Anyone who has grown up, knows that very few problems have easy answers. If they did, they would have been solved long before.
Vandana Shiva has strong views on the use of pesticides in farming -- that many of us have heard many times.
A CEO/MD of a pesticide company firmly states taht all accounts of harm caused by pesticides are lies.
Where is the possibility of a debate?
I am old enough to remember the taste of food before pesticides and fertilisers and hybrid varities were introduced. The taste was better. However, housewives spent considerable time putting dal, chillies, rice and sooji out in the sun regularly. This was a daily job consuming an hour or so and prevented the food from getting infected by pests. Failure to do this meant worms in the sooji, insects in the dal. How many of us can do that nowadays?
I also remember the standing in queue for food ration. There was genuine food scarcity. We lived on inferior PL480 hand out.
So the use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides did increase food production and decrease food wastage due to pests.
However, this should have been treated as a short-term solution for food scarcity, and meanwhile, other sustainable methods researched. THIS was not done.
There should have been a control on the use of fert/pesticides, ensuring that none were overused. In those days, everything was under quota/control. So why weren't fert/pesticides?
Even now, pesticide companies, instead of pretending BHC is as good as vit B, could steal a march by developing environment-friendly variants themselves. They can educate farmers on precise dosage, provide scientific consultancy- they could make money out of this.
7 comments:
I would suggest you to go through the following:
http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?programId=10350696&tabId=13&contentId=11639615&BV_ID=@@@
http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/India/Cancer-Express/Article1-498286.aspx
comment guyes:
Growing India, Growing People, then why not growing Ideology ??
http://lawfreaks.org/pest-control-management-a-gyration-by-satyamev-jayate/
I have bought organic vegetables, lentils, brown rice etc. several times when I lived abroad. One thing they do with things like lentils and rice is washing them with jets of water and drying them before packaging. This itself takes care of dust and many pests. Here (in Mumbai), even the non-organic packets of rice and dal contains pests unfortunately. So we end up with getting both pests and pesticides! Much of pest control has to do with right hygiene and packaging I suppose.
@Anonymous:True.. better packaging and maybe irradiation could take care of pests. The thing is to invest in research on more benign pest control methods. If i were a pesticide manufacturer, that's what I would do.
@L: Don't you think that would mean destroying the nutrients as well?
@A.T.R: Irradiation should not diminish nutrients anymore than normal storage does. Yes, it may cause concern if seeds meant for sowing are irradiated.
Bio pesticides is also a good option to stop using artificial pesticides and hence avoid its side effects. An detailed article about the same is http://www.seedbuzz.com/knowledge-center/article/bio-pesticides-benefits-barriers
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