Medardo Pérez, 60, sprays paraquat, a potent herbicide, to kill the weeds growing in his corn crop in the San Isidro canton of the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador. Most small farmers in Central America use this and other agrochemicals on their crops, just as agribusiness does on monocultures such as bananas, pineapples, coffee and sugar cane. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SANTA MARÍA OSTUMA, El Salvador , Aug 21 2023 (IPS)

In his green cornfield, Salvadoran farmer Medardo Pérez set about filling the hand-held spray pump that hangs on his back, with the right mixture of water and paraquat, a potent herbicide, and began spraying the weeds.

Paraquat, the active ingredient in brands such as Gramaxone, from the German pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer, is sold without any restrictions in El Salvador and in other nations in Central America and around the world, despite its toxicity and the fact that the label clearly states “controlled product”."We are risking our lives with these poisons, since we don't even use a waterproof cape to protect ourselves, so the chemical wets our backs, it gets inside our bodies, through our pores." -- Medardo Pérez

“We are risking our lives with these poisons, since we don’t even use a waterproof cape to protect ourselves, so the chemical wets our backs, it gets inside our bodies, through our pores,” the farmer from San Isidro, in the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, in the central Salvadoran department of La Paz, told IPS.

Pérez, 60, said he was aware of the risks to his health, but added that using the agrochemical made it easier and faster for him to get rid of the weeds growing in his cornfield on his two-hectare farm.

“Paraquat is restricted here in Guatemala, but it is commonly used in agriculture; any peasant farmer can buy it; it is sold freely,” David Paredes, an activist with the National Network for the Defense of Food Sovereignty in Guatemala, told IPS.

In 2016 the New York Times reported that scientific reports linked paraquat to Parkinson’s disease, and explained that the product could not be sold in Europe but could be marketed in the United States and the rest of the world.

Agrochemicals everywhere and no controls

Central America is a region where these and other agrochemicals are imported and marketed with virtually no controls, and where governments appear to have given in to the interests of the powerful transnational corporations that produce and sell them.

Some 51 million people live in the region and 20 percent of jobs are in the agricultural sector, which accounts for a total of seven percent of the GDP of the seven countries of Central America.

In addition to small farmers, agroindustry in the region uses agrochemicals intensively to produce monocultures for export, such as bananas, pineapples, African palm, coffee and sugarcane.

Sugarcane is the raw material for the sugar that the region exports to the United States, Europe and even China, through trade agreements.

The sugar agribusiness uses glyphosate, patented in 1974 by the U.S.-based Monsanto, to accelerate sugarcane ripening, but there are reports around the world about the damage caused to the environment and to health, including possible cancer risks, as warned by environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

And yet it continues to be widely used in the region and in other parts of the world. Glyphosate is known by commercial names such as Roundup, also owned now by Germany’s Bayer.

“There is indiscriminate use of agrochemicals by agribusiness,” Paredes said from his country’s capital, Guatemala City.

Paredes shared with IPS the preliminary results of a study, still underway, that has detected the presence of 49 chemicals in the water due to the use of pesticides, half of them banned in more than 120 countries, he said.

The research has been carried out along the southern coast of the country, where monocultures such as sugar cane, banana, African palm and pineapple are predominant, he said.

Juan Mejía, a small farmer, takes a break from his daily chores on his two-hectare plot in the El Carrizal canton, in the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, El Salvador. Mejía still continues to use herbicides such as paraquat, but has reduced their use by 90 percent, and is now shifting to agroecological production. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala

The fight against agrochemicals

“Glyphosate is applied through aerial spraying, it is very common in that area, and when the wind spreads it to the crops of poor communities, their harvests are destroyed,” he said.

The same is true in El Salvador, where environmental organizations have been carrying out the Bitter Sugar campaign for several years, against the indiscriminate use of glyphosate, in particular, and agrochemicals in general.

“In this campaign we have protested the fact that spraying by light aircraft continues, and that it is punishable, as an environmental crime,” Alejandro Labrador, of the Ecological Unit of El Salvador (UNES), told IPS.

In September 2013, El Salvador’s single-chamber legislature approved a ban on 50 agrochemicals, including paraquat and glyphosate. But the decree was rejected by then President Mauricio Funes and the bill has been bogged down ever since.

However, except for a list of 11 products – including paraquat and glyphosate – the agrochemicals that the legislature wanted to ban were already regulated by other national and international regulations, although in practice there is little or no state control over their use in the fields.

“The corporate lobby twisted their arm,” Labrador said, alluding to the failed attempt to ban them via legislative decree.

He also hinted at the influence exercised over presidents and government officials by transnational biotechnology corporations such as Bayer and Monsanto, whose interests are usually defended by the agricultural chambers of the Central American region.

He added that El Salvador is the Central American country that imports the most agrochemicals per year, “at a very high cost to ecosystems and people’s health.”

In this regard, in the last decade, the use of glyphosate during the sugar cane harvest has been linked to a high rate of kidney failure in El Salvador.

This nation has the highest rate of deaths from chronic kidney disease in Central America: 47 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, according to a UNES report published in 2021, which states that 80,000 tons of fertilizers, 3,000 tons of herbicides and 1,200 tons of fungicides are imported annually into El Salvador.

The bittersweet taste of pineapple

In Costa Rica, the use of pesticides is also intensive in monoculture export crops like bananas and, above all, pineapples, activist Erlinda Quesada, of the National Front of Sectors Affected by Pineapple Production, told IPS.

Quesada pointed out that the product known generically as bromacil has been linked to cases of cancer, while nemagon has been linked to cases of infertility in men and women.

“It happened to us with the nemagon in banana production, which sterilized a lot of men in Costa Rica,” said Quesada, from Guásimo, a municipality in the province of Limón, on the country’s Atlantic coast.

Complaints from environmental organizations led the government to ban bromacil in 2017, due to the impact on underground water sources.

“However, I doubt that they have stopped using it,” Quesada said.

A report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) revealed in May 2022 that Costa Rica uses up to eight times more pesticides per hectare than other Latin American countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“The average apparent use of pesticides in agriculture between 2012 and 2020 was 34.45 kilos per hectare, a figure higher than previous estimates” in the Central American country, the report cited, more than in OECD members Canada, the United States, Mexico, Chile and Colombia.

One of the one-liter cans of paraquat that Salvadoran farmer Medardo Pérez used during a day’s work to eliminate weeds in his cornfield. Paraquat is one of the most widely used agrochemicals in Central America and the world, despite health risks and environmental contamination. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A blow to food sovereignty

The focus on intensively produced monocultures among national and international economic leaders has ended up damaging the capacity to produce food for the local population, Wendy Cruz, of the local affiliate of the international farmers’ rights movement Via Campesina, told IPS from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.

“Now it is the consortiums and elites that occupy large tracts of land to produce for global markets, and agrotoxins increasingly weaken the capacity of the land to produce food for our people,” Cruz said.

“We need to push for a change of model, with governments adopting an agroecological vision that sustains life,” she said.

Seeds of passion fertilize Brazil’s semiarid Northeast

This vision of producing agricultural products without damaging the environment with agrochemicals is shared by another Salvadoran, Juan Mejía, a 67-year-old small farmer who grows some of his products using ecological fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.

Paraquat is still used, he said, to “burn the weeds,” but on a smaller scale, and he is trying to use it less and less. He also uses – but “very little” – Monarca, another Bayer pesticide, whose active ingredient is thiacloprid.

“We have learned to work organically, maybe not 100 percent, but as much as possible,” said Mejía, during a break in the work on his two-hectare plot, located in the canton of El Carrizal, also in Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador.

Mejía produces organic fertilizer known as gallinacea and a pesticide based on chili, onion, garlic and a little soap, with which he combats whiteflies, a pest that damages growing vegetables.

“It’s effective, but it doesn’t work automatically, right away, it takes a little more time,” he said.

He added: “We farmers have always mistakenly wanted to see immediate results, like we get with chemicals. But organic agriculture is a process, it is slower, but more beneficial to our health and the environment.”

In addition to milpa, a traditional ancestral pre-Hispanic system of planting corn, beans, chili peppers and pipián, a type of zucchini, Mejía grows citrus fruits, plantains (cooking bananas) and cacao.

“We have diversified and included other crops, such as green leafy vegetables, so that we are not buying contaminated products and are harvesting our own, healthier food,” he said.

Sometimes the best solutions can appear to be so simple that it’s hard to imagine why they weren’t invented centuries ago.

Credit: Purdue University

Take the so-called PICS bags, big plastic storage sacks made of triple-lined plastic that can hold up to 90 kilograms of cowpeas or other farm produce. They cut agricultural waste and boost the incomes of rural smallholders, and go for around 2 dollars apiece.

Much of the credit for this recent innovation is due to Larry Murdock, the Purdue University (US) professor who invented the first Purdue Improved Cowpea Storage bags – the “C “in the acronym now stands for “Crop” as the latest generation are designed for other farm outputs.

But PICS also remind us that implementing the best ideas requires more than a touch of genius, but also a fair amount of tenacity and legwork on the ground and in the fields.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is working on that, and has conducted more than 1,500 demonstrations of the product in more than 25 states across Nigeria.

The IITA is “the main source of information” for what is not such a simple product after all, said Tahirou Abdoulaye, a Niger-born economist who is IITA’s project coordinator and, fittingly, earned his doctoral degree at Purdue.

The case for the PICS bag is compelling. By hermetically sealing dried produce, they keep the insect threat at bay. That in turn revolutionizes the potential value of the food that farmers grow, as they face lower risks of losses from voracious weevils who can easily destroy half a crop in less than two months when traditional storage methods are used. With their crop better protected, smallholders can assure they have enough to eat at home and can actually command higher prices for what they take to market because they are no longer forced to sell into seasonal gluts out of fear that their goods would spoil. An early analysis found that cowpea farmers raised their income by almost 50 per cent by using the bags.

IITA has been promoting PICS, helped by a host of partners and the Gates Foundation, for seven years now.

One of the issues for PICS bags is that they need to be manufactured locally. That is being organized in a slew of African countries, most recently Rwanda. In Nigeria, the company Lela Agro has churned out more than a million PICS bags. But even once that process has been licensed and authorized and built, the supply chain still needs a distribution network.

Use of PICS bags jumps when there is a local dealer, Abdoulaye said. He can be surreally precise: In Nigeria, if there is a dealer within seven kilometres, farmers use the bags. That means a lot of recruiting.

IITA holds workshops to train vendors about the technology, builds capacity among existing networks of extension agents, leverages media publicity and holds scores of direct demonstrations at the farmer level.

These, too, require time. Typically, one of Abdoulaye’s staff will go back to a volunteer after two months and arrange for the farmer’s produce to be opened after two months. At that point he has clinched the sale, so to speak. Losses of cowpeas – also known as blackeyed peas and a product of which Abdoulaye’s home country is the world’s second-largest exporter – are negligible, whereas they were typically above 20 per cent using traditional granaries or simpler polythene sacks.

There are extra benefits, as well. For example, farmers can use pesticides, both during the growing season and in treating their harvest upon drying. The price of such chemicals can easily run to 10 dollars a tonne, which amounts to half the price of a PICS bag that will typically last two or three growing seasons.

Abdoulaye is shepherding IITA’s efforts across West Africa. PICS bags are gradually spreading around the entire continent, and their deployment is being fined tuned for more crops, ranging from peanuts, sorghum, bambara groundnuts, cassava chips and corn.

The IITA is a non-profit research organization that for almost 50 years has focused on hunger, malnutrition and poverty. The PICS project is an example of how all three can be tackled in an integrated way.

First, food loss rates – the bane of sub-Saharan Africa – are reduced. Second, cowpeas and similar crops – around half the region’s dry beans are grown for sale – are high-protein foods, greatly boosting affordable nutritional prospects. Lastly, secure storage methods allow small farmers to choose their time of sale of surplus produce, thereby enabling them to wait for the optimal market price.

That last factor can have dramatic impact in times of drought, and in ordinary times raises farmer revenue by 10 to 15 per cent, according to Corinne Alexander, an agricultural economist at Purdue. Many African markets also offer a quality premium for beans that have no holes and have not been discolored by other anti-pest treatments.

Another potential benefit is that the bags may help combat aflatoxin, a sneaky fungus that can rip into harvests and eventually weaken human immune systems. Intensive empirical studies have recently shown strong evidence that the air-tight bags impede mold growth and aflatoxin accumulation for corn in the storage phase.

Meanwhile, IITA is also rolling out AlfaSafe, a biological control product that basically crowds out the harmful Aspergillus molds that produce aflatoxins, and has set up a low-cost factory in Nigeria to make it.

Perhaps more importantly, technology adoption such as using the bags entails a lot of collateral learning, which IITA is designed to provide. By knowing more about their problems, rural smallholders will doubtless develop better ways to combat them.

(End)

Tammy Brehio of Kihei, Hawaii, pointing from her back balcony to a Monsanto cornfield a few hundred yards from her house. The inset photo, taken by Tammy, shows a Monsanto tractor spraying pesticides. Credit: Photo by Christopher Pala. Inset photo by Tammy Brehio.

By Christopher Pala
KIHEI, Hawaii, Oct 16 2015 (IPS)

Tammy Brehio stood on the back balcony of her home in Kihei on the island of Maui and pointed to a brown field a few hundred yards away.

“That’s where they spray the pesticides, even when the wind is blowing directly at us,” said the 40-year-old year mother of three small children. “Ever since we moved here, we all have sore throats and we cough all the time.”

She and a neighbour, who declined to be identified because he works for an agricultural company and feared losing his job, said the spraying often takes place at night. “It wakes me up, it smells really strong and it’s hard to breathe,” Brehio said.

“We do not apply pesticides at night,” said Monica Ivey, the spokeswoman for Monsanto, which grows genetically modified corn on the field. “Monsanto complies with all federal and state laws that govern responsible pesticide use.”

Whether or not the companies respect these laws, which forbid allowing pesticides sprayed on a field to drift beyond it, has become one of the biggest controversies in Hawaii in the past few years.

Over the past decade or so, Monsanto, DuPont and Dow Chemical of the United States, Bayer and BASF of Germany and Syngenta of Switzerland have more than doubled their acreage in Hawaii. Attracted by a year-round growing season that cuts in half the time it takes to bring a new variety to market, they have turned the Aloha State into the epicentre of corn grown with genes modified in laboratories – designed mostly to tolerate the pesticides the companies produce and sell to farmers with the corn.

The kernels grown in Hawaii are sent the mainland United States, where they are planted and harvested. Those kernels are then sold to farmers, whose production ends up mostly as cattle feed and ethanol. The corn sold as food is known as sweet corn and constitutes perhaps one percent of the industrial variety, which is known as field corn.

The agro-chemical companies now own or lease about some 25,000 acres on the islands of Maui, Molokai, Kauai and Oahu – about 2 per cent of the land area. Because the islands are mountainous and farmland is scarce, the fields often abut homes, businesses and schools. Most of these fields were previously used to grow sugar cane and pineapple, and the towns grew around them in the 19th and 20th centuries.

At any given time, about 80 per cent of the fields are bare and brown. The crops are grown in small patches of a few acres and sprayed often with pesticides, which residents complain that they often are forced to inhale.

Even a mile from the nearest cornfield in downtown Waimea, on the island of Kauai, Lois Catala, 75, reports that the pesticide clouds percolate into her home with no warming. “All of a sudden, your eyes are burning and you’re itching all over, and you hear everybody complaining,” she said. A local doctor says she stopped biking to work on a road that bisects cornfields because she went through clouds of pesticides too many times. Other residents interviewed told of similar experiences.

Testing new varieties of pesticide-resistant field corn and growing seed corn from them requires 17 times more restricted-use insecticides and more frequent applications than farmers in the US use for their crops, a study by the Center for Food Safety has concluded. Court documents filed by attorneys for Waimea homeowners who successfully sued DuPont for pesticide and dust impacts to their homes show the company sprayed 10 times the mainland average, based on internal pesticide records obtained from DuPont.

The frequent, sometimes daily, sprayings have led to a spate of complaints that the companies violate with impunity federal and state laws.

The laws say that commercial applicators who spray pesticides that winds carry out of their property is liable for a $25,000 fine and/or six months in jail. The pesticides receive approval from the federal Environmental Protection Agency only after being tested for their legal use, which does not include human inhalations.

In 2006 and 2008, Howard Hurst was teaching special-education classes at Waimea Middle School, on Kauai, when clouds of what he believes were concentrated pesticides blew into the school from an adjoining field operated by Syngenta. “It feels like you have salt in your eyes, your tongue swells, your muscles ache, it’s awful,” he said in an interview at the school. Both times, the school was evacuated and several students were treated at the nearest emergency room.

But the state authorities, instead of prosecuting the Swiss company, which denied that it was spraying on those days, insisted that the evacuations were caused by mass hysteria triggered by an onion-like plant called stinkweed.
Without ever accepting responsibility, Syngenta stopped using the field adjacent to the school. The closest is now a half-kilometer away. Hurst said pesticide odors have become much less frequent.

In 2013, the Kauai county council passed a law ordering the companies to create wider buffer zones and to disclose in far more detail than they do now what they spray, where and when. A group of doctors in Waimea, which is surrounded by cornfields on three sides, testified that the number of cases of serious heart defects in local newborns was 10 times the national rate.

Meanwhile, in Honolulu, a pediatrician said in an interview that he’d noticed a statewide spike in another birth defect called gastroschisis, in which the baby is born with the abdominal organs outside.

“Data suggest that there may also be an association between parental pesticide use and adverse birth outcomes including physical birth defects,” the American Academy of Pediatrics reported this year.

“I think it’s serious,” says Bernard Riola, a pediatrician in Waimea. “We need an in-depth epidemiological study. Right now, we just don’t know” if the pesticides are causing the birth defects. Another doctor at the hospital said he tried to get the state to do just such a study, to no avail.

Bennette Misalucha, the head of the agro-chemical companies trade group, the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, dismissed the doctors’ concerns. “We have not seen any credible source of statistical health information to support the claims,” she wrote in an e-mail after declining to be interviewed.

The companies she represents strongly opposed the buffer-zones and disclosure law, which resembled others passed in 11 other states. They argued that it would drive away the companies and cause job losses, and that critics of the pesticide-drift problem were simply victims of scare-mongering by opponents of genetically modified food.

They sued and a federal judge struck the law down, arguing that only the state can regulate pesticide use. Civil Beat, a Hawaii news site, reported here that it effectively does not.

In Maui and Molokai, which form one county, a bitterly fought ballot initiative was approved by the voters in November 2014 banning genetically modified agriculture until an Environment Impact Statement is performed and proves the industry is safe.

The companies spent $8 million to fight it, reportedly the most spent on any political campaign in Hawaii history. Another federal judge struck it down on the same grounds as the Kauai ordinance: that only the state can regulate pesticide use. Both rulings are being appealed.

Back in Maui, Brehio, the mother of three who says she is dispirited by the lack of progress in curbing illegal pesticide drift, was remodeling her kitchen with her husband and preparing to sell their house. “This is a not a safe place for me and my family,” she said.

Meanwhile, construction has started on a strip of land between her house and the Monsanto field for a 660-unit affordable-housing development where the cheapest units will be right against the Monsanto fields.

“This report was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.”

With adequate extension support, women farmers can increase productivity and food security in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, May 8 2014 (IPS)

An estimated one billion small farmers scratching out a living growing diverse crops and raising animals in developing countries represent the key to maintaining food production in the face of hotter temperatures and drought, especially in the tropical regions, says Sarah Elton, author of the book, “Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet.”

The Canadian journalist travelled to southern France, China, India and the province of Quebec in her own country to observe how small farmers apply their practical knowledge of agriculture – defined as either organic, agroecological or sustainable.“We are now aware that the unthinking application of yield-boosting technologies around the world has brought both many good things as well as many bad things." -- Evan Fraser

“What I found most surprising as a journalist was to see how pervasive the social movement was at the grassroots. So, rather than it being a policy perceived by government, people [in the rural areas] are not waiting for government. Government is not there to solve their problems. [Small farmers] are figuring out better ways themselves.”

At the moment a “very big but brittle” global industrial food system is supplying the world’s supply of food, she explains. Typically, it is reliant on the massive growing of single crops like wheat, corn or rice, which in turn are assisted by commercial agriculture inputs such as hybrid seeds, chemical based pesticides and fossil fuel-based fertilisers, as well as an overuse of water.

Global industrial food is praised for its efficiency and high yields and so small farmers get aboard. But in the process some become too dependent on these expensive commercial agricultural inputs by borrowing money to pay for them and thereby incurring large debts.

The journalist relates in her book how Chandrakalabai, today a resourceful and thriving farmer in the agricultural state of Maharashtra in the western part of India, managed to avoid that economic fate.

Originally, she struggled in terms of growing a range of items – millet, sorghum, vegetables and cotton – while simultaneously investing into the commercial agricultural inputs when she could afford them.

By the early 1990s, she made the switch to organic farming, minus these inputs and with the assistance of an NGO, the Institute for Integrated Rural Development.

“Chandrakalabai’s story shows us that smaller farmers in the developing world can lessen their input costs and grow organically. If they can then embed themselves in a local food system with a minimum of intermediaries between them and the consumer, they can earn more money and secure a better future,” Elton writes in her book.

The other problem with global industrial food is that single crop farming undermines the soil’s fertility and makes these kinds of operations especially vulnerable to storms, floods and drought, associated with climate change, adds Elton.

She cites how 880 small holders based farming plots in Nicaragua with diverse crops and minus the commercial agricultural inputs managed to survive the catastrophic battering of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. On average these agro-ecological operations retained 40 percent more topsoil after the storm and lost 18 percent less arable land in landslides.

Isabel Michi carefully tends seedlings in the greenhouse on her small organic farm in the settlement of Mutirão Eldorado in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

The latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paints a stark picture of a hotter future where crop yields decline, demand for food increases and food prices rise.

Farming operations are being urged by scientists to alter their growing practices as a part of a general mitigation strategy for a range of human activity (which also includes reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned for energy) in order to avoid the worst case scenario of world temperatures rising way past two degrees Centigrade.

“One of the things that the report makes very clear is how farmers respond and how farmers behave will have a huge impact on the effect of climate change,” says Evan Fraser, a University of Guelph geography professor, food security specialist and Canada Research Chair in Global Human Security. He worked on an earlier draft on the food section of the IPCC report.

Fraser says that sophisticated weather forecasting tools are being developed to make it possible for government authorities to react before a catastrophic storm arrives to cause devastation to crops, infrastructure, homes and people. And he also maintains that drought conditions represent a far more serious threat to agriculture single episodic events like storms and floods.

“I think that drought is going to be the bigger problem over the long term, in the 21 century. Certainly drier conditions in the tropics are going to lead to significant challenges for farmers,” he says.

With that in mind, Fraser calls for going in the direction of traditional small farmers by planting diverse crops. Furthermore, he say, one should include drought tolerant crops with a deeper root structures to access water. Furthermore, the food security specialist suggests a ramp up of organic matter, be it recycled manure or what is left of last year’s crop, to serve as a sponge in the soil to trap or restore water.

“We are now aware that the unthinking application of yield-boosting technologies around the world has brought both many good things as well as many bad things. Developing and applying new technologies to boost yields into the future will require a deft handling of both science, agricultural extension, social policy, and a very context-specific understanding of the needs local farmers face,” Fraser told IPS.

But experimentation in agricultural practices is less likely to happen in North America where farming operations, because of their size, are tied up in loans and big contracts to corporations in agribusiness and their unsustainable practices, says food security specialist Danielle Nierenberg, president of the Chicago based Food Tank, a food security think tank.

But small farmers, especially in developing countries, are better able through necessity to innovate and so, “we have a lot to learn from them,” she told IPS.

Many farmers have been encouraged to practice more industrial methods and they are finding in the face of drought and extreme flooding that going back to more traditional and indigenous practices they are able to better combat climate change,” says Nierenberg.

But the president of Food Tank warns against a rigid definition of what constitutes sustainable agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, where are the soils can be deficient, “an extra boost” of artificial fertiliser may be needed to make the land more productive, she explains.

Meanwhile, some government and international development agencies including the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation are jumping on the “sustainable” bandwagon without completely breaking away from chemical inputs, says Julia Wright, deputy director at the UK-based Centre for Agroecology and Food Security at Coventry.

“Sustainable intensification, for example, can mean a concentrated form of industrial agriculture, and conservation agriculture – one form that the FAO likes to promote,” she told IPS.

One piece of good news, Wright adds, is that there are a number of national governments which have genuine programmes for agroecological or organic smallholder farmers.

“Bhutan is planning to become the world’s first organic country. Bolivia has some supportive policies. Parts of Germany are quite forward thinking in this respect, and of course the Cuban government supports smallholder organic urban agriculture,” Wright said.

Cyclamens on sale at Home Depot. Credit: AWA/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Major U.S. retailers are selling garden plants that are billed as “bee-friendly” but laced with pesticides known to be toxic to bees, according to a preliminary study, the first on the issue, released Wednesday.

Researchers with Friends of the Earth U.S. and the Pesticide Research Institute say that more than half of the nursery plants studied contained residues of “neonicotinoid” pesticides, a substance increasingly thought to be contributing to mass die-offs of global honey bee populations."It turns out these systemics have major risks that EPA did not fully understand. Now the agency is in a defensive stance … It will be difficult to reel these products back in, but it can be done.” -- Peter Jenkins of the Centre for Food Safety

“At the levels observed in our report, the high percentage of contaminated plants and concentrations suggest this problem is widespread,” Lisa Archer, a co-author of the new report and director of Friends of the Earth U.S.’s food and technology programme, told IPS.

“Unfortunately, too many home gardeners have likely become a source of exposure to pesticides that have been shown to harm, weaken and kill bees. It’s pretty shocking that consumers who may be purchasing these plants specifically to help bees could in fact be poisoning them.”

Many others may share that shock. Also on Wednesday, these groups delivered a petition signed by some 175,000 people to major retailers, urging them to stop selling neonicotinoid-treated plants.

Following on a half-decade of mysteriously bad news, last winter was one of the worst on record for U.S. commercial bee populations, with beekeepers reporting mortality rates of 40 to 90 percent and the collapse of nearly a third of hives. Normal “over-wintering” mortality rates should be around 10 to 20 percent, experts say.

In the United States, around a third of the food supply (and two-thirds of food crops) is dependent on bee pollination. Broader ecosystems arguably have even more to lose, with some 80 percent of flowering plants relying on bees for their survival.

Neonicotinoids (or “neonics”) are known as a systemic pesticide, water-soluble substances that can travel throughout a crop via its roots, remaining within the plant for multiple seasons. Today, neonics make up the most common class of pesticide in the world, including treatments for nearly all commercially sown grains in the United States.

Yet a growing body of scientific evidence is suggesting that low levels of exposure to neonics could be making bee populations more vulnerable to a host of other problems, including parasites and a changing climate, or even simply making it through the winter months.

Sublethal doses

While scientists have increasingly focused on the potential impact of the agricultural use of neonics, Wednesday’s study is the first to try to gauge the use of these substances in home and industrial ornamental gardens. The report notes that “many of the seedlings and plants sold in nurseries and garden stores across the U.S. have been pre-treated with neonicotinoids at much higher doses than are used on farms.”

The study sample was very small, just 13 plants known to be highly appealing to pollinators, and the researchers are calling for more extensive research. The plants were purchased at three nationwide retailers in three areas of the United States and then analysed by an independent laboratory.

More than half the plants sampled were found with some level of neonic concentration, ranging from 11 to 1,500 microgrammes per kilogramme. Some plants were found to be carrying two or even three types of neonics.

While the lower levels of that spectrum would likely not kill bees, Archer notes that smaller amounts could have significant impact.

“Adverse effects are definitely possible even with lesser amounts, including impacting on bees’ fertility and ability to navigate, as has been proven in lab settings previously,” she says.

“Bees already have enough problems as it is, so our hope with this study is that retailers can now take action and lead on this issue, to ensure that consumers at least have access to neonic-free plants.”

Archer is unaware of the extent of knowledge within the nursery retail industry about the potential impact of neonics on bee populations, but says she’s willing to give companies the benefit of the doubt that they were unaware of the issue to date.

A spokesperson for Home Depot, a home services giant that operates some 2,250 stores, told IPS that his office hadn’t yet reviewed the new study. “But we certainly appreciate the importance of the bee population,” he said, “so we’ll be reaching out to the study groups to learn more.”

Lowe’s, another large-scale retailer included in the new study, did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

Defensive regulators

Last month, U.S. lawmakers introduced national legislation aimed at taking emergency interim measures to safeguard U.S. beehives, after some 50,000 honey bees reportedly died following an ornamental application of neonic pesticide in a business parking lot. If passed, the bill would halt the use of neonics until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – the body that approved their use in the first place – undertakes a scheduled reappraisal of the pesticides in 2018.

“Twelve years ago, EPA became so enamoured with systemic insecticides that they approved hundreds of these products,” Peter Jenkins, an attorney with the Centre for Food Safety, an advocacy group that sued the EPA over the issue this spring, told IPS.

“But it turns out these systemics have major risks that EPA did not fully understand. Now the agency is in a defensive stance … It will be difficult to reel these products back in, but it can be done.”

While some suggest that conservative pushback could doom the currently pending pollinator legislation, Jenkins points to recent evidence of notably broad bipartisan support for such action.

A related provision would have passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives earlier this year as part of a larger bill that ultimately failed, he says. In addition, the Republican-controlled House committee that oversees financial appropriations for the EPA is currently urging the agency to take related regulatory action.

To a great extent, global precedent on neonic use is currently coming from Europe. The European Union is slated to pass a two-year moratorium on the use of three types of neonics, pending additional research, while the majority of home garden retailers in the United Kingdom have already stopped selling neonic-treated plants.

“If retailers can do this in the U.K., they can do it here,” Friends of the Earth U.S.’s Archer says. “According to the American Gardening Association, more than 80 percent of consumers are interested in purchasing environmentally friendly products, so we’re hoping retailers will see this as an opportunity to be leaders in pollinator protection.”

A honey bee in a willow tree. Credit: Bob Peterson/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

Two Congressional Democrats have co-sponsored new legislation called the Save America’s Pollinators Act of 2013 to take emergency action to save the remaining bees in the U.S., and in turn, the U.S. food supply.

At issue is the use of toxic insecticides called neonicotinoids. Recent studies suggest that at least four types of these insecticides are a primary cause of the massive decline in bee populations seen in the U.S. in recent years.“Our ecosystems are based on pollination of native bees; everything from grizzly bears to songbirds rely on foods that rely on pollination." -- Scott Hoffman Black of the Xerxes Society

It is estimated over 10 million beehives been wiped out since 2007, as part of a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder.

“Given that EPA allowed many of these insecticides on the market without adequate safety assessments and without adequate field studies on their impact to pollinator health, we feel it’s time that Congress support a bill like the Conyers-Blumenauer bill, which would suspend the use of the neonicotinoids until EPA does the adequate science to prove that these neonicotinoids… are not harmful – and if they are harmful, to keep them off the market,” Colin O’Neil, director for government affairs for the Centre for Food Safety, told IPS.

“One-third of food that’s reliant on the honeybee pollination is really under threat, and threats to pollinators concern the entire food system,” O’Neil said.

During the last winter alone, which began in 2012 and ended early this year, U.S. beekeepers lost 45.1 percent of the colonies they operate, with some beekeepers losing 100 percent, according to a government-sponsored study.

The European Union has already imposed a two-year moratorium on several types of neonicotinoids, after the European Food Safety Authority found in January 2013 that certain neonicotinoids were threatening Europe’s bee populations.

In May 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a joint study noting that, “Acute and sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees have been increasingly documented, and are a primary concern.”

The proposed legislation, by Rep. John Conyers and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, would require the EPA to suspend the use of at least four neonicotinoids, including imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and dinotafuran.

The legislation would prevent the EPA from re-authorising the use of the chemicals as pesticides until the agency conducts a full review of the scientific evidence. It would have to determine there are no unreasonable adverse effects on bees or other pollinators or beneficial insects before allowing them back on the market.

Through their pollination activities, by which bees allow plants to reproduce, bees are responsible for over 125 billion dollars in global food production, including over 20 billion dollars in the U.S., according to the legislation’s findings.

“Neonicotinoids cause sublethal effects including impaired foraging and feeding behavior, disorientation, weakened immunity, delayed larval development, and increased susceptibility to viruses, diseases, and parasites and numerous studies have also demonstrated acute, lethal effects from the application of neonicotinoid insecticides,” the legislation states.

“Recent science has demonstrated that a single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid is toxic enough to kill a songbird,” it says.

In June 2013, over 50,000 bumblebees were killed in Wilsonville, Oregon, as a direct result of exposure to a neonicotinoid that was used not as a pesticide, but to cosmetically improve the appearance of certain trees.

So many bees have already died in the U.S. that just one more bad winter here could cause a major food crisis, one U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist said in the recent report.

O’Neil notes the U.S. House recently approved an amendment to the Farm Bill that would establish an interagency consultation process on pollinator protection, and would establish a task force to address bee decline.

“Passage of that was the first indicator this summer that members of congress were really waking up to this issue,” O’Neil said.

“We feel this bill [Conyers-Blumenauer] is necessary because the bees are dying now, and we can’t wait four years down the road to come to the conclusion that pesticides are killing bees,” he said.

The Centre for Food Safety recently sent an email to their members asking them to contact Gina McCarthy, the new head of the EPA, to encourage her to take action to benefit bees. McCarthy is believed to be a strong proponent of environmental stewardship.

“We’re hoping she’s going to be a better steward of bee health at the EPA than her predecessor was,” O’Neil said.

One of the neonicotinoids was conditionally registered for agricultural uses by the EPA in 2003, based on the fact that it was already registered as an insecticide for non-agricultural uses.

“So they allowed it to be conditionally registered without a field study on the condition this field study would still be received. Ten years later this requirement has never been met and the EPA continues to allow the use,” O’Neil said.

Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerxes Society, an organisation that advocates on behalf of invertebrates, told IPS, “The important fact about [neonicotinoids], they’re systemic, they’re inside the plant. Others go straight on the plant, and the rain would wash it off after. It’s [the neonicotinoids] in the roots, it’s in the stem, it’s in the flower, it’s in the flower nectar.”

When asked what would happen to te U.S. diet if there was a bee collapse large enough to eliminate pollination across the nation, Hoffman Black said that crops like wheat and corn, which do not require pollination, would still be available.

“Vegetables, fruits, nuts, all things that are highly nutritious and taste really good,” would be eliminated, Hoffman Black said. “We would have rice and wheat.

“Our ecosystems are based on pollination of native bees; everything from grizzly bears to songbirds rely on food that rely on pollination,” he said.

At least 22 people in northern India, mostly children, have died and dozens were hospitalised in critical condition after apparently being poisoned by a primary school meal.

The incident has triggered violent protests and angry allegations of blame.

School principals in Bihar state in northern India have been ordered to taste-test food before it’s served to students.

The children, aged four to 12, fell ill on Tuesday after consuming a lunch of rice, soybean and lentils in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states.

The school, at Mashrakh village in the district of Chapra, provided free meals under the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, the world’s largest school feeding programme involving 120 million children.

Medical teams treating the children said they suspected the food had been contaminated with insecticide.

“It appears to be a case of poisoning but we will have to wait for forensic reports … Had it been a case of (natural) food poisoning, so many children would not have died,” Poonam Kumari, a local government administrator at the village, told the Reuters news agency by phone from Mashrakh.

Kumari said bodies of the victims had been cremated, adding that the remainder of a total of 48 children who fell ill from the contaminated food were being treated in Patna, the capital of Bihar.

“We feel that some kind of insecticide was either accidentally or intentionally mixed in the food, but that will be clear through investigations,” said R K Singh, a medical superintendent at the children’s hospital in Patna.

“We prepared antidotes and treated the children for organophosphorous poisoning,” he said.

Probe under way

Organophosphorus compounds are used as pesticides.

The state government said it was investigating the cause of the disaster.

The meal was cooked in the school kitchen.

The school headmistress fled after the deaths became known, and was dismissed, P K Shahi, Bihar’s education minister, told a news conference.

“In spite of the cook’s complaint (over the smell of cooking oil used for the food), the headmistress insisted on its use and the cook made the food. The children had also complained about the food to the cook,” Shahi said.

The cook, who also fell ill after eating the food and was hospitalised, told Reuters television it had looked as if there were a layer of residue at the bottom of the oil jar.

“I thought that this is locally-made oil as often there is an accumulation of residual waste at the bottom … generally we get just about enough oil to prepare one meal, as there is no space for storage,” Manju Devi said.

Opposition parties accused the Janata Dal party-led government of acting too slowly to hospitalise the children, and dozens of people took to the streets to protest, television channels showed.

Protesters pelted a police station with stones, set ablaze buses and other vehicles, chanted slogans denouncing the state government and burned effigies of Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s chief minister

“I feel that the government completely failed vis-a-vis the evacuation of the affected children,” said Rajiv Pratap Rudy, a spokesman for the main federal opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

“As soon as my boy returned from school, we rushed to the hospital with him,” said Raja Yadav, the father of one schoolboy. “He was vomiting and he said his stomach was aching.”

Three of the children being treated in the hospital were in critical condition, doctors and Shahi said.

Chief minister Kumar has ordered an inquiry into the incident and has offered 3,400 dollars to the families of those who have died, said Shyam Rajak, Bihar’s food minister.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Bumblebee pollinating Aquilegia vulgaris. Credit: Roo72/cc by 3.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 3 2013 (IPS)

A major study by the U.S. government’s environment and agriculture agencies has suggested a strong link between the use of certain pesticides and the widespread deaths that have afflicted honey bee populations around the world in recent years.

Still, the joint report, released Thursday, does not suggest limiting the use of these pesticides, nor does it recommend immediate action to impose a temporary ban, as was announced this week in a landmark decision by the European Union. Rather, the report offers technical tweaks while urging additional research on the issue."The five-to-ten-year timeframe these agencies are now saying they will follow is not fast enough." -- Pesticide Action Network's Paul Towers

“Acute and sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees have been increasingly documented, and are a primary concern,” the report, released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), states.

“Further … research is required to establish the risks associated with pesticide exposure to U.S. honey bee declines in general. The most pressing pesticide research questions lie in determining the actual field-relevant pesticide exposure bees receive and the effects of pervasive exposure to multiple pesticides on bee health and productivity of whole honey bee colonies.”

The report has also expanded official focus from one notorious family of pesticides – known as neonicotinoids (or “neonics”), the subject of the European Union’s new two-year moratorium – to a second, known as pyrethroids. Indeed, research within the report suggests that “the frequency and quantity of residues of pyrethroids coupled with the toxicity of these insecticides to bees could pose a 3-fold greater hazard to the colony than the systemic neonicotinoids.”

These are important findings in what remains a scientific mystery amidst an environmental and agricultural crisis. A half-dozen years after mass bee deaths were first noticed, last year was the worst yet on record, during which around half of all bees in U.S. commercial hives inexplicably disappeared.

Since 2006, the U.S. government estimates that 10 million bee hives have succumbed in the United States alone. Similar phenomena are being seen in European countries.

Beyond the potential environmental implications of what is being called Colony Collapse Disorder, major bee problems inevitably have major ramifications for agriculture. Government and other experts have put the annual value of bee-pollinated foods at nearly 20 billion dollars – making the new report’s findings increasingly urgent.

Great imperative

Despite the anticipation with which the report was being watched, the USDA and EPA ultimately state only that the findings are not yet conclusive enough to take major action.

The agencies note that pesticide use is one of several potentially interlinked factors that have contributed to the recent mass die-off. Other factors include abnormally high rates of bee parasites, poor nutrition among the insects, and a loss of genetic diversity among today’s hives.

“The report makes a compelling case that multiple factors are at play and that we do need to take action, but this needs to be done far more quickly,” Paul Towers, media director with the Pesticide Action Network, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The five-to-ten-year timeframe these agencies are now saying they will follow is not fast enough. In fact, there is great imperative here: bees are a clear indicator of the overall health of our agricultural system, so if we’re unable to protect the pollinators we’ll put our entire agricultural system at risk.”

Further, consumer watchdogs say that multiple high-level studies in recent years have strengthened scientific consensus on the impact of pesticides on bee populations, with research suggesting these chemicals could act as a critical instigator among a combination of other factors. The weight of this evidence, they say, warrants a quicker response.

“We do need more research, and it is good that EPA and USDA are working together, but I do think we know enough now to act,” Jennifer Sass, a toxicologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“The Europe ban is based on good data, and there is increasing evidence to where we can get a pretty good understanding of the impact on bees. All of the actions being suggested in the new report are good, but in addition we need to severely ramp down the volume of chemicals we’re using – or stop using them entirely.”

Indeed, it is important to note that the European Union’s ban is actually just a two-year moratorium, to allow for additional scientific study to progress in the context of mounting evidence.

“The EPA is putting blinders on, pretending the main problem is pesticides ‘drifting away’ from the application site, pretending the actual seed treatments aren’t the problem,” NRDC’s Sass, who recently co-authored a study accusing the EPA of shoddy approvals procedures, says.

“This has allowed them to come up with technical solutions, focusing on how to reduce the amount of pesticides that are getting off the treatment sites, when really the issue is that the pesticide is getting into the plants – just as it’s meant to do.”

Further, some research has found that these substances may not be staying where they’re placed. A California study discovered that 80 percent of the state’s waterways were contaminated with pesticides, for instance, while the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found similar traces in 60 percent of water samples in Georgia.

Lobby victory?

The EPA has recently stepped up a required review of all “neonic” pesticides currently allowed in the United States, but that too won’t take place until 2018.

“The agency has accelerated the schedule for registration review of the neonicotinoid pesticides due to uncertainties about these pesticides and their potential effects on bees,” the EPA told IPS.

“However, if at any time the EPA determines there are urgent human and/or environmental risks from pesticide exposures that require prompt attention, the agency will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the registration review status of that pesticide.”

The agency says it has “several hundred” studies on the effects of neonics on bees and bee colonies, but notes that “At this time, the data available to the EPA do not support a moratorium” such as the one recently instituted in the European Union.

In this decision, Sass sees evidence of the strength of the chemicals lobby. Two of the most prominent neonic producers, for instance, are the chemicals giants Bayer and Syngenta, evidence of whose lobbying in the European Union on the issue has recently been documented.

“These chemical makers are clearly the biggest lobbying voice in this discussion – bigger than the growers and way bigger than the beekeepers,” Sass says. “While the action in Europe will protect agriculture, the EPA’s action will simply protect corporate profits.”`

Critics say the EPA should not have approved clothianidin, a potent pesticide that belongs to a family of substances linked to the current widespread die-off of global honeybee populations. Credit: Bob Peterson/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

An environment group here is warning that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a key government regulator, may have been haphazardly approving thousands of pesticides for decades, some of which pose risks to both human and environmental health.

Following on two years of research, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a watchdog group, has found that as much as 65 percent of the 16,000 pesticides the EPA approved between the late 1970s and 2010 were greenlighted through a hasty and potentially incomplete process.The public is under the false impression that if a substance has been registered by the EPA, it has gone through a thorough government review.

NRDC says these 11,000 substances were approved using a loophole in strict regulatory legislation known as “conditional registration”, created by the U.S. Congress to be used only in very limited circumstances.

“Properly used, conditionally registering a new pesticide provides an important benefit in special situations such as allowing new pesticides on the market to address a public health emergency,” a new NRDC report, released Wednesday, states.

“However, improper use of conditional registration means that scores of untested or undertested pesticides may litter the market, potentially threatening human health.”

The EPA told IPS it has yet to fully review the new report. However, the agency says it has found that “the data required pursuant to conditional registrations have been submitted and reviewed in a timely fashion. EPA’s review of the data confirms that products initially registered on a conditional basis are not posing unacceptable risks to human health or the environment.”

Congress created the conditional registration option in the late 1970s, a half-decade after it passed stringent new regulatory legislation covering pesticides, in response to industry complaints that the new testing requirements were too onerous and were gumming up the development process.

As such, lawmakers said they would allow the use of conditional registration if a developer claimed to have insufficient time to come up with the data required, and if the temporary granting of approval would not have an overly negative environmental impact.

Both of these requirements – temporary use and follow-up data – remain central components for the use of conditional registration. And yet, according to the NRDC findings, not only has the EPA appeared to massively over-rely on this loophole, but it has also failed to adhere to these additional reporting requirements.

Abdication

“The EPA’s database is seriously disorganized. Once a pesticide is conditionally registered, the EPA does not have a system to track the data it had requested as a condition of the registration,” the report states.

“In addition, the agency does not follow whether those data were received, what the data show regarding the pesticide’s potential for harm or other aspects of the registration decision, or what, if any, changes were made in response to the received data.”

Coupled with the fact that the EPA also offers no public comment period on its decisions, alongside a broader lack of transparency, NRDC is calling the approvals process “grievously flawed” and accusing the agency of an “abdication” of its duties towards public health and the environment.

“The big problem is we have to take EPA at their word, because what the public has access to doesn’t offer us some critical information,” Mae Wu, an NRDC attorney and co-author of the new report, told IPS.

“It sounds as though we’re just talking about a messy database here, but we’ve identified at least two real-life examples of pesticides that went through this process that, had it been more open, EPA might have realised shouldn’t be approved.”

Those two substances are nanosilver, tiny pieces of silver used for their antibacterial properties, including in infants’ toys; and clothianidin, a potent pesticide that belongs to a family of substances linked to the current widespread die-off of global honeybee populations.

To a certain extent, the EPA appears to implicitly agree with at least some of these concerns. In an internal report last year, the agency admitted to administrative mistakes regarding the use of conditional registration in around 95 percent of cases.

In an e-mail to IPS, the EPA says it is currently working “on improving record-keeping and have developed a plan to update the IT systems to address that need.”

Further, after being privately briefed on the NRDC initial findings in 2010, the agency’s use of conditional registration appears to have plummeted, to about 20 percent of pesticides approved in 2011 and 2012. “It really did seem to open their eyes to a problem they didn’t realise they had,” Wu says.

Birds and bees

EPA has stated that it would be moving up a required periodic re-appraisal of approved pesticides. But even under the new timeframe it is not expected to rule on clothianidin until 2018.

Since the introduction of this substance’s broader family of pesticides (known as neonicotinoids), in the mid-2000s, mass honeybee deaths have threatened the huge food crop industry – worth some 15 billion dollars a year here in the United States alone – that depends on their pollination.

With U.S. beekeepers currently reporting hive losses of up to 50 percent, last week a group of beekeepers, environmental and consumer groups formally accused the EPA of failing to protect bees from harmful pesticides. (Also last week, a major new report was published detailing the harmful effect of neonicotinoids on the U.S. bird population.)

The lawsuit follows an EPA decision last year to deny a petition to halt the use of clothianidin – despite the agency itself having rejected research on the substance’s safety by its producer, Bayer.

“The EPA denied the suspension request by essentially concluding that there was no ‘imminent hazard’, but it didn’t review a majority of the new studies that further support the charge of imminent hazard,” Sylvia Wu, a staff attorney at the Center for Food Safety, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, told IPS.

“We believe that EPA has been abusing the conditional registration process. The public is under the false impression that if a substance has been registered by the EPA, it has gone through a thorough government review. The reality is that a lot of these substances are being widely applied even though EPA has been aware of potential harms.”

Elsewhere, while the European Union earlier this month failed to ban three neonicotinoids pesticides thought to be endangering European bees, the European Commission is reportedly continuing to pursue action on one unless a compromise with industry is reached.

On Thursday, the two largest neonicotinoid producers, Bayer and Syngenta, proposed a package plan in the E.U. that would include greater monitoring of neonicotinoids, more research on bee viruses, and planting of more flowers around the edges of agricultural fields.

Green taxes could finance wind parks, like this one in the southern state of Oaxaca. Credit: Mauricio Ramos /IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Mar 14 2013 (IPS)

As the Mexican government prepares a broad tax reform bill, experts and activists see it as an opportunity to include new “green taxes” aimed at raising funds for curbing pollution.

Fuel consumption, the manufacturing of automobiles and fertiliser, and mining could be among the areas subject to new environmental taxes under the reform.

But the business community has already protested eventual new green taxes.

“Taxes are a means of getting prices of merchandise to reflect the real economic, environmental and social value of resources. They seek to modify conditions of consumption, reduce emissions, and improve the environment,” academic Karina Caballero told IPS.

“Gradually increasing taxes can be applied,” said Caballero, a professor in the economics department of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM).

Caballero studied fuel taxes in this country and found that the more income people have, the more gasoline they use, in general. Moreover, she reported that price hikes do not significantly dampen demand.

She also said the highest income segments of the population consume more fuel and spend more on transportation than lower income segments.

The introduction of so-called green or environmental taxes picked up speed in the 1990s, especially in industrialised nations like Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, which tax vehicles and energy products that emit carbon dioxide (CO2), produce toxic waste, or have impacts on water sources.

Green taxes are aimed at reducing environmental damage and curtailing the effects of pollution by earmarking the revenue for conservation efforts, more green-friendly consumption, or the generation of more environmentally efficient technologies.

In Latin America, Brazil adopted a tax in 1988 on the circulation of merchandise and inter-state and inter-municipal transportation service and communication providers, which taxes consumption of goods and services. A greater share of the revenue goes to those municipalities and states that do the most to protect the environment.

Costa Rica, for its part, dedicates 33.5 percent of its fuel tax to conservation activities.

On average, the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of industrialised nations including Mexico, levy eight environmental taxes.

The OECD reported that the revenue from green taxes represented around seven percent of the total tax revenue of its 34 member countries between 1994 and 2007.

“The reform is a good chance to apply green taxes, which can have positive environmental and social effects,” economist Mauricio González, director of the graduate school of business administration and management at the private Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, told IPS.

When conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December, he pledged to overhaul Mexico’s tax system, to make it more fair and simple, increase revenue, boost economic growth, and increase funds for social sectors like health and education.

The bill will be negotiated in Congress this year, with the aim of putting it into effect in 2014.

Under the reform, food and medicine would no longer be exempt from the Value Added Tax, which currently stands at 16 percent.

Mexico’s overall taxation rate is 19 percent, one of the lowest in Latin America.

A high-level government source told IPS that there was no specific green tax proposal to add to the reform bill as yet. But the source said new environmentally-related taxes may be included, or existing ones may be raised.

The green taxes that are currently levied do not surpass one percentage point of Mexico’s GDP, according to OECD statistics, while the average in the bloc is seven percentage points.

“In Mexico, environmental fiscal policy is in diapers,” says the study “Public finance and the environment” produced in 2010 by the Centre for Public Finance Studies of the Mexican Congress.

“The possibility of implementing a reform of this kind has not been thoroughly analysed, and the existing taxes appear to be vague when it comes to the environment,” it concludes.

In Mexico there are taxes on new cars, and on the production of diesel, natural gas used in transport and gasoline. But within the OECD, Mexico is the country with the lowest taxes on fuel.

On the other hand, subsidies for gasoline, electricity and household gas exceed 23 billion dollars, according to experts and environmental organisations.

Environmental groups have so far set forth nine specific proposals for new environmental taxes. They also insist that fuel subsidies should be phased out, arguing that they are inequitable, inefficient and environmentally costly.

In 2005, Carlos Muñoz and Sara Ávila of the governmental National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) proposed establishing a graduated scale of taxes from zero to 15 percent for pesticides, depending on level of toxicity, or a single 10 percent tax only for the most toxic pesticides.

Their study, “The effects of an environmental tax on pesticides in Mexico”, published in the magazine Gaceta Ecológica, concluded that the chemical industry would not lose revenue and consumers of agricultural products would absorb the price hikes.

Another study, “Agricultural pollution and costs in irrigation district 011, Guanajuato”, led by Rosario Pérez of UNAM’s Economic Research Institute, found that a 100 percent tax on methyl parathion, a highly toxic insecticide, would cut its use in half and reduce the earnings of its producers by less than one percent.

“The costs of water and insecticides represent a small percentage of the total cost, due to subsidies, which stimulate the over-use of these inputs. The cost of polluting and over-exploiting water and the soil is practically zero,” says the study published in the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Agrícolas (Mexican Journal of Agricultural Sciences) in August 2011.

But business leaders are far from accepting environmental taxes.

“We have to be careful about these issues…they must not affect the country’s competitiveness. Mexico cannot take vanguard positions,” and do so on its own, the chairman of the energy commission of the Confederation of Industrial Chambers, Régulo Salinas, told IPS.

“Taxes can be levied on electricity, gas and water,” said Caballero. “But you have to compensate the social impact, by means of benefits that target the lowest income sectors, like a transport subsidy.”