The fiction of healthy toxins

By Dr. Ranil Senanayake

Prof. O. A. IIeperuma’s rebuttal of my observations on the ‘development’ of our agriculture with the applications of agrotoxins illustrates clearly the lament made by the Sri Lankan farmers to such agricultural ‘scientists’. The statement from the Sri Lankan Farmers’ Forum made to the scientists of the CGIAR in 1998 reads:

“We have watched for many years, as the progression of experts, scientists and development agents passed through our communities with some or another facet of the modern scientific world. We confess that at the start we were unsophisticated in matters of the outside world and welcomed this input. We followed advice and we planted as we were instructed. The result was a loss of the varieties of seeds that we carried with us through history, often spanning three or more millennia. The result was the complete dependence of high input crops that robbed us of crop independence. In addition, we farmers, producers of food, respected for our ability to feed populations, were turned into the poisoners of land and living things, including fellow human beings. The result in Sri Lanka is that we suffer from social and cultural dislocation and suffer the highest pesticide related death toll on the planet. Was this the legacy that you the agricultural scientists wanted to bring to us? We think not. We think that you had good motives and intentions, but left things in the hands of narrowly educated, insensitive people.”

This statement illustrates the poor understanding of how an ecosystem operates and a poor idea as to what biomagnification is. The good professor says, “These trace levels of pesticides accumulate in the fatty tissues, a process called bioaccumulation. Human body has a remarkable way to get rid of these poisons; the liver acts as the waste treatment plant and these poisons are detoxified in the liver and excreted through the kidney.” He has totally missed the point; his statement sadly confirms the sentiments of our farmers: “We think that you had good motives and intentions, but left things in the hands of narrowly educated, insensitive people.” Bioaccumulation or bioconcentration in this sense does not refer to the human body as suggested by the ‘kidney’ comment; it refers to the agroecosystem!

The concentration ratio means that if there is one part of toxin in the environment, it will be concentrated along the food chain at increasing levels. The concentration ratio of standard agrotoxins ranges from 1:3900 to over 1: 92,000. There is no way the human body, however remarkable it may be, could get rid of toxins at these concentrations. At an individual level, yes, it is the dose that matters, but while scientists talk about application rates, they seem to ignore the fact that organisms in the natural system begin to bioconcentrate. This comment also suggests that something is dreadfully wrong in the research protocols being developed to asses agriculture if they do not consider the agricultural field as an integrated ecosystem.

Agriculture is not just crop production. he Hon D. S. Senanayake: our first Prime Minister had this to say about agriculture: “Agriculture is not merely a way of making money by raising crops; it is not merely an industry or a business; it is essentially a public function or service performed by private individuals for the care and use of the land in the national interest: and the farmers in the course of securing a living and a private profit are custodians of the basis of national life. Agriculture is therefore affected with a clear and unquestionable public interest ….”

Unfortunately, the goals of modern agriculture discount this public function, based on the premise that the main goal of agriculture is productivity increase; this has created a plethora of problems that bedevil all of humanity. The most significant of them are the loss of sustainability, the loss of biodiversity, the loss of independence, the loss of traditional knowledge and the loss of nutrient breadth. We need a new paradigm in agriculture.

It is sad to witness the defence of the indefensible. If one looks at the statistics of rural health, it is clearly seen that the appearance of non-communicable diseases (NCD’s) in the rural sector began in the early 70s and has been rising exponentially since. If one looks for a significant correlation, it will be seen that it was around this time that the nation began its entry into the ‘green revolution’ or fossil energy and chemical supported agriculture. If the price for self-sufficiency in rice leads to a national health disaster should one not be promoting the popular slogan of toxin free agriculture?

An average Sri Lankan is exposed to 8-10 different pesticides through food, beverages and drinking water every day; the majorities of these chemicals are endocrine disruptors and accumulate in the body. However, there is a simple way to reduce the risk and clean your body; it is by consuming a diet of ‘clean’ food grown without the application of these poisons for a period of time, recent studies suggest that consuming organic food for about a week can reduce circulating pesticide based endocrine disrupting chemicals to non-detectable or near non-detectable levels. Sri Lanka unfortunately does not have a programme of public health, where the food arriving in the markets is checked for their toxin levels; other nations do.

I have been working on Sri Lanka’s agroecosystems since 1970 onwards and what I have recorded is a massive loss of sustainability and biodiversity in our agriculture fields as we were slowly made addicted to the new chemicals and fossil energy input. Today, our entire production base is addicted to agrotoxins; the management of the living soil ecosystem has been neglected, and the biomass of our agricultural soils is almost gone. We are heading towards a situation where the temperatures will exceed the thermal threshold of chlorophyll, but who amongst our agricultural scientists has addressed these realities and provided solutions? Further, kidney disease is not the only NCD impacting our farming population, and it should not be used as a red herring to distract us from the rapidly decreasing health of our rural populations.

Scientific research shows that Glyphosate is toxic to plants and microorganisms. The reality is that the living oil consists of microorganisms, the destruction of which will reduce the ability of the soil to support a crop unless chemical fertilizers are used. Further, the gut flora of microorganisms is also compromised if one ingests Glyphosate, which today is a chemical that is ubiquitous in the bodies of humans in many nations.

I suppose that finally it is what we accept as ‘agriculture’ that will determine our responsibility by the ecosystems that produce food and the biological systems that maintain health. The care of our agroecosystems cannot be defined merely as crop output with external input. How can we address the lament of our farmers to the scientists of the CGIAR who stated: “we farmers, producers of food, respected for our ability to feed populations, were turned into the poisoners of land and living things including fellow human beings.”

Are they merely ‘uneducated villagers’ who know nothing of agriculture who should await the ‘scientists’ to guide them towards what is good?