subject of immediate government regulations and measures against the annual massive chemical bombardment considered "normal" on P.E.I. Regular on-foot inspections of fields and rivers should take place, and stiff fines that "make you think twice" should be strictly enforced on those farmers that give the rest a bad name.
Meanwhile, the government should immediately begin a large marketing drive and new fully funded provincial agency to discover alternative markets in the U.S. and Europe for organic produce, so farmers can switch to organic farming and make a good buck.
If the Irvings threaten to pull out as usual, then say goodbye; we will not need them anymore. As for the short term, the province and the federal government should act together to begin a program to buy acreage surrounding P.E.I. rivers and streams, taking them permanently out of potato production. We bought back fishing licences when we destroyed the cod, why not land?
Most of the health food and produce being sold at some of the grocery store chains on the Island is being produced in the U.S. and being imported into P.E.I.
Anyone on P.E.I. who says there is not a market for organic products on a wide scale is a person with too much tied up into our old, incredibly destructive system of potato production. Changes cannot occur overnight but we need to put a plan in place for a productive transition away from using these dangerous chemicals to vastly increased organic farming in the future.
If things keep going the way are in P.E.I., no one will be buying anything produced in P.E.I., organic or otherwise, because our reputation for being a pristine beautiful environment will be in permanent shatters.
© Copyright 2002 Summerside Journal-Pioneer
http://www.canada.com/search/site/story.asp?id=40668A80-D9BC-4BCA-8F55-8D2C61364748
Well Mr. Helliker, It reminds me of the quote of Calgacus in Tacitus' Agricola. : "Atque ubi colitudinum faciunt pacem apellant". (Translation - They create a desolation and call it a peace). You create a deadly POISON that KILLS and say it will "protect" us.
Respectfully, Stephen L. Tvedten
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