Cotton
spraying kills fish
Up to 250,000 fish were killed in
Lawrence County, Alabama, when heavy rains washed lethal
concentrations of the insecticides methyl parathion and endosulfan,
into a 16 mile (25 km) stretch of stream. The pollution flowed into a
nearby lake that is commonly known as ‘the smallmouth bass capital
of the world’. These insecticides were sprayed on cotton fields
during August 1995, to kill the tobacco budworm.
Problems with the budworm
were particularly serious during 1995, halving the expected cotton
yield. Local growers believe that the problem began with the US
Federal boll weevil eradication programme. It stipulated early season
use of malathion against the boll weevil. This killed many of the
beneficial insects that would normally parasitise and kill the
budworm. As a result budworm populations increased dramatically
forcing farmers to use insecticides that subsequently killed the fish.
Caroline Cox, Cotton spraying kills fish, Journal of Pesticide Reform, Winter 1995, 15:4 p13.
OPs
pose major problem in China
Approaching 43,000 new cases of
pesticide poisoning, including 3,900 fatal cases, were reported from
28 Chinese provinces in 1994. Among them, 13,210 cases were caused by
pest control in agriculture, accounting for 30.9% of total cases. The
fatality rate was 0.5%. Among these agricultural cases, poisoning by
insecticides accounted for 92%. Organophosphorus pesticides were the
major cause of new cases (92.7%), followed by carbamates (3.4%).
Over half (51.8%) of poisonings were caused by parathion, 14.3% by
methamidophos and 6.1% by dichlorvos.
IPCS News, Issue 8, December 1995, p7.
Anti-toad
virus to be introduced in Australia
After the disastrous ‘controlled’
attempt to infect rabbits on the South Australian Wardang island with
the Calici-virus, a Venezuelan virus is now to be used in the
Australian wilderness to control toads.
As with rabbits, which have become a serious pest,
toads are not native to Australia. They were brought from South
America in the 1930s to control insects in sugar cane plantations,
with undesirable results. Both rabbit and toad populations have
increased dramatically as they encountered no natural predators in
Australia. It is now feared that the plague of toads could threaten
the Kakadu National Park. The solution to the problem could be in the
release of an Irido-virus, imported from South America, which will
kill both the toads and the tadpoles.
Süddeutsche Zeitung 3 January 1996 and PAN Pestizid-Brief January 1996
Genetic
engineering trials
Monsanto Crop Protection, in conjunction
with a number of plant breeding companies, are developing sugar beet
plants which are tolerant to applications of the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate).
Sugar beet, which would normally be sensitive to Roundup has been
modified for tolerance to the herbicide by transferring genes from a
bacterium to sugar beet plants. The glyphosate-resistant sugar beet
can tolerate applications of several times the commercial rate of use.
Monsanto is now carrying out field trials at
locations in England and several other European countries . One site
in the UK will be near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The trials will
last between planting in March-April and harvesting in
October-December.
Gloucestershire Echo, 22/1/96
[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 31,March 1996, page 18]