Agri-chemicals - a global toxic legacy

Healthy cabbages and yacon thrive with a mulch of dead weeds. See
Weeds are our friends  
for how toxic agri-chemicals
reduce natural productivity,
and weeds can be part of replenishing it.

Just how big a mess have toxic agri-chemicals (pesticides and herbicides) made of farmland, natural ecosystems, fisheries, wild flora and fauna - and people's lives - around the world, since the chemical companies started pumping them out big time in the middle of the twentieth century?

I can't answer that question quantitatively, but today I heard Dr Ron McDowall, an expert on both the quantitative and qualitative horror caused by these chemicals, tell some tragic stories about what he had personally witnessed, or heard about, while working as consultant engineer for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in charge of cleaning up toxic waste sites in Africa, South America, and Eurasia. Small personal tragedies – children dying in agony from drinking pesticides stored in Coke bottles, rural women using pesticides to commit suicide – and long-term, large-scale social tragedies, such as the children still being born with deformities in Vietnam over thirty years after American forces left dumps of Agent Orange (dioxin) behind.

Dr McDowall has also seen the total destruction of farm land caused by such chemicals. An article on him and his work records that there is an estimated 100,000 tonnes of toxic chemical waste to be cleaned up in Africa alone. Most of it is unwanted pesticides that have been banned from sale or are past their expiry date. You can listen to the Radio New Zealand interview with Dr McDowall here, and read more about him and his work here.

We are fortunate that there are people with Dr McDowall's courage and expertise to do this awful work, and enough money in the UNEP budget to fund it. There's no justice in that, though, since it was chemical corporations, not the countries which fund the UNEP, that made this filthy stuff, and sold it to people who did not have the means or knowledge to store or dispose of it safely. Before they profit from selling any more, I'd like to see the owners, boards of directors and senior managers of these companies made personally liable to pay compensation for any deaths, illnesses and clean-up costs resulting from their products - and send them out to do the clean-ups as well.