Over the past months news reports have warned of coming locust swarms
and now document the destruction being wreaked by these insects in Africa. But locust plagues in Africa are nothing new. The last devastating swarms occurred between 1987 and 1989. What has gone unreported is that a biological control to manage incipient locust outbreaks already exists. In this issue we bring you a report from PAN Africa documenting how swarming locusts are affecting farmers in Senegal, one of the countries worst affected (page 3). In our next issue we will carry a follow-up article on Green Muscle, the biological control for locusts, and we will look at reasons why this is currently not being used.
December 3rd is the anniversary of the worst factory explosion our world has ever known at the Union Carbide factory in
Bhopal, India. The factory was making pesticides, and toxic fumes emitted on the night of 3rd December 1984 killed several thousand people in the hours and days immediately following. This year is the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, and twenty years on the people of Bhopal are still suffering. Twenty thousand are now dead and a greater number still suffer ill-health as a result of injuries sustained during the explosion, or due to the chemicals leaked from the factory that continue to poison land and water supplies. The affected people have received minimal compensation. The Bhopal Medical Appeal was set up in 1994 to provide ongoing help for the people of Bhopal. Funds raised by the appeal have set up the award-winning Sambhavna Clinic. We provide an update on this work and on legal challenges to Dow Chemicals the new owners of Union Carbide’s interests (page 11).
PAN UK’s second annual Rachel Carson Memorial Lecture was held on the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, given by award-winning Guardian journalist and author of ‘Not on the Label’, Felicity Lawrence. Competition between supermarkets in the UK continues to drive food prices lower. Felicity documents an aspect of this cut-throat market system not generally seen by their customers, that is the appalling social and environmental conditions in agricultural areas supplying vegetables to supermarkets. In particular she has documented conditions in Andalucia, Southern Spain, and in the Lake Naivasha region of Kenya. Her work questions the cost paid by the environment and by society for our cheap food. The full text of Felicity’s lecture can be read in this issue (page 12).
We report on an initiative to improve conditions within the coffee supply chain (page 8). The
Common Code for the Coffee Community has been developed through extended consultation with over 70 stakeholder organisations (including PAN
UK) and has established guidelines to improve the social, environmental and economic impacts of coffee production. Coffee is produced in over 60 countries and most producers are small-scale farmers so improvements have the potential to impact millions of growers. The code was launched in September of this year. We will follow progress on implementing this initiative over the next few years.
Up until now the highly toxic pesticide endosulfan has been considered the only effective and economically viable way to control the coffee berry borer, probably the most significant pest of coffee. Here we report on a new, safe
alternative to endosulfan tested in Central America and equivalent in cost to endosulfan (page 10). Endosulfan causes more poisonings in developing countries than any other pesticide so the development of an alternative is particularly significant.
[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 66, December 2004, page 2]