By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Aug 19 2003 (IPS)

A high-profile spat between a top Indian environment group and the world’s best-known brand names, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, over the allegedly toxic contents of their softdrink products, has revived the serious but dormant issue of pesticide use in this largely farming country.

India is among the world’s largest producers as well as consumers of pesticides, using up some 80,000 tonnes of toxic material to cover 185 million hectares of cultivated land.

At least a third of all known pesticide poisoning cases, including suicides, are reported from this country of one billion people.

For years, leading environmental groups including Greenpeace International and the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), which blew the whistle on Coke and Pepsi, have been issuing dire warnings of serious dangers to human beings and animals from the indiscriminate use of pesticide in agriculture and in vector control.

Except for stray cases where the courts have intervened, the manufacturers of pesticides have had a field day – until the revelation by CSE on Aug. 5 that samples of Coke and Pepsi tested in its laboratories had shown the presence of the commonly used pesticides DDT, Lindane, Chlorpyrifos and Malthion far in excess of permissible limits.

The director of CSE, Sunita Narain, has declared that Coke and Pepsi were only incidental to a larger campaign by her organisation and that of several other leading environmental groups to get the government to introduce a pesticide policy and act stringently on it.

But the Indian government itself happens to be the world’s biggest manufacturer of DDT. While most of the world has banned the substance, it continues not only to produce some 10,000 tonnes of the persistent organic pollutant (POP) but even exports quantities of it to several neighbouring countries in South Asia.

Even the discovery of unacceptably high levels of DDT in samples of breast milk taken from mothers in and around the national capital by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), some years ago, has failed to bestir the government.

Activists are now pinning their hopes on a writ petition filed in the Supreme Court in April by the Delhi-based group Srishti (Creation) seeking the prescription of permissible residue levels of pesticides based on international standards and the setting up of an expert body for prevention, control and monitoring of toxic substances and their effects on the environment and human health.

According to Ravi Agarwal, director of Srishti, while primary production of food in India is through agriculture, food processing and value addition are in the hands traders and food manufacturing enterprises which are not adequately governed by law.

”There is an urgent need to amend existing laws and bring them in harmony with standards set up by the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CODEX) set up in 1962 under the aegis of the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation,” Agarwal said in an interview.

Agarwal pointed to ICMR reports released last year, which showed more than half of all food commodities produced in India to be contaminated with pesticides with 20 percent of that having levels far exceeding maximum tolerance limits.

Other studies conducted by the noted Consumer Guidance Society of India (CGSI) have shown that apart from pesticides, food substances in India contain a deadly cocktail of fertiliser residue, antibiotics and chemical wastes such as sodium carbonate.

A R Shenoy, expert at the CGSI, says that dairy milk, regarded by most Indians as ideal food, is not safe simply because cows and buffaloes are kept in unhygienic surroundings and feed on contaminated feed and fodder.

Residents of the national capital who swear by vegetarianism were shocked by the results of yet another study carried out jointly earlier this year by Agarwal and Fiona Marshal from the Imperial College in London on popular vegetables like spinach, cauliflower and ladies’ fingers grown in nearby fields.

According to the study, funded by Britain’s Department for International Development and released in March, these vegetables grown by poor farmers had high concentrations of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and zinc that far exceeded the standards set even India’s outdated and grossly inadequate laws – let alone the CODEX.

”Policy approaches to food safety needed to be based on prevention rather than command control of food quality at the retail end of the food chain – as is happening with the Coca-Cola and Pepsi controversy,” Agarwal explained.

Agarwal said there have been attempts in India to set up independent multi-stakeholder agencies to monitor food safety as in other countries but these have somehow failed.

The last attempt was made in 1998 by the influential industrialist Nusli Wadia, who helped set up the ‘Food Regulatory Authority’ supported no less than the Prime Minister’s Office. Despite the fanfare at its inauguration, the body died a natural death.

But there are signs that the charges of pesticides in Coke and Pepsi and other yet unnamed contaminants leveled by the CSE may not go away so easily.

Already the controversy has provoked the government’s Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to announce on Monday that it would raise the standards for drinking water and water used in the food processing industry and bring them in alignment with those set by the European Union from January next year.

The BIS, however, must wait for Ministry of Food Processing, which governs softdrink manufacture, to change the present rules.

At present, these merely require the use of ‘potable’ water by such companies as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which critics accuse of dispensing with costly purification processes required in the polluted environmental conditions in the country.

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