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Pesticide Action Network Updates Service (PANUPS)
A Weekly News Update on Pesticides, Health and Alternatives
See PANUPS archive for complete information.
January 15, 2010
- Getting relief to battered Haiti
- Farm Bureau denies climate change, targets sustainable ag movement
- Bees, bats & frogs dying off in droves, pesticides implicated
- GMOs cause organ failure in mammals
- Bayer cited for failure to store Bhopal gas safely in West Virginia
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Getting relief to battered Haiti
Tuesday night’s massive 7.3 earthquake that rocked Haiti – the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere – makes the country’s future only so much more fragile. As Tracy Kidder observed in the New York Times, “While earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade.” Haiti’s poverty has been exacerbated and its food systems impaired over the last several decades by the World Bank, IMF, and USAID policies. According to The Centre for Research on Globalization, 80% of Haiti’s population lives in poverty, more than 2/3 of workers have only sporadic employment, and even though the national minimum wage is $1.80, IMF figures indicate that over half of employed Haitians earn only 44 cents per day. In the 1990’s, the World Bank and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Program for Haiti eliminated most export duties and import tariffs, flooding the country with cheap American corn and destroying the local food economy. Haiti’s farmers couldn’t compete as the U.S. government dumped our surplus corn into a market at prices far below the local cost of production.<>
In 1997 Grassroots International released a study documenting how USAID policies had undermined local and national Haitian priorities: Despite stated goals of revitalizing agriculture, only a tiny fraction of the USAID budget has gone to agricultural development that could provide food security; much more went to direct food aid, which suppresses the price of local food and further undermines the local food system, thus keeping Haiti dependent on international food aid. Fortunately, there are plenty of organizations already working with and through local Haitian groups to empower Haiti’s people who are well-positioned to provide relief. Grassroots International has set up a fund through their partner organizations in Haiti. Another PAN ally, Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante in Haitian Creole) works to address disparities in healthcare worldwide, and has been the largest rural healthcare provider in Haiti. They are accepting funds for organizing aid through their facilities outside of Port-au-Prince.
Wednesday afternoon, Partners in Health issued the following statement: “We have already begun to implement a two-part strategy to address the immediate need for emergency medical care in Port-au-Prince. First, we are organizing the logistics to get the medical staff and supplies needed for setting up field hospital sites in Port-au-Prince where we can triage patients, provide emergency care, and send those who need surgery or more complex treatment to our functioning hospitals and surgical facilities. To do this, we are creating a supply chain through the Dominican Republic. Second, we are ensuring that our facilities in the Central Plateau are ready to serve the flow of patients from Port-au-Prince. Operating and procedure rooms are staffed, supplied, and equipped for surgeries and we have converted a church in Cange into a large triage area. Already our sites in Cange, Belladeres and Hinche are reporting a steady flow of people coming with medical needs from the capital city. In the days that come we will need to make sure our pharmacies and supplies stay stocked and our staff continue to be able to respond. Currently, our greatest need is financial support”
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Farm Bureau denies climate change, targets sustainable ag movement
Falling into lockstep with the newly clarified Big Ag alignment was House Agriculture Committee Chair Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn), who, after voting for and extracting pounds of farm lobby flesh from the Waxman-Markey climate bill, has recently vowed to vote against any Senate bill on climate change. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, over 40 distinguished scientists have challenged the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) for its “inaccurate and marginalized position” on climate change. In an open letter, the authors wrote: “As scientists concerned about the grave risks that climate change poses to the world and U.S. agriculture, we are disappointed that the American Farm Bureau has chosen to officially deny the existence of human-caused climate change when the evidence of it has never been clearer.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced long awaited changes to its rules on agricultural subsidies. According to Philip Brasher of the Des Moines Register, “The USDA largely left intact rules proposed in December 2008 in the final days of the Bush administration.” Small-scale farmers and advocates of sustainable agriculture were hoping for something more in line with Obama’s campaign promises around farm subsidy reform. Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, commented, “Like other administrations before, when push comes to shove, something is always more important to the White House politically than the fate of family farming, and they trade away subsidy reform in a heart beat.”
shareMORE National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition |
Bees, bats & frogs dying off in droves, pesticides implicated
Whether or not they are placing their work in this longer-view context, scientists are drawing more and more links between pesticide use and certain clusters of wildlife die-offs. “For decades,” Sonia Shah reports in Yale’s Environment 360, “toxicologists have accrued a range of evidence showing that low-level pesticide exposure impairs immune function in wildlife, and have correlated this immune damage to outbreaks of disease.” Amphibians were the first to start dying off – in 1998 scientists identified the cause as a type of fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Carlos Davidson, a biologist at San Francisco State University, has studied insecticide use in the San Joaquin Valley that shows a strong correlation between pesticides drifting into the Sierra Nevada Mountains and declining amphibian populations. A few years later America’s honeybees started dying – 35% of their population has been decimated since 2006. Many scientists have begun drawing links between the dramatic bee die-offs, labeled Colony Collapse Disorder, and a group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids.
Bats are the most recent victims: in 2006 the first cave floors were found covered with dead bats in the Northeast. White Nose Syndrome, the fungus-related disease that killed them, has killed at least 1 million bats since then. As with the fungus that’s killing amphibians, some scientists think that that bats are more susceptible to the fungus because their immune systems may be weakened by pesticide exposure. Bats are particularly vulnerable because even low levels of pesticides can accumulate over of their long life spans. While there might be “too many different pesticides, lurking in too many complex, poorly understood habitats to build definitively damning indictments,” the growing body of evidence points increasingly towards pesticides – even at so-called “safe levels” – as the cause of these and other problems for wildlife.
shareMORE Center for Biological Diversity |
GMOs cause organ damage in mammals
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shareMORE Organic Center Report: “The Impacts of GE Crops on Pesticide Use” (PDF) |
Bayer cited for failure to store Bhopal gas safely in West Virginia
shareMORE Living in the Shadow of “The World’s Next Bhopal”? |
CORRECTION: In a January 8 story — Bayer pesticide banned ‘for the bees’ — we mistakenly stated that the chemical spirotetramat is a neonicotinoid pesticide. The confusion stems from the fact that Bayer CropScience markets several different formulations of their products Movento and Ultor, some of which contain neonicotinoids in addition to their listed “active ingredient” spirotetramat. Certain formulations sold in other countries contain imidacloprid, which is a neonicotinoid, as well as spirotetramat. While Bayer promotes spirotetramat, a lipid biosynthesis inhibitor, as a “safer” alternative to neonicotinoids, both have been shown to be fatally toxic to bees.<>
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