Controversial and
damning in its evidence, Silent Spring, exposed the destruction of
wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides. Republished in the UK now, 37
years after its original run, the prophecies made by Rachel Carson are as
relevant today as they were back in 1962.
No one has yet translated the current concerns over
genetically modified (GM) foods into such eloquent and accessible prose as
Rachel Carson did for pesticides. But the pesticide precedent is a central issue
in the genetic engineering controversy. There is the same 'out-of-control'
technology that is leading us towards an unsustainable future. The potential for
resistance, through natural selection, to render useless the GM technologies of
the 1990s is the same as it is (and has always been) for pesticides.
The 1940s and 50s technology-that sparked Rachel Carson
into environmental consciousness-still persists today. Organochlorine
pesticides, that concerned her so much, are still in regular use in most
countries of the world. The bête noir, DDT, is still widely found as residues
in food. In this issue, Ian Shaw, highlights the levels of DDT found in
human breast milk samples taken from women in Indonesia.
There are over 400 pesticide chemicals in the environment.
Many of them may be harming human health in ways we still do not fully
understand. Their residues are everywhere: in air, water, in soil, sediment, and
constantly in our food. Andrew Watterson analyses work done by Helen Murphy, a
field epidemiologist working for the Food and Agriculture Organisation. She has
established how enormously difficult it is to assess the acute and chronic
poisoning and reproductive effects of pesticide use in Indonesia.
On a brighter note, the US Environmental Protection Agency
should be congratulated for refusing a full approval license to the new cotton
pesticide chlorfenapyr because it is also highly toxic to birds. It would have
been unthinkable in Rachel Carson's day for a pesticide to be restricted
because it also happened to kill birds-the power of the chemical companies was
too great.
The biotech equivalent may now be wiping out the monarch
butterfly. Entomologists at Cornell University have found significant adverse
effects in larvae of the monarch that were fed pollen from GM maize. We wait to
see if this negative impact is considered politically significant enough to
warrant regulatory action in the US and elsewhere.
The truly global impact of GM technology is highlighted in
this issue of Pesticides News. The article by the UK development organisation
Christian Aid challenges the notion that GM crops are the answer to world food
security. People go hungry because they are poor and because they have no
land to grow food on. Poor farmers stay hungry because they lack access to
basics like water, credit, and lose out in the battle for government support
supplied to rich farmers and corporations.
[This
article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 44, June 1999, page 2]