Courtesy & Thanks : The Hindu
Taking the poison out of our food
I personally feel we have no option but to move gradually towards organic farming.
I am not someone who usually goes shopping for
vegetables or even other food stuff. My present professional
requirements don’t allow me this luxury. But I remember when I was a
child I would often accompany my mother or my aunt when they went
shopping for vegetables, fruits and other food stuff. I remember being
thoroughly bored during these trips. They would spend hours selecting
vegetables, examining each fruit or vegetable with great interest,
pointing out flaws and insisting on the best quality and the most fresh
food, and constantly comparing the quality offered by different sellers.
All this while my friends were waiting for me to join them for a game
of cricket! Today when I pass Khar market [in Mumbai], or the road that
leads to Khar Telephone Exchange on Linking Road, which is lined by
vegetable and fruit sellers, I look at all the women doing exactly what
my mother and aunt used to do and it takes me down memory lane to those
afternoons or evenings spent following them around carrying heavy bags.
How much time our homemakers spend in selecting fresh food for us —
little do we realise that no matter how fresh the vegetable or fruit
maybe, it may still contain high levels of poison in it.
We
can test the freshness of a fruit by holding it, smelling it, giving it
a soft squeeze, checking for bumps and spots and bruises. But how do we
check the level of pesticides contained in it?
Why
do we eat food? Obviously, because our body needs the nutrition in order
to survive. Nutritious food contributes to our physical and mental
growth, our well-being, our ability to fight diseases, etc. But if we
consume large amounts of pesticide along with our food, then along with
nutrition we are also consuming poison, and that defeats the very
purpose of eating the food in the first place.
Green Revolution
In
the 1960s, India experienced what was called the Green Revolution.
Policy makers at that time felt that in order to feed the growing
population in India, we needed to increase the productivity and per acre
yield. In order to achieve this result, interventions were made in
traditional natural organic farming — interventions that were big on
chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Pests or insects damage our
agricultural produce by feeding on it. To destroy or kill these pests we
use what are called pesticides. Pesticides are basically poison to kill
the insects. Apparently, of all the pesticide sprayed on the crop, only
one per cent of it actually falls on the insect. As much as 99 per cent
of it falls on the crop, gets absorbed in the soil, and/or water, gets
carried a little distance by wind, etc. In this manner it gets into our
food and, thereby, into us.
Nature has its own way of
keeping a balance and therefore, each one of these pests which destroys
our crops, also has predators. So broadly speaking there are two kinds
of pests — vegetarian pests or those that feed on our crops, and
non-vegetarian pests or those that feed on the pests that feed on our
crops. A pesticide does not distinguish between veg and non-veg pests.
It’s a poison that kills both. So having killed our friend insects we
are then left with those pests which have survived the onslaught of the
pesticide. Their survival creates resistance in them to these
pesticides, and to kill the same insects you have to spray more
pesticides. It’s a vicious circle. A circle from which we have
consistently been removing our friendly insects; a circle which perhaps
also results in us consuming more pesticides.
Plight of the farmer
If
pesticides in our food affect us, how does it affect our farmers? Well
the people spraying pesticides are in the immediate vicinity of the
pesticide and therefore are much more exposed to it than us, the
consumer. This is cited as one of the major health hazards for persons
engaged in farming. Also, one of the stated reasons for farmer
indebtedness is the huge cost of pesticides. An experiment with
non-pesticide farming done in Andhra Pradesh which began with a few
villages on 225 acres has been so successful that it has now spread
across 35 lakh acres! And this has been possible because of the effort
of a women’s collective across villages with the support of the Andhra
Pradesh government. Sikkim is the first State in India to go fully
organic, with more States seriously looking to make the shift.
The
arguments for and against pesticides are many and have been dealt with
in great detail on our show. For me, the choice is simple: I personally
feel we have no option but to move gradually towards organic farming.
And, until such time that we are fully organic, we need a government
regulatory authority to do monthly checks on the food coming into
wholesale markets across the country in all the different cities, and to
monitor the amount of pesticide in our food.
In the
meantime, live with this report from the Centre for Science and
Environment: assuming that the pesticide content in each and every food
product we consume does not exceed the MRL (Maximum Residue Limit) of
pesticide in our food, and is at permissible level, even then, anyone
with an average daily intake of various foods, will exceed the ADI
(Acceptable Daily Intake) of pesticides by approximately 400 per cent!
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