Pesticides Poisoning and Food Security

Food security is the ultimate problem the world is facing today. The relationship between food security and food production is a complex one. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that globally three million intentional and unintentional pesticide poisoning episodes occur annually. The corresponding figures for India is estimated to be 6,00,000 cases and 60,000 fatal outcomes occurring annually. The Bihar mid-day meal tragedy perfectly illustrates the higher vulnerability of children to the toxic effects of pesticides. The continuous increase of pesticide suicide rates in India exemplifies this vulnerability. According to the National Crime Records Bureau in India, there is 80 Deaths per day due to Poisoning.That is the equivalent of three suicide every one hour.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and WHO have encouraged countries to phase out highly hazardous pesticides. Leading Asian countries have banned the use of monocrotophos because of unacceptable health risks, but in India, monocrotophos continues to be produced, used and exported. The perception that monocrotophos is cheap and necessary, have prevented the product from being taken off the market. Urgent action is thus needed to reduce the availability of and the demand for highly hazardous pesticides, as recommended by WHO and FAO.

The myth that more pesticides means greater productivity which means fewer hungry people, lives on and is still a powerful driver in agricultural policies worldwide. “If farmers use more pesticides, food problems will all be solved”, has been the institutional mantra of the last 50 years. Now, added to that is the new version of the old theme: If farmers use modern biotechnology, then hunger in developing countries can be banished.

Increasing the yields of crops will not by itself solve the problem of hunger. What matters most is who produces the food, who has access to the technology and knowledge to produce it, and who has the purchasing power to buy it (Pretty & Hine 2001). Also who has access to the land to grow it, as rural poverty is highly correlated to access to land (ESCAP 2002). Rising output has been accompanied by rising input costs and rising food prices, reducing the food purchasing power of the poor. To make agriculture more productive and profitable in the face of rising costs and rising standards of human and environmental health, the best combination of available technologies has to be used. Also the availability of additional agricultural land is limited thus, we need to grow food on even less land, with less water, using less energy, fertiliser and pesticide than we use today. Given these limitations, sustainable production at elevated levels is urgently needed.

Further Readings:

http://www.living-farms.org/site/media-/news-articles/newsclippings?limit=0&limitstart=0

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-012-0105-x

http://www.panap.net/campaigns/hhps/children-and-pesticides/post/2631