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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.
May 21, 2009
- POPs exemption loopholes must be closed
- China phasing out POPs pesticides, including DDT
- UNEP head urges chemical industry to clean up stockpiles
- New evidence of pesticide residues in homes
- Middle East replacing pesticides with owls
- National Geographic on the food crisis
POPs exemption loopholes must be closed
Environmentalists are “raising concerns about the exemptions for lindane” and four of the other nine new chemicals recently listed for elimination under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), reports Inside EPA. The Center for International Environmental Law says the exemptions could “undercut the treaty’s goals of protecting human health and the environment from POPs.” Karl Tupper, staff scientist at Pesticide Action Network, participated in the fourth Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Stockholm Convention in Geneva and is concerned about the precedent that could be set for future additions to the treaty. He says the governments at the COP meeting “took the easy way out by allowing the exemptions” and that “the power of the treaty to drive the move away from POPs could be compromised with too many loopholes for chemicals still in use or posing disposal problems.” The pesticide lindane, for example, is now listed for global elimination, but existing stocks can be used for the next five years in lice and scabies pharmaceutical products — with a possibility that the exemption could be extended. “Ending the production and agricultural use of lindane is a huge victory,” Tupper says. “But now we must close the loophole for pharmaceutical use, and a first step is to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to deregister it.” In a reversal from its previous stance, the U.S. did not support the exemption for pharmaceutical uses of lindane at the Geneva meeting.
shareMORE PAN’s lindane campaign | Digg This
China phasing out POPs pesticides, including DDT
On May 18, China’s vice minister of environmental protection, Zhang Lijun, announced in Beijing that the country “has phased out all pesticides containing persistent organic pollutants (POPs) … as required by the Stockholm Convention,” reports China Daily. Zhang declared that “the production, sale, use, import and export of [the pesticides] chlordane, mirex and DDT… have been banned in China from May 17.” With funding from the UN Development Program and World Bank, China has started to introduce alternatives to these pesticides, including termite treatments, he added. “We welcome this step by China to drop the exemptions they had earlier requested from the Convention for these pesticides,” said Pesticide Action Network campaigner Dr. Medha Chandra. “Still, though China reports it stopped exporting DDT for pesticide use in 2005, it continues to use DDT in producing the acutely toxic insecticide dicofol. We hope they phase out dicofol. In the meanwhile we’d like to see evidence that the dicofol thus far produced has no DDT content as per the POPs treaty rules for dicofol produced in a close-loop system that would ensure that DDT does not contaminate the dicofol produced.” Unlike the U.S., which has yet to ratify the Convention, China was among the first to ratify in 2004.
shareMORE PAN report on POPs elimination |
UNEP head urges chemical industry to clean up stockpiles
shareMORE African Stockpiles Programme |
New evidence of pesticide residues in homes
Insecticides, along with lead and allergens, have shown up in a nationally-representative sample of homes. The research, published May 6 in Environmental Science and Technology, was conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in collaboration with the U.S. EPA. Hard surface floor wipes were collected between June 2005 and March 2006 from 500 randomly selected homes. “Samples were analyzed for a suite of 24 compounds which included insecticides in the organochlorine, organophosphate, pyrethroid and phenylpyrazole classes, and the insecticide synergist piperonyl butoxide. The most commonly detected were permethrin (89%), chlorpyrifos (78%), chlordane (64%), piperonyl butoxide (52%), cypermethrin (46%), and fipronil (40%).” While concentrations of the chemicals varied widely, “results show that most floors in occupied homes in the U.S. have measurable levels of insecticides that may serve as sources of exposure to occupants.” Chlorpyrifos (PDF) was widely used in homes as a residential insecticide (under the trade name Dorsban) through 2005 when its phaseout for those uses was completed — the result of a U.S. EPA decision based primarily on its hazards for children.” Chlorpyrifos remains heavily used in agriculture.
shareMORE Overview of EPA’s Healthy Homes Survey (PDF) |
Middle East replacing pesticides with owls
shareMORE Barn Owl webcam from Israeli Kibbutz |
National Geographic on the food crisis
“‘The green revolution has brought us only downfall,’ says Jarnail Singh, a retired schoolteacher in Jajjal village. ‘It ruined our soil, our environment, our water table. Used to be we had fairs in villages where people would come together and have fun. Now we gather in medical centers. The government has sacrificed the people of Punjab for grain.'” Singh’s lament is one of many revealing vignette’s in the June 2009 National Geographic special report, “The End of Plenty”. The richly-illustrated feature describes how hunger is hitting people around the world, despite bold attempts by multinational food conglomerates, pesticide corporations, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations and others to promote a “new green revolution”. “But is a reprise of the green revolution — with the traditional package of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds — really the answer to the world’s food crisis?” National Geographic asks. “Last year a massive study called the ‘International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development’ concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology in the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor. The six-year study, initiated by the World Bank and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and involving some 400 agricultural experts from around the globe, called for a paradigm shift in agriculture toward more sustainable and ecologically friendly practices that would benefit the world’s 900 million small farmers, not just agribusiness.”
shareMORE PAN’s resources on the UN Agriculture Assessment |
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