Tag Archives: pesticides

Of pesticides and fertilisers

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This week saw a lot of talk on safe food, clean environment, pesticides and fertilisers emanating from two events — a conference on food safety and environmental toxins and the release of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) global report “Our Nutrient World”.

The conference — organised by New Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) — noted that bio-safety of pesticides was a serious issue for India. It called for policy level intervention to give regulatory powers to either the health or the environment ministries (not the agriculture ministry, which presently regulates).“There is a need to review all registered pesticides taking into account comparative risk assessment and deregister toxic and obsolete pesticides,” said Chandra Bhushan, head of CSE’s food safety programme, in a press release. Organic and non-pesticide farming has been showing encouraging results across the country and the government should encourage them, he noted.

The conference called for publication of an annual report on the status of pesticide contamination in the country.

The UNEP report

The UNEP global Report “Our Nutrient World” co-authored by eminent Indian biotechnologist N. Raghuram took note of India’s constraints in phosphorous mining and urged for a mechanism to recycle human wastes for agriculture through innovative steps like urine-separating toilets.

Raghuram, also the Director of New Delhi-based South Asian Nitrogen Centre, said most of the phosphorous in India is mined from sedimentary rocks with the country accounting  for only 0.19 per cent of the world’s resources. It is mostly low-grade phosphorous not suitable for fertilizer manufacture. That makes India heavily dependent on imports.

Also, large tracts of croplands in India suffer from physico-chemical and nutrient imbalances resulting in low efficiency of applied fertilizer phosphorous. An estimated 4-15 per cent of phosphorous consumed by livestock becomes available for human consumption in the end.

With a population of close to 1.3 billion, India is estimated to release between 0.38-1.02 Tg of phosphorous per annum. Raghuram says the country needs an effective mechanism to recycle human wastes to plough back this phosphorous into agriculture use. It would ensure two things, he says — capturing nutrients and returning them to the soil as well as improved sanitation in the developing world.

Sane thinking all. Hope advocacy like this finds its way into the country’s policy documents.

Green groups and scientists in battle amid sun, cheese and folk music

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Say what you will about the scientific literacy of protesters against genetically modified (GM) crops, they certainly put on a good picnic.

Anti-GM protesters at the Rothamsted agricultural research station.{credit}Tim Scrivener/Rex Features{/credit}

Amid a mini-heatwave in the United Kingdom, some 200 activists with anti-GM campaign group Take the Flour Back descended upon the well-to-do town of Harpenden on the outskirts of London on Sunday with the intention of ‘decontaminating’ — or tearing up — fields of GM wheat. The grain, being tested by the local, publicly funded Rothamsted Research agricultural institute, gives off an odour to repel aphids. The researchers use a synthetic form of a gene that encodes a protein that happens to be similar to one found in cows, and so the protesters say that Rothamsted is producing some unnatural cow–wheat monster that they had planned to uproot.

The action had been widely debated in much of the British press and on blogs as researchers feared the beginnings of a revival of the anti-GM activism of the 1990s and early 2000s that saw hundreds of campaigners destroy GM crops throughout Europe. Take the Flour Back’s plans have become the focus of a rancourous debate in these same newspapers between green groups and a growing movement of self-proclaimed geeks out to promote evidence-based policy and expose pseudoscience, who announced online that they would mount a counter-protest.

In the end, a heavy police presence prevented Take the Flour Back from entering the Rothamsted fields. The group decided to march up to the edge of the fields instead, although Anonymous, the online community of hackers, did mount a successful distributed denial-of-service attack on the Rothamsted website overnight, shutting it down for 12 hours. Continue reading →