Silent Life Springs to Death


For all those searching for answers, or for someone to blame for all those harmful pesticides we have been told taint our freshest and best produce, look no further than our industrial food production system. The wide spread use of man made chemical insect killers following the second world war, which was aimed at feeding a growing global population, comes back time and again to haunt us.

Whether you eat fresh produce or not makes little difference. These carcinogenic, birth defect causing chemicals are in our ecological system, in the soil, in our water table, in the animals of the fields, and they are affecting and changing our living environment in ways we can only guess at. True, not everyone will develop cancer, but the risk is still there and it is still high.

If you haven't done so already then read "Silent Spring", a book by Rachel Carson published in the 1960s. While many of the pesticides Carson wrote about are no longer in use today, like the DDT family of 'chlorinated hydrocarbons', there are many new man made chemicals that have been introduced since that we know very little about. Many affect the unborn featus, others are carcinogenic and some have been found to be gender benders, affecting our hormone balance that make us the sex we are.

If you think Europe is better off, think again. Earlier this year tests in the UK on an assortment of fruits and vegetables found traces of chemical pesticides in 95 percent of the samples tested.

Our best defense is information which allows us to make informed choices. Unfortunately our local press has made a pig's breakfast of the whole pesticide thing and supplied little in the way of useful facts. I am sure illegal pesticides do get into the country, I am sure some ignorant farmers use these chemicals on their crops without knowing anything about them. Again here we come to information, knowledge is power.

No matter how many farmers pick and eat their own tomatos and cucumbers on camera, we are still left with lingering doubts and these doubts are fed by a lack of information. No authority stepped in to educate farmers and teach them which chemicals to use and which not to use or in fact how to use these chemicals.

If a pesticide is not on a list somewhere, its importation, I suspect, is allowed. The question to ask here is how can we know what the impact of a new pecticide on the market can be? Do we have labs capable of testing these chemicals and all their components? I suspect the answer would be no, although I am hoping for a yes.

The burden here is on the government agencies concerned to improve their monitoring and control mechanisms, to inspect farms more frequently, to take soil samples and samples of produce and test them. To set up a database of statistical information that is accurate and gives a clear picture of the situation now, ten years prior and ten years from now. Remember, these chemicals take time to break up in nature, many remain in the soil for years, even decades.

So it all comes back to government, the chief regulator and enforcer, and the chief source of our consternation.

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