Organic Bytes
Newsletter #957: Nearly Half of Farmers Are Poisoned by Pesticides Each Year. Start by Banning the Deadliest.

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Nearly Half of Farmers Are Poisoned by Pesticides Each Year. Start by Banning the Deadliest.

Globally, an estimated 46 percent of farmers are victims of unintentional, acute pesticide poisoning every year.

What’s the solution to this problem?

Ban the hazardous pesticides that cause these poisonings, starting with five of the deadliest sold in the U.S.: aldicarb, chlorethoxyfos, ethoprophos, phorate, and terbufos. All five are classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “extremely hazardous.”

Aldicarb alone caused the largest food borne pesticide poisoning in U.S. history. More than 2000 people were made sick from illegally treated watermelons in 1985. This pesticide is still legal on the sweet potatoes many of us eat today at levels the EPA’s own scientists say are unsafe for children.

Learn more about these extremely hazardous pesticides used on food in the U.S.: READ: Ban the Pesticides that Poison Nearly Half of the World’s Farmers Each Year

TAKE ACTION: Ban the Pesticides Classified by WHO as Hazardous, Including These Top Five!

REAL ORGANIC PODCAST

Omar Dieguez: My Hunger Strike Over Driscoll’s Berries

“Omar Dieguez explains why he undertook a 30-day hunger strike to call attention to pesticides near schools in California’s berry-growing region.

Speaking from Watsonville, (home of the Driscoll’s Berries headquarters) he describes spray drift, childhood illness, and the pressure campaign aimed at Driscoll’s to stop spraying near schools and convert nearby fields to organic.

The conversation connects food, environmental justice, and farmworker health, asking what it means when the berries sold across the country are tied to harm in the communities where they are grown.”

Watch Dave Chapman interview Omar Dieguez on Real Organic Podcast #270.

Please take action at CORA and follow Safe Ag Safe Schools on Facebook.

“FOOD, LAND & MONEY”

The Case for Ending the Agribusiness Financial Complex and Funding the Peoples’ Food Web

Food, Land & Money, Friends of the Earth U.S.:

“Food is abundant. So is money. Yet despite record production of industrial commodity crops, hunger remains widespread while billions of dollars flow to agribusiness corporations and their shareholders. Industrial agriculture doesn’t only fail to feed people — it imperils our future by driving climate emergency, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse.

Food, Land & Money follows the money to reveal who benefits most and why so much investment continues to support a model that is harming people and the planet. It also looks at what could happen if more resources were directed to those who already nourish much of the world.

This is a call to all of us, activists, donors, investors, researchers, policymakers, farmers, food workers, communities, entrepreneurs, and eaters, to develop and practice these approaches to tackling the deeper dysfunctions of our food system, especially those rooted in financial flows, even as we work to lessen its immediate harms. We all depend on our food system, and we all have a role to play in transforming it.”

Shift the money. Shift the power.

HEALTH

Syngenta’s Secrets – What the Company Didn’t Tell the EPA About Its “Blockbuster” Paraquat Pesticide

“This story was originally published by The New Lede.”

Carey Gillam, The New Lede:

“Now, clues to how and why the US remains one of the world’s last large markets for widespread paraquat use are coming to light through troves of internal Syngenta records recently revealed through litigation.

The records show that as paraquat markets around the world started crumbling over concerns for public health, Syngenta fought to keep a tight hold onto the US market, where use of paraquat nearly tripled between 2000 and 2018, a time period when dozens of other countries were banning paraquat.

Notably, internal corporate records, depositions and other records show that both before and during this time frame, Syngenta did not share certain internal data and other information with the EPA regarding paraquat health effects and risks despite federal legal requirements for companies to report information about ‘unreasonable adverse effects’ of their products.”

At the same time the company was holding back adverse information, the records show the company was developing and promoting science showing paraquat safety that it could tout to EPA.

SUPPORT OCA & RI

We All Have a Roll To Play

There are 150 pesticides still used in the U.S. that the World Health Organization classifies as “hazardous” because they can cause unintentional, acute pesticide poisoning. They’re used on crops like corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes, and farmworkers are the ones getting poisoned. Around the world, nearly half of all farmers get sick from pesticides every year. We’re asking state lawmakers to ban all 150, starting with the worst 5, that the WHO says are “extremely hazardous”.

Pesticide companies won’t make that easy. They have a lot of pull with regulators. Recent records show Syngenta kept some health data about its weed killer paraquat from EPA, and EPA worked closely with Bayer to reapprove dicamba.

There’s good news, too. A new report from Friends of the Earth, Food, Land & Money, points out that the world isn’t short on food or money. Billions of dollars just flow to big agribusiness instead of to the small farmers and food workers who already feed much of the world. Shift where that money goes, the report says, and we can grow a food system that’s better for people and the planet.

Our strength is people like you, who care whether their food made someone else sick.

Please make a donation to help us push state lawmakers to ban all 150 hazardous pesticides, keep watch on what pesticide companies tell regulators and help us get the word out that we all have a roll to play, and give people the tools they need to transform our food system.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

Have you considered including OCA in your will?

BILLIONS AGAINST BAYER

EPA Coordinated With Bayer on Reapproval for Controversial Herbicide Dicamba

“This story was originally published by The New Lede.”

Brian Bienkowski, The New Lede:

“The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) worked directly with pesticide maker Bayer in approving the controversial herbicide dicamba earlier this year, presenting the company with different options for how to reduce drift and runoff and then aligning on those options in the final decision, according to internal agency records.

Critics say the records do show a federal agency giving deference and working hand-in-hand with the companies that it is supposed to be regulating, and further call into question the reapproval of dicamba — which in addition to drift concerns, has been linked to certain cancers.”

The records showing Bayer’s influence on dicamba reapproval are the latest evidence the EPA is working with Bayer behind the scenes on regulatory and legal issues.

NEW SURVEY

Big Food & Regenerative Agriculture: Questions Remain About Standards, Oversight, and Greenwashing

by Lisa Held, Civil Eats:

“Almost everyone agrees regenerative farming is rooted in building and maintaining healthy soil. Some regenerative practices can be traced back to Indigenous methods, and others to organic, biodynamic, or permaculture systems.

Sometimes, these methods overlap. Other times, practices being described as regenerative are simple additions to industrial systems that share little in common with those methods, and regenerative commitments made by big food companies and touted for public relations and marketing may not be what consumers expect.

‘It’s honestly such an incredibly complicated issue that I think is causing a lot of confusion for the everyday consumer, also for the companies, advocates, and farmers,’ said Sarah Starman, senior campaigner for food and agriculture at Friends of the Earth.

‘There are actors in the space who I think are doing a lot of good and moving forward regenerative projects. There are also a lot of companies that are capitalizing on sort of the loosey-goosey nature of regenerative.’”

GUT HEALTH

Probiotic Supplements Often Fall Short. Real Food Works Better.

Anahad O’Connor, The Philadelphia Tribune:

“Supporting and nourishing your gut microbiome is a worthy goal. But new research suggests that many Americans may not be going about it in the best way.

The research, published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, found that the percentage of Americans over age 20 who used probiotic supplements more than tripled from 2009 to 2023 — rising from slightly less than 2% of the population to roughly 7%. Probiotic use climbed among people under age 20 as well.

While the absolute numbers are relatively small, that represents a significant increase, said Chris Damman, a microbiome expert and gastroenterologist at the digestive health center at the University of Washington Medical Center, who was not involved in the new research.

Yet at the same time, there was little or no increase in Americans’ consumption of fermented foods and fiber-rich plants.”

That contrast is striking. Experts have found that one of the simplest and most important ways to improve your gut health is by feeding your gut microbes the foods that they thrive on.

READ: 17 Ways to Eat Sauerkraut, the Fermented Food You Should Be Adding to Everything

FOOD & AGRICULTURE

Who’s Missing From Climate Week?

Errol Schweizer, Grocery Nerd, The Checkout:

“There is a lot of really interesting, diverse stuff happening at the food-focused events at Climate Week NYC. There are panels featuring small scale ranchers, young farmers and indigenous growers. There is a major focus on organic, regenerative and agroecological farming systems, with many natural/specialty, organic and plant-based food companies in the mix.

On the other hand, there is one major interest group missing, not on the main stages, not on a funder panels, not really in the itinerary, but wholly essential to it. It’s a major miss.

Farmwork. Processing. Warehousing and wholesale. Logistics. Receiving, buying, stocking, cashiering. Food delivery. And the care work of making food, while other folks go to work doing all these things.

The rank and file food workers are missing from Climate Week (other than feeding the attendees, of course).

So here is a mild corrective: I am a panel member with IPES-Food, an international food policy working group. Our next report is all about labor in food and agriculture. It is going to kick ass.

Here is a short teaser of what our amazing research team pulled together. Watch this space for more.”

BOOK CORNER

Thirty-Two Words for Field

by Manchán Magan, Emergence Magazine:

“It was my grandmother, Sighle Humphreys, who taught me Irish and when I asked her one day what the word for a hole was, she replied, ‘Do you mean one dug into the ground by an animal? That’s an uachas. Or one made by fish in a sandy riverbed for spawning? That’s a saothar. Or if it’s been hollowed out by the hoofs of beasts and then filled with rain it’s a plobán. Or if a lobster is hiding in one it’s a fach. Or if it’s been created as a hideaway by a wild beast it’s a puathais.’

Perhaps it was then that I first noticed that the two languages I spoke, Irish and English, required not just different forms of grammar and syntax but different ways of interpreting reality. It wasn’t just that the sun rose in five distinct stages in Irish, but that if I needed to give directions to someone I had to orientate myself in relation to the sun quite specifically.

I couldn’t just say I was heading ‘up the road’ or ‘back to someone’s house’ or ‘into town’.”