National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #01-01 Spray Job: Corporations and Pesticide Use
January 3, 2001

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2001/0101.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact:

Erika Rosenthal: The FDA tests only a fraction of the food imported into the United States for pesticide residues, something less than 2%.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman: The fact that many farmers will be poisoned and that the soil quality will be degraded or that there'll be pollution of the water is not quantified and put into the equation.

Phillip Babich: The use of pesticides is widespread in agriculture today, and there are many examples of grassroots efforts to curb their use and to introduce alternatives. But resistance by chemical companies and agribusiness has prevented any major transitions. On this program we take a look at pesticides and some of the dangers they pose.

I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information.

In December, 2000, after a week long meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, delegates from 122 nations agreed to a global ban on 12 highly toxic chemicals. The so-called POPs or "persistent organic pollutants" are particularly dangerous because they don't break down and are easily absorbed by living organisms. They've been linked to cancer, birth defects and other genetic abnormalities. If 50 of the 122 nations ratify it, the treaty will take effect in May of 2001. U.S. delegate Brooks Yeager said he expected the ban to be approved by the U.S. Congress, a requirement for the United States to become a signatory to the ban. Another chemical also scheduled for global phase-out by 2005 is methyl bromide, a known ozone depleter. This chemical is at the center of a struggle in California where its use on strawberry farms has a long and contentious history. It is the only pesticide that warranted its own special session of the California State Legislature under then governor Pete Wilson to be granted an extension for its use. One of the most urgent issues surrounding the chemical is its effect on children who attend schools near fields where the pesticide is used as a soil fumigant. Making Contact's Monica Lopez has more:

Monica Lopez: The demise and rise of the chemical methyl bromide in California has been a long and politically contentious journey through rich agricultural fields to the halls of power in the state capitol. Another side of pesticide struggles are the schools that operate near, or in some cases, adjacent to strawberry fields that are regularly injected with methyl bromide, a soil fumigant, termiticide and neurotoxin.

In 1998 the Environmental Working Group reissued its report, "An Ill Wind: Methyl Bromide Use Near California Schools." In it, the bi-coastal organization documents pesticide toxicity at all schools in California within one and a half miles of fields treated with methyl bromide, as well as the amount of the chemical used at the farms neighboring each school. Bill Walker is the California director of Environmental Working Group:

Bill Walker: We know that at very small exposures methyl bromide can cause things like nose bleed, headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, that sort of thing, and for those reason parents in some areas of California where methyl bromide is used often have held their children out of school on days when it's been applied. But the real danger is the long-term health effects that we may be exposing these kids to. We know that methyl bromide causes brain damage. We know that it causes nerve damage. It's a suspected carcinogen. In 10 out of the 11 tests required by the state of California to try and determine whether or not methyl bromide damages human health, 10 of them definitively said that it was a health hazard. The 11th study was not completed.

Monica Lopez: In the coastal farming community of Watsonville, parent and community organizer, Jim Scott- Behrends, helped take on methyl bromide use after symptoms of pesticide exposure were reported to him by a teacher at his children's school, Amesti Elementary. Scott-Behrends:

Jim Scott-Behrends: One of the teachers of my daughter mentioned that they were having trouble with the pesticide drift from the neighboring fields and some of the teachers there noticed they were getting ill and they noticed that the children were getting ill also, and they're very concerned about that. And I had wondered--it's been the last year before that--my children had come home several times with kind of flu-like symptoms. And then they'd get home, and then they'd be okay. And then checking it out with her and finding out the dates of the previous applications, I find out those applications were at the same time that my children were coming home.

Monica Lopez: For Scott-Behrends and other members of the community-based group, Farm Without Harm, the suspected exposures were an impetus for action. The group initiated a pesticide permit challenge to temporarily halt the application of pesticides near Amesti until the challenge could be fully examined. Scott- Behrends:

Jim Scott-Behrends: That entailed contacting the agricultural commissioner and then also filing a challenge with the Department of Pesticide Regulation. And they take that under review. And then you can also request a hearing on that. So we had all those in place. In the time in between, there's not supposed to be an application of pesticides in the area that you're questioning. But in our circumstances they did allow an application to go on, a little farther away from the school. So at that time, the parents and teachers and members of the Farm Without Harm group had a meeting and decided that we weren't going to allow the children to be exposed to that. And so numerous phone calls were made. And the day that they started the application, half the children of a school of about 600 stayed home. That was very effective as far as getting notice from the school district and notice from the growers, and also the media became very interested in that process.

Monica Lopez: Because the harmful effects of pesticides are often measured by how an adult might respond to a chemical, some researchers call particular attention to the ways in which a child's body responds to pesticide exposure. Dr. Marion Moses is a physician and the director of the Pesticide Education Center. According to Moses, children are more susceptible to their exposures than adults for several reasons:

Dr. Marion Moses: First of all, children have more body surface for their size than adults do. Children also take in more breaths per minute. So at the same level of exposure as an adult, a child will have more exposure. The other two things that make children more susceptible are the fact that children...their detoxification systems, their enzymes in the liver and other organs in their body, are developing, they're not as mature. And their immune systems are also not as mature. So they can't fight off outside influences as easily as an adult can.

Monica Lopez: According to the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, over 202 million pounds of pesticides were reported as being used in 1999. The same report also contains a list of chemicals that are known to cause reproductive toxicity and the amount of each chemical used that year. According to the list over 15 million pounds of methyl bromide were used, a third of which went to treat strawberry farms. But Walker says that protective regulation surrounding the application of methyl bromide that went into effect January, 2001, are relatively lax, considering the toxicity level and the amount of chemical being injected into the soil. Bill Walker:

Bill Walker: We don't believe that the state of California has really made an honest effort to try and protect kids, even though they've had ample opportunity to do so. New regulations that are going into effect shortly after the first of the year will allow methyl bromide to be used within fifty feet of schools, homes and other businesses. This is a significant step back from just a few years ago when in practice the level usually allowed was about 200 feet. The State has adopted these new regulations despite recommendations from its own scientists that an extra margin of safety needed to be built into the methyl bromide regulations to protect kids.

Monica Lopez: Concern over the harmful effects of methyl bromide is nothing new and it is not limited to California or the United States. Worldwide, more than 170 countries are signatories of the Montreal Protocol, a treaty that has scheduled the phase-out of methyl bromide in all industrialized countries by 2005 for the role it plays as an ozone depleter. The United States is also a signatory of the Montreal Protocol and therefore obliged to honor the treaty's phase-out deadline of 2005. But a history of missed deadlines in California and an increase in the use of methyl bromide is cause for concern with some activists. According to Anne Schonfield of the Pesticide Action Network, there is also a history of intense lobbying pressure at meetings of the Montreal Protocol from two of the world's largest producers of methyl bromide: Great Lakes Chemical from Indiana and Dead Sea Bromine in Israel. Member countries and observers of the treaty met in December, 2000. For Making Contact, I'm Monica Lopez.

Phillip Babich: Much of the work being done in the United States to rid the air, water and soil of dangerous pesticides could be undermined by the imposition of lower international standards, a problem many observers call "downward harmonization." In 1961, the Food and Agricultural Organization under the United Nations set up the Codex-Alimentarius Commission or the CODEX. This body was designed to develop international standards for food quality and safety. Under the World Trade Organization, or WTO, and many international trade agreements, if a country's regulatory requirements exceed CODEX, they can be challenged as trade barriers.

Erika Rosenthal is with the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit law firm working to protect the environment. She spoke at a forum on globalization and accountable governance organized by the Washington, DC based group, Public Citizen in June 2000. Rosenthal says there are already a number of problems with pesticide harmonization under the WTO and other trade agreements based on those standards.

Erika Rosenthal: Many CODEX standards are weaker than most national standards or than many national standards. The example that's often given in the U.S. is that CODEX standards allow residues of pesticides that have been banned here including DDT. A Government Accounting Office study determined that in well over 50% of cases compared, the U.S. standards are stricter, more protective of the environment and public health than the CODEX standards. So this leaves us very open to a downward harmonization of U.S. regulations. It's a clear possibility. Alternatively, other countries could challenge high, very protective U.S. food safety standards under the WTO or NAFTA. The CODEX standards are seen as a ceiling not as a floor. If a country wants to use standards that are less protective than CODEX, great, go to it. But if a country wants to use standards that are more protective, they can be challenged.

Third, the industry being regulated has incredible, incredible influence that kind of captured the whole debate. It's like leaving the fox to guard the chickens. They've calculated more or less that at the CODEX meetings, there's a 70-30% ratio industry representatives to government. At some of the Latin American harmonization fora, Monsanto, for example, has been there with about ten Monsanto representatives because they come with every national delegation. So Monsanto has a larger delegation than any of the countries themselves. And of course, in the Latin American context, there are no consumer representatives. There are at least a few observers at the WTO. The nakedness with which the industry has captured these fora came through to me last year. I was talking to a staff person for the Central American Pesticide Harmonization Agency. After we'd finished our conversation--all very pleasant--he gave me his card. It had the name of the Central American agency on one side, and I turned it over and it had Zeneca, a big chemical company on the other side.

Under the WTO, it is not considered trade-legal to consider environment or worker health issues in the setting of food safety standards. So those standards both here and in other countries for pesticides that have been set based on trying to limit or based on limiting worker exposure or environmental contamination are not considered trade-legal. The FDA tests only a fraction of the food imported into the United States for pesticide residues, something less than 2%. Under NAFTA, imports from Mexico have increased significantly. Now over 50% of U.S. fruit and vegetable imports come from Mexico. The classic example of the risk for the U.S. consumers: Mexican strawberries. When they were tested somewhere in the mid-90's, almost 20% had illegal pesticide residues. And since then, imports of Mexican strawberries have gone up significantly. It's also really important to remember that for those shipments or imports into the United States of products that are tested and found to exceed the limits, what happens to them? They just get returned to the country that exported them, like Mexico or Chile or wherever so that Mexicans and Chileans can eat them. There's virtually no domestic pesticide testing in any of these countries.

So are there examples of downward harmonization? Yeah, there are some. Japan has lowered something like 1500 pesticide standards to harmonize with CODEX. That is probably the most shocking example. There are many other that are perhaps a little more subtle. But in Central America for example, harmonized pesticide regulations forced El Salvador to weaken its regulations on toxicological classification in labeling of pesticides. Meaning that, a pesticide that used to have the red label and the skull and crossbones--Dangerous! Don't use me!--based on a proposal by industry has now been lowered in classification. Doesn't seem so dangerous anymore, but it's the same active ingredient. So a user has a sort of false sense of security. This has happened in other countries too and the pesticide poisoning rates have gone up.

Another example from Central America, this is kind of a unique one: The Central American harmonized regulations forced one Central American country, Belize, to allow again the use of a pesticide, a highly toxic one, methyl bromide, which is also a Class 1 ozone depleter under the Montreal Protocol, that had been prohibited for use in Belize ten years earlier. So it's a really good tool for the companies to get their products back on the market as well as to expand the markets. And here in the United States, the EPA was pressured to create a sort of an emergency tolerance--otherwise known as an exception--to permit the import of wine from Europe that had residues of a particular pesticide, even though the data and the studies necessary for the U.S. under our regulations to create the tolerance didn't exist. But they wanted to avoid a trade crisis with Europe. So, bon appetite again. Next time you make a toast, think of it.

Phillip Babich: Erika Rosenthal is with the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. You are listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about this program, we'll be giving out our toll free number at the end of this broadcast.

Farmers in poor countries across the globe are finding it increasingly difficult to preserve their traditional farming practices. Those who would usually have neither the money nor the inclination to use pesticides are facing pressure from multilateral lending institutions, like the World Bank, to become so-called "modern farmers." Under many World Bank projects, that means treating crops with toxic chemical pesticides often including what are termed "fixed agricultural input packages." Making Contact's Krissy Clark has more:

Krissy Clark: When Marcia Ishii-Eiteman visited the Indonesian Islands where a World Bank farming project was based, she says she noticed some striking contrasts in the land and farming styles there. On the one side of the road, she saw lush fields with coffee plants, banana, casaba, wild grasses, pineapples and native coconut trees. The farmers who tended the fields were prospering. On the other side of the road, the site of the World Bank project, it looked like another world, Ishii-Eiteman says:

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman: The fields that we looked at there were completely barren and brown because they had been drenched with Roundup, glyphosate, which kills all the vegetation in the area and also has very negative ecological impacts on soil microorganisms. So it's this wasteland and then sticking up out of it were occasional hybrid coconut trees that were part of the package that they had gotten. And these are supposed to be more disease resistant and more productive. But the farmers felt that there was too much risk. Sometimes they didn't take at all in that environment and they still preferred to have the local varieties.

Krissy Clark: But the World Bank wasn't supportive when farmers expressed interest in growing a more diverse group of native crops that would require less pesticides.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman: They were told that: "Well, if you don't get with it and get modern, you'll be left behind with your parents." But the parents seem to be doing better off with their very diverse systems.

Krissy Clark: Ishii-Eiteman is a senior program coordinator at the Pesticide Action Network, known as PAN and the director of that group's World Bank Accountability Program. She spent several years monitoring this World Bank program in Indonesia called the Integrated Swamps Development Project. She says in many case, the farmers involved in the project were required to buy fixed packages that included seeds, fertilizer and pesticides but no training on the proper use of the chemicals.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman: We asked farmers to draw pictures of where they stored them in their house. And many of them had the pesticides stored in the kitchen, just along with other food products. Also some of the pesticides were stored in conditions where the containers were these paper bins, were just falling apart and they were spilling onto the ground. They were leaking down the sides of the bottles and farmers were mixing the contents by hand--with their own hands--mixing different pesticides. So it's all the horror stories that one often hears. You can just see each of these things happening by farmers who, if it weren't for the World Bank project, would probably not have been able to afford the pesticides and would have been developing their own traditional methods of pest control.

Krissy Clark: Why would the World Bank promote pesticide use to farmers in developing countries? Fred Kirschenmann is a farmer and the director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Iowa. He says in poor countries World Bank projects often require its farmers to specialize in a specific cash crop that it thinks will be easy to export. But such specialization commonly leads to aggravated pest problems that can only be effectively controlled with pesticides. In this way a kind of chemical dependency develops, says Kirschenmann:

Fred Kirschenmann: Brazil's a great example. You know Brazil is now exporting huge quantities of soybeans because their ecologies are well suited to raising soybeans. And so they're now heavily into mono-croping soybeans. And at the same time, local populations can't get access to land to raise other diversities of food that they would like to raise for...to supply their own food needs. And the farmers who are producing these export crops are having to specialize into soybeans, and so they're having to use the same pesticides and fertilizers that farms in industrialized countries are using.

Krissy Clark: Kusherman says when farmers, whether they're in Indonesia or North Dakota, want to diversify their crops and decrease pesticide use, they often face uphill battles with skeptical lending institutions. Kusherman decided to go organic on his 3500 acre grain and livestock farm after 30 years of pesticide use had devastated the quality of his soil. He says his transition to sustainable agriculture wouldn't have been possible without the help of an independent community bank that was willing to listen to him.

Fred Kirschenmann: When we decided to make this transition, first thing we did was go to our bank, and we said here's what we want to do and, you know, here's the information. We aren't positive this is going to work, but we think it will. And we want to work with you to do this. So they came out to the farm and spent some time with us. And we went into some detail with what we wanted to do, and then they supported it. But I found out later that some of the larger branch banks who primarily make their decisions about the kinds of loans that they will fund from more centralized locations, and local branch banks don't have the freedom or the authority to contradict those guidelines. And then if your cropping plan, your farm plan, doesn't show that you plan to use the traditional fertilizers, etc. there have been farmers that have been denied loans because of that.

Krissy Clark: The importance of a lending institution that is sensitive to a community's needs became equally clear to the Indonesian farmers who participated in the World Bank's Integrated Swamps Development Project. A few years into the program, after the Bank had continually ignored farmers' complaints, a local Indonesian organization called Yayasan Duta Awan or YDA began working directly with communities involved in the project. YDA asked farmers themselves about the impact of the project and the pesticide use on their crops, their health, their lives and their pocketbooks. The kinds of questions the World Bank project managers had never asked. Eventually YDA trained farmers to go out into the field themselves and do project monitoring. After interviewing 300 farmers in 15 villages, they came back with some disturbing results. Common complaints about the Bank's project included widespread corruption, disappearance of funds and a lack of interest in community feedback. Again, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman of PAN.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman: When they found out that what was happening to one group of farmers was actually common throughout a number of villages in both provinces on a couple of these islands, they realized it wasn't just one individual's unlucky story but was a systemic problem with the World Bank project. And interestingly, this also led to much more public criticism of the World Bank as an intervention, as a development institution intervening in their country's affairs. And questions arising as to why do we have such a huge foreign debt, if it's to pay off projects like this which are actually bringing us much more grief and woe?

Krissy Clark: In some ways Ishii-Eiteman says, the most disturbing element of grief and woe was the report that overall participating farmers had increased their pesticide dependency through the World Bank program. This increase was a direct violation of Bank policy which mandates a commitment to reducing farmers' reliance on pesticides.

When Making Contact asked one World Bank scientists to comment on the disconnect between policy and implementation, she declined, saying pesticide policy was an explosive issue. But those who have worked with local communities to monitor World Bank projects had some ideas.

Stephanie Freed is a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. After a decade of work looking at the social and environmental impact of multilateral lending institutions, she's observed some revealing trends in how the World Bank does business:

Stephanie Freed: One of the things that happened for years with the Bank is that it tolerated violations of its own policies in order to not offend major borrowing governments, whether or not those governments were dictatorships, regardless of the human rights record. The Bank seemed to act in a way, at whatever cost, not to offend these borrowers.

Krissy Clark: Freed also points to what she calls "a pervasive culture of loan approval." She describes how this "culture" can lead some World Bank employees to approve loans despite apparent conflicts with the World Bank policies:

Stephanie Freed: Your career will progress in an upward direction if you're able to disperse or send out a large number of significant loans, of big loans. What this means is that if paying close attention to environmental and social concerns can be seen as an impediment to career advancement. This isn't to say that everyone in the World Bank ignores the environmental and social policies, but there is a very strong institutional pressure to get as much money as possible out the door as quickly as possible.

Krissy Clark: Ishii-Eiteman of PAN says that after some bad press in Indonesia and several meetings where the farmers presented their findings to the World Bank, the Bank did finally make some improvements to its Indonesian swamp project. But, she argues, the same kind of problems continue to appear in other World Bank projects which are designed by economists with little thought to environmental issues or local farmers' concerns. She suggests an underlying cause to the World Banks inconsistencies might be the cozy relationship between the Bank and the private sector.

PAN and several other organizations sent a letter to the World Bank expressing their concern about a secret, closed-door meeting in late 2000 between the Bank's president, James Wolfensohn, and the heads of the world's major pesticide companies. The letter asks the World Bank to hold a similar meeting with civil society groups.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman: In that meeting with Wolfenson there were the CEOs of Aventis, Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, Syngenta, BASF-AGI, all the major corporations were there. And you have to ask yourself: Is president Wolfenson convening a similar meeting with the farmers in west Kalimantan, to ask them what do they really need? I would expect the response is: There are...you know, there is an attempt at the regional level to start having more consultations with civil society. But it's really not parity when you have the president of this major institution having a secret closed-door meeting with these transnational companies.

Krissy Clark: For Making Contact, I'm Krissy Clark.

Phillip Babich: And that's it for this edition of Making Contact: A Look at Pesticides. Thanks for listening and special thanks this week to Orla Rapple for production assistance. Laura Livoti is our managing director; Peggy Law, executive director; associate producer, Stephanie Welch and Shereen Meraji; senior advisor, Norman Solomon; national producer, David Barsamian; Women's Desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman; Prison Desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt. And I'm you host and managing producer, Phillip Babich.

If you want to know more about the topic of this week's program or how to get in contact with any of our guests, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. Bye for now.