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Harmful Effects of Pesticides Increase Organic Crop Production

January 13th, 2010 Posted in Green Living & News

An Australian workplace cancer forum, held by the Cancer Council of Australia and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was told on December 10 that many Australian farmers are being dangerously overexposed to some of the most dangerous chemical pesticides available in the world today. Dr. Liz Hanna, from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, addressed the forum and announced the findings of a 2003 study that surveyed 1050 farming households in NE Victoria. The study revealed alarmingly high rates of chemical use as well alarmingly low rates of safety training per household; 95 percent and 40 percent respectively.

“Agricultural chemicals are of particular concern as they interrupt biological pathways that we share with the pests they are designed to kill,” Dr Hanna said. “They are among the most dangerous chemicals we have on the market, yet there is no monitoring in place to encourage safe handling.”

Hanna maintains that this lack of an oversight system directly relates to the relatively high percentage of Australian farms that are family owned. The use of dangerous chemicals is tightly controlled in corporate factories and large farms that require outside labor; however, 95 percent of the Australian farms are small family affairs, and these are most threatened by the lack of a mandatory control and training system.

Some of the other disturbing figures that surfaced because of Hanna’s study include:

• 84 percent of farmers applied chemicals at least weekly during the high season
• 70 percent of farmers worked closely enough to get chemicals on their skin and/or inhale fumes
• 64 percent sometimes, rarely or never wore protective clothing when applying chemicals
• 86 percent had spray drift on their skin and clothes from other people using chemicals
• Some water supplies were also contaminated as chemicals drifted onto roofs with water tanks or seeped into aquifers

Hanna has also correlated these high figures with the rise of cancer rates in farming communities.

This rise in incidence has provided a deadly-serious incentive for many Australian farmers to switch to organic growing methods; a move wholly endorsed by the Cancer Council. The Biological Farmers of Australia, or BFA, has interviewed many of these newly-green farmers and they have disclosed that indeed a high proportion are switching to organic production methods as a means to avoid chronic overexposure to lethal pesticides that are forbidden in the organic process.

One of the worst chemical groups in use are the organophosphate varieties of pesticides and insecticides. Organophosphates have long been used as deadly nerve agents against both humans and insects, and have been directly linked to higher incidences of various cancers, sterility, and multiple mental defects. Endosulfan is another example of an incredibly toxic insecticide (organochlorine cyclodiene) still legal in Australia.

Nothing seems to change people’s behavior like a solid incentive, and although overexposure to dangerous chemicals like organophosphates takes years to truly avail the public of how much harm has already been done, once the farmers see family and friends developing serious health concerns, their incentive becomes the protection of themselves and their loved ones.

Given the awful potential of taking the situation too lightly or reacting too slowly, it is easy to see why so many farming households are going organic down under.