If a stockpile of obsolete pesticides is not widely known about or is not the focus of national attention, does that mean it should be
ignored?
Those working to eliminate the problems of obsolete pesticides, and prevent their recurrence, have to face this question daily. Should action only be taken where awareness has been raised to a level that pushes governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the public and owners of pesticide stocks to call for action? Or should we be more proactive in unearthing and dealing with a huge problem of toxic waste that is probably contaminating people, animals and the environment all over the
world?
Action on obsolete pesticides
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has been running a programme for the prevention and disposal of obsolete pesticides since 1994. PAN UK has been similarly working on the issue for a decade. In their wake other international organizations including the Basel Convention Secretariat, UN Environment Programme, World Bank, UN Development Programme and UN Industrial Development Organization have taken action in a variety of ways to help governments to identify and deal with problems of pesticide and other chemical waste stockpiles. PAN UK has alerted and informed its partners in other regions of the world and they in turn have brought their governments and grass roots members on board to recognize that not only do stocks of obsolete pesticides exist, but that their continued existence represents both a symptom of acute pesticide mismanagement and a barrier to sustainable development.
Until the late 1990s, when FAO with the support of the Netherlands raised awareness among the governments of African and Middle Eastern countries, little was known about the situation. Once preliminary inventories of stocks in these countries had been gathered and the alarm had been raised sufficiently for these governments to call for action through a range of international forums such as the Intergovernmental Forum on Chemical Safety and the Basel Convention Continental Conference of 2001, the international community took notice.
Africa Stockpiles Programme
The most important fruit of this labour is the Africa Stockpiles Programme (ASP) which aims to eliminate all existing stocks of obsolete pesticides from all 53 African countries and put in place measures to prevent their recurrence over a period of 12-15 years. Phase 1 of the programme will be launched this year and will rid six countries of their stocks and work with an additional nine countries to prepare for cleanup while implementing prevention programmes that include strengthening legislation, reviewing pest management policies and strengthening chemical management capacity in all 15
countries.
Stockpiles outside Africa
The ASP should not allow anyone to put a tick next to Africa to suggest that the obsolete pesticides problems is solved there. The programme has hardly started and there is a long way to go. Never before has the international community of donors, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), NGOs, national governments and the private sector come together to address such a problem on this scale, and there will be many lessons to learn. However, does this mean that we should stop and wait to see how the ASP will fare before action is taken in other geographical regions? The answer is already echoing from around the globe where smaller initiatives have generated calls for action in countries in Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. We must all continue working to make all the stakeholders aware of the existence and the hazards of obsolete pesticides, and help them to take appropriate
action.
But what action? Who should take action? And where to act? Enough has been learned from the experience gained to give some useful guidance in response to these questions. The biggest stocks of pesticides are invariably found where major donor operations have taken place, large scale cash crop production exists or has existed in the past, and centralized agricultural input supply systems operate or operated in the past. Cotton, for example, has consistently been a major user of pesticides and national cotton production and marketing organizations have commonly been involved in buying and distributing pesticides. Low cotton prices encouraged farmers in many countries to grow other crops leaving in many cases massive stocks of pesticides and pesticide treated seed unused. To a smaller extent a similar pattern was repeated with coffee production. Countries where such shifts took place often have long forgotten warehouses full of obsolete pesticides. Colombia, Paraguay and Pakistan offer good examples of this. Elsewhere structural reforms put an end to centralized pesticide purchasing operated by government institutions or parastatals and in such cases the stores were locked and the pesticides left to rot. The countries of Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, where tens of thousands of tonnes of obsolete pesticides linger, offer prime examples of the consequences of such reforms.
Pest ecology can also contribute to the creation of obsolete pesticide stocks. Migratory pests can be devastating but behave in unpredictable ways. Countries want to hold on to stocks of pesticides ‘just in case’ the pests arrive, but when they do not the chemicals become obsolete in as little as two years from their date of manufacture. When the migratory pests do come, donors are quick to respond with funds to buy pesticides or actual donations of pesticides. These emergency supplies rarely match needs exactly and very large stocks can be left after the pest emergency is over. When pests develop resistance to a chemical, farmers will switch to other products to save their crops regardless of whether stocks of the previous pesticide of choice remain in stores. Similarly when the EC imposed maximum residue limits of zero on a range of pesticides not approved for use within the EC, farmers in developing countries were forced in many cases to change the chemicals they were applying to export crops. The abandoned pesticides that were previously used may well emerge in obsolete pesticide stocks in years to come.
Galvanising action
Raising awareness of these actual and potential problems is an important ongoing task well suited to NGOs who are often well positioned to alert their governments and farmers and lobby for action to prevent obsolete pesticide stocks before the event, and to eliminate the stocks where they already exist.
For the governments that have recognized the problem, the role of IGOs is to assist them with technical guidance and fundraising efforts that will allow them to take appropriate action. We must avoid at all costs inappropriate action such as burial of pesticides or their destruction in ways that are likely to create different and possibly worse environmental contamination such as the emission of dioxins or other toxic products of incomplete destruction.
Where action is taken experience has shown that it is crucial to involve a wide range of stakeholders from the very beginning of a project in order to ensure that the necessary finance is secured and effectively directed, best practice is applied to the management of hazardous waste, national and international legislation is adhered to, and that practical and well-targeted prevention measures are implemented to strengthen capacity in pesticide management. The stakeholders should typically include concerned government departments such as the obvious agriculture and environment authorities, but also less immediately obvious ones such as health, industry, finance and the emergency services. In addition the private sector must be involved as they are best placed to address distribution and storage of pesticides, locate stocks that may exist in the private sector, provide technical advice on their own products and not least because they can generate funding towards destruction of some products and some prevention related activities such as training. NGOs have also played important roles in several past and ongoing projects that include awareness raising and training among farmers, independent monitoring of project activities and identification and quantification of obsolete pesticide
stocks.
Stockholm Convention
The advent of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) has done much to raise awareness of hazardous waste stockpiles in developing countries, provide coherent and consistent guidance on the management of such waste and in some cases initiate projects to eliminate the stocks. National Implementation Plans (NIPs) funded by the Global Environment Facility in every eligible country have taken steps to quantify existing stocks of POPs and in some cases other hazardous wastes including non-POP obsolete pesticides.
Time to act
Nobody can claim that obsolete pesticides are a more urgent issue that many other demands on the limited purse of international aid such as AIDS, famine, clean water and natural disasters. Nevertheless, the time is ripe to act now to get governments and the international community to take action to rid communities in all geographical regions of their stockpiles of obsolete pesticides. Waiting is not an option as interest and funding that exist today will soon be replaced with other urgent needs as the neglected chemicals that in many cases have not yet been located continue to leak and poison the soil, water and air in all of our back yards, whereever we are in the
world.
Mark Davis is Coordinator and Chief Technical Advisor, AGPP Division, Obsolete Pesticides Project, FAO, mark.davis@fao.org