Health Risks Ignored; Thousands Poisoned : Poor Nations Pour On Pesticides

The world’s poorer countries, desperate for more crops, are spraying pesticides at dangerous new levels, killing people by the tens of thousands and poisoning environments.

Despite new international guidelines, pesticides outlawed in the United States and Europe are sold aggressively throughout the Third World to farmers untrained in their use.

“It is going to get worse,” said Thomas Odhiambo, director of the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi. “Unless we develop a strategy, this will be with us forever.”

Stimulating Pests

Odhiambo, chairman of the African Academy of Sciences, and other specialists, farmers and officials in developed and developing countries say:

- Misused poisons are stimulating pests they are meant to kill, creating resistances and new threats that spur an even greater use of more potent chemicals.

- Harmful effects reach consumers in developed countries, widening what U.S. researcher David Weir identified as “a circle of poison.”

- The spreading ecological damage is worldwide, with traces of banned chemicals in Antarctic snowfields and Alpine lakes. Some soils are losing productivity and ground water is increasingly polluted.

- Overuse of DDT, malathion and other pesticides are rendering malarial mosquitoes invulnerable in some tropical climates.

- Although world attention focused on 2,347 Indians killed in 1984 at Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal, many thousands more die unnoticed at backyard factories all over the Third World.

“The argument is that pesticides are essential to protect food supplies,” said David Bull, a British specialist. “But we are creating even greater problems for the future.”

Major producers now sell $18 billion worth of pesticides a year, a fifth of them to the Third World. In addition, local factories make huge quantities of DDT and other chemicals.

Major Exporters

West Germans export the most, but Swiss, British, American, French, Japanese and Dutch manufacturers also sell widely in developing countries.

“Companies say they apply rigid controls,” said Michael Hansen, a scientist with the Consumers Union in Mount Vernon, N.Y. “But that’s not what you see in the field.”

To increase profits, he said, producers encourage chemical use far beyond what is safe or effective, resulting in a “pesticides treadmill” with steadily more serious consequences.

Odhiambo blames a well-organized chemical lobby in Europe and the United States, assisted by official foreign aid programs and some United Nations agencies, for encouraging sales despite the risk to users.

“Some of them are not very honest,” he said. “They tell us: ‘Since you are poor, you should accept it. It’s not that bad.” ’

Industry executives acknowledge that although they may seek to control misuse of their chemicals, Third World conditions make accidents and side effects all but inevitable.

U.N., governmental and voluntary guidelines prescribe elaborate controls and warnings, but energetic local salesmen --often paid by commission--push their products with abandon.

Third World nations, with agriculture as their main hope to escape crushing debt, rely ever more heavily on pesticides. Many use paraquat and other toxic defoliants to clear new land.

William Hollis of the National Agricultural Chemicals Assn. in Washington agrees that some producers are lax in policing their local agents because of greater profits generated.

“They’re blinking dollar signs,” he said.

Most companies press hard to improve the image of pesticides but find independent distributors and pirate producers beyond their control, Hollis said.

Outdated World Health Organization estimates say 500,000 people a year are poisoned by pesticides, and 10,000 of them die. Privately, WHO experts say the figures are now at least double that.

And some specialists say actual figures may be far higher and are mounting fast.

Farmers Dying

Michael Loevensohn, in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet, found a 27% increase in deaths among Philippine rice farmers during a period of high pesticide use.

He estimates that tens of thousands of farmers were dying each year in Southeast Asia alone. As a result, he said, accepted worldwide figures seemed to be “substantially underestimated.”

Pesticide deaths are often slow and misreported. Poisoning, if not fatal, can cripple for life. Little is known about cancer risks or long-term effects on nervous systems, fertility and immune systems.

Isolated studies across the Third World suggest an alarming picture.

A Kenyan scientist recently found mothers’ milk with DDT levels 300 times above accepted international norms. “I found no milk without DDT,” said Laetitia Kanja, “including my own.”

Western authorities banned DDT because it remained undeteriorated in the food chain, threatening predator birds, among other species.

“Here we have so many other priorities,” said one Kenyan scientist. “If you are hungry, you don’t mind eating a little DDT.”

Kenya is typical of Africa, where pesticide use increases by more than 12% a year. But in Asia and Latin America, where farmers have more money to spend, the problems are worse.

India’s pesticide consumption--100,000 tons a year--is 20 times the 1960 level.

Parts of India’s Ganges River are too poisonous for irrigation. One study showed that at least 700 Sri Lankans commit suicide each year by swallowing paraquat or other easily available pesticides.

Many countries are replacing DDT and other organochlorines that remain in the environment. But although alternative organophosphates break down rapidly, they are highly toxic. And they are expensive.

Ben Waiyaki, a former sales manager in Kenya for CIBA-Geigy of Switzerland, now studies pesticides for the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Program.

“I switched sides, and I know what I’m talking about,” he said. “I sold chemicals that we knew very little about. Salesmen want to sell, to make money. It’s a vicious circle.”

Government agricultural agents are scarce and badly informed, Waiyaki said. Farmers must rely on salesmen for information on a bewildering array of products, all requiring different dosages and techniques.

Across the Third World, farmers often spray by calendar rather than in response to pest invasion, applying up to 50 times more poison than is necessary.

Many are sold by gaudy advertising, such as a company in Brazil that calls its product “200% safe.” Major producers run ads showing farmers spraying without required masks and gloves.

Even if farmers learn proper techniques, most reject hot, bulky protective equipment. Pesticide containers often are re-used to carry food and water. Clothing remains contaminated.

More often, farmers are ignorant of the danger.

“Sure, I use a lot of pesticides,” said Dominick Karanja, who farms near Nakuru in central Kenya. Asked how he protected himself, he shrugged: “When my brother dies, I stop.”

Similar patterns are repeated elsewhere on a larger scale.

Drop on the Tongue

In Thailand, David Bull found a farmer who tested his mixture of parathion by putting a drop on his tongue. If his tongue went numb, the dose was strong enough. If not, he added more.

In Brazil, Darcy Bergman, who quit selling pesticides to farm organically, told the West German magazine Der Uberbick he was urged to lie to farmers to sell more chemicals.

In Nicaragua, Doug Murray of CARE filmed youngsters splashing with gay abandon in a makeshift tub, a barrel that recently contained lethal methyl parathion.

Consumers are often as much at risk as farmers. In much of the Third World, vegetables and fruits are doused with fungicides containing mercury immediately before shipment to markets.

Scattered incidents suggest the bigger picture. A Brazilian doctor, writing in the Jornal do Brasil, told of a patient who ate a tomato fresh from the fields and fell unconscious from poisoning.

The United States imports $24.1 billion in food each year, and authorities say that 6.1% of what they test is in violation of food safety laws.

Samples Checked

But the General Accounting Office found last year that only 1% of imported food shipments are checked for pesticide residues. Often fresh produce is eaten before sample analyses are complete.

U.S. officials stopped the use of ethylene dibromide, or EDB, a suspected carcinogen, on fruits shipped to the United States from the Caribbean. But farmers use EDB widely to treat soil. The Zimbabwe tobacco crop depends on it.

Japanese consumer protection groups found dangerous chemicals on imported tea leaves.

Often pesticides are abused for aesthetic purposes: foreign buyers want unblemished fruits and vegetables.

Jose Lutzenburger, a Brazilian organic farming expert, noted recently that the best-looking apples in his region were sprayed 37 times and coated with wax to keep fungicide in place.

The Pesticides Action Network, a worldwide coalition of 300 groups, campaigns against the “Dirty Dozen,” 12 chemicals banned or restricted in the West that are still sold in the Third World.

Manufacturers argue that Third World nations would starve without the disputed pesticides. They say some chemicals break down faster in tropical conditions than in temperate zones.

PAN, and a range of independent scientists and specialists, counter that widespread ignorance and lack of proper facilities make many pesticides even more dangerous in developing countries.

Disputes within the industry point out the problem.

“EBD is not dangerous once it evaporates,” asserted Hollis. “But I’d hate to be the guy applying it.”

Brian Hursey, Zimbabwe’s tsetse fly eradication officer, offers to eat a spoonful of DDT when visitors denounce the chemical. “Dieldrin now, that stuff is murder,” he said. “I almost died from it once.”

“The truth is nobody knows,” said Raoul du Toit of the Zimbabwe Department of Parks and Wildlife. “They keep on splashing pesticides on the ground without any idea of the long-term impact. All they’re doing is looking for evidence of immediate effect.”

Du Toit decries what he calls a double standard. Western countries set baseline standards at home but not for Third World countries where they export banned or restricted chemicals.

Robert Armstrong, an African regional officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said he turned down requests to join European Economic Community aid programs to import pesticides banned in home countries.

“We would have been morally remiss,” he said.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recently published an international code on pesticides. After nine drafts, U.S. and other Western delegates succeeded in deleting a crucial aspect:

The code obliges exporters to advise Third World countries of Western restrictions on their products. But it does not require them to wait for confirmation that importers have taken note.

The concept is known as PIC, prior informed consent. Producers say it is a needless restraint to trade. Their critics say it is essential because of conditions in poor countries.

In any case, experts say, the code is not working. The Nairobi-based Environment Liaison Center reported in June on 12 sample countries. It concluded: “The results are very disturbing.”

Unmarked Bags

Inspectors found violations of nearly every provision down to the last point of retail sale: Deadly chemicals were repackaged in unmarked plastic bags and sold alongside food.

Jan Huismans, director of the U.N. Environment Program’s registry of agricultural chemicals, agrees the problem is critical and is getting worse.

He said governments under pressure to relieve mounting debt encourage the use of pesticides for immediate crop results.

Third World governments subsidize up to 85% of their pesticide imports, providing cheap or free chemicals to farmers. But few are capable of adequately balancing their chemicals.

“Often a government asks us for data about a certain chemical, and we don’t know how to answer,” Huismans said. “We could give them documentation three yards high.”

Sudan is a classic case of imbalance.

Cotton is grown along the White Nile at Gezira, the world’s largest farm. Too many chemicals were dumped on Gezira, too often, creating resistances and altering the ecological balance.

From 1960 to 1981, American cotton farmers reduced their average annual sprayings from 12 to two. During that period, the Sudanese increased theirs from one to eight. Now some spray 17 times.

Scourge in Sudan

Whitefly suddenly emerged as a new scourge in Sudan. The crop now depends on aldicarb, a highly toxic poison used in the United States only under rigid control, by specialists in protective gear.

Farmers, sometimes barefoot and naked to the waist, splash aldicarb with their hands and carry it home to their families. Despite increased doses, Sudanese cotton is sticky from whitefly.

Desperately poor, Sudan each year imports nearly two pounds of pesticide per inhabitant, counting nomads in the barren north. As elsewhere in Africa, Sudan’s land grows steadily less productive.

Isolated successes offer some encouragement in developing countries. Integrated pest management combines limited chemicals with biological control and natural predators.

In Nicaragua, farmers combat weevils with trap-cropping: A patch of cotton is planted early, attracting the season’s population of weevils to a small area where they are sprayed heavily.

But such programs require a careful balance, spraying correct amounts of the right chemical, and planting other crops to coincide with insect breeding cycles.

John Phillips, FAO representative in Kenya, explains the problem:

“Any Third World nation can produce a Nobel Prize winner. What they lack are enough good bottle-washers. It is a question of management, of overseeing the control of chemicals.”

Most peasant farmers, and many governments, prefer the immediate results of chemicals, Waiyaki said. “They see the insect fall dead. It is magic. They don’t think of long-term danger.”

Many Third World countries produce their own poisons, sometimes under license but often in small pirate plants with little supervision. DDT is produced widely in Asia.

Few countries can afford to combat the human and ecological damage of pesticides, let alone pay for the research necessary to find alternatives to protect their crops.

“People don’t realize what a job it is to produce effective chemicals,” Hollis said. “These days a company has to have sales of at least $1 billion to afford research and development.”

Federal regulations on chemical producers run to 75 pages, Hollis said, and products require years of testing.

Sharp divisions over pesticides worsen the problem, experts conclude.

Lukas Brader, the FAO’s chief of plant protection, worries that overreaction to pesticides ties authorities’ hands so that vital crops are lost needlessly.

“We couldn’t stop desert locusts in Sudan because of too many objections to the chemicals we needed to use,” he said. “By the time locusts reached the stuff we sprayed, it had lost its effect.”

Without a well-managed program of spraying against insects, fungus and weeds, he said, developing countries could not grow enough food or cash crops to survive.

At the same time, Brader said that pesticide abuse in the Third World is a worsening crisis. “It is a mess. You can’t believe what you see sometimes.”