| > 1,000 | |
| 500-1,000 | |
| 50-500 | |
| 5-50 | |
| Not quantified | |
| ? |
Further full inventory is necessary |
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All require revised inventory from |
Obsolete, unwanted and banned pesticides and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are serious environmental hazards. Leaking and corroding metal drums filled with obsolete and dangerous pesticides dot urban and rural landscapes of developing countries around the world as one can witness from the various pictures given below. These chemical leftovers have become villains in the agricultural world they were designed to help, affecting not only a nation's agriculture and its environment, but also fundamentally the health of its people and consequently development in general be it in rural areas or under urban conditions.
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This global environmental tragedy is a direct result of several decades of mishandling and misuse, but is most dramatic in the developing world where there is no awareness of the inherent danger of pesticides. The unaware therefore draw water from contaminated site for own survival and that of his animals.
The demise of countries affected
Most of the affected countries are under tropical conditions where agricultural and vector pests flourish both in diversity and numbers. Migratory pests such as locusts, grasshoppers, grain eating birds, storage pests, rodents, etc. inflict untold damage to agriculture and bring about hunger or misery when they are at their peak.
Poor nations have been led to believe that the only alternative to combat pests agricultural or otherwise effectively is only by using pesticides. The poor or the unaware never think for a moment that pesticides are poisonous and that they are dangerous to life. Most believe that pesticides are like medicines. They consider that they kill pests selectively and are therefore less harmful to humans, animals and plants. Governments save budgets to purchase pesticides on regular basis. Also constantly plead to donors and organizations for assistance either for direct supply of pesticides or for contributions of financial support for purchasing them. In response, donors and organizations supply pesticides.
Recipient countries anxious to minimize pest damages to the minimum or, being less aware of the negative consequences, usually receive pesticides from every possible source and direction. This leads to uncoordinated influx of pesticide donations and trading, subsequently giving rise to excessive supply. While some of the donations are genuine others take the opportunity to dump unwanted and illegal pesticides on the poor and unsuspecting countries. Pesticides reach individual farmers or household dwellers that value pesticides dearly. They keep them in their houses, with their food and animals. Pesticide vendors take the opportunity to promote pesticides aggressively. It is not uncommon to find pesticides being stored in the open or in heavily populated zones and usually in substandard stores and sold along with food and drinks, etc. Children are used in advertising sales of pesticides and often get easy access to pesticides.
They play with empty pesticide cans and use them for drinking water or milk. Most pesticide cans litter high streets or are simply dumped in open municipality dumps for subsequent open burning leading to serious emissions of dioxins.
Reasons for accumulation
Extent of spread
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The unaware and unsuspecting buy pesticides that are distributed in various containers such as coke, wine, whisky bottles, etc. It is very likely that these pesticides are mistaken for drinks once purchased and left in human domains Pesticides are mixed or dumped in rivers, canals, etc. and sprayers washed and cleaned in the same site where people get drinking water from The build up of high pressure of obsolete stocks inside containers and the ballooning effect on drums |
Obsolete stocks constantly cause mass suffering and widespread irreversible human health hazards. Unfortunately accumulation continues at an increasing rate. There is no country, being it developed or developing, that is free from the negative legacy of obsolete pesticides and POPs waste.
The hazard is acute and devastatingly dangerous in the developing countries because:
Policy Issues
Mistakes have been made in the past and recognised but urgent measures need to be taken to prevent repetition because large quantities of obsolete pesticides remain as a heritage of more than 30 years of misuse.
Unless coordinated international action is taken, the problem will continue to worsen. The following are areas where FAO intends to focus its efforts if the necessary funds can be found.
Related or similar areas of the FAO's activities include the following:
The FAO programme of obsolete pesticides
A collaborative programme on disposal of obsolete pesticides established by FAO in mid 1994 under the financial support of the Government of the Netherlands, underlines the urgency and importance of a concerted international effort to solve the problem.
The cost of disposal is high. There is a need of as much as US$500 million to clean up critically affected areas of the developing world. The potential for environmental disaster will be complicated and more expensive if the situation is not dealt with swiftly and safely.
High temperature incineration in dedicated hazardous waste incinerators is the currently recommended method for disposal of obsolete pesticides. This is outlined in the joint FAO, UNEP and WHO Disposal Guidelines. But such sophisticated incinerators do not exist in developing countries. It is therefore necessary to re-package pesticide waste in new UN approved containers where they exist in developing countries, transport them overland to a major port and then by sea to a country where there is dedicated hazardous waste destruction facilities. Shipment has to comply with the International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code (IMDG-Code) and the Basel Convention on the restrictions of Transboundary movement of toxic waste. FAO estimates the cost of disposal ranges between US$ 3 000 and US$ 4 500 per tonne depending on a number of factors.
Small Pesticide Vendors
Small vendors or pesticides are themselves often ignorant of the danger of pesticides because they have little or no training about pesticides. They fail to protect both themselves and staff working for them in their stores. They rarely provide workers with protective gears at work place and often-leftover pesticides are simply spilled out on the streets or in their backyards. Some pesticide distributors have credit systems that they offer to farmers to distribute and promote sales of pesticides. Competing pesticide distributors have their own extension agents whose sole purpose is to sell pesticides. As the income of the pesticide-selling agents depends on quantities they sell per season or day, each agent strives to be at the top by selling the most. In the process, pesticides are misused and get accumulated in the environment. Pesticide containers are equally as dangerous as pesticides themselves. In many countries farmers are advised by pesticide distributing agents to bury containers in their backyard. But most of them end up for domestic use either for keeping water, or for food storage.
The Chemical Industry
The annual worldwide sales of pesticides for example are in the region of 30 to 40 billion US dollars. The following ten top chemical companies share over 96% of such sales:
No Company Description Sales region 1 Monsanto USA Multinational India, etc. 2 Bayer Germany Multinational US, Asia, L. America 3 Zeneca UK Multinational China, Thailand 4 AgrEvo Germany Multinational US, China etc. 5 Dupont USA Various countries 6 Rhône-Poulenc France Various countries 7 DowElanco Various countries 8 Amer. Cyanamid USA Various countries 9 BASF German Various countries 10 Novartis Swiss Various countries (A) Ciba-Geigy Swiss N. America & Europe Multinational (B) Sandoz Swiss Various countries
Companies listed under (A) and (B) have merged and are referred to as Novartis. This is one of the largest multinational companies. Most of them have associations referred to as Global Crop Protection Federation (GCPF). Despite the widespread problems associated with pesticides, the Industry has consistently failed to take either firm commitment or tangible action in cleaning up obsolete pesticides but didn't fail to promise since the inception of the programme on obsolete pesticides.
Definition of obsolete stocks
Obsolete pesticides take into consideration the following:
Pesticides that are in the form of liquids, powder or dust, granules, emulsions, etc. Empty and contaminated pesticide containers of all forms and kinds (i.e. metal drums, plastic containers, paper cartoons, jute and other bags, etc.) Heavily contaminated soil, Buried pesticides, etc.
Obsolete pesticides are pesticides that can no longer be used for their intended purpose or any other purpose and therefore require disposal. Common causes of this situation include the following:
Use of the product has been prohibited or severely restricted for health or environmental reasons (e.g. through banning; withdrawal of registration, or policy decision by the ministry of agriculture or other authorized ministries). The product has deteriorated as a result of improper or prolonged storage and can no longer be used according to its label specifications and instructions for use, nor can it easily be reformulated to become usable again. The product is not suitable for its intended use and cannot be used for other purposes, nor can it easily be modified to become usable.
A product has deteriorated when:
It has undergone chemical and/or physical changes that result in phytotoxic effects on the target crop, or an unacceptable hazard to human health or the environment The product has undergone an unacceptable loss of biological efficacy because of degradation of its active ingredient and/or other chemical or physical changes Its physical properties have changed to such an extent that it can no longer be applied with standard or stipulated application equipment.
Obsolete pesticides are therefore referred to as toxic pesticide waste.
For broader definition, reference should be made to the FAO Guidelines: Disposal of bulk quantities of obsolete pesticides in developing countries.
Global Outlook: (reflecting on the past, the current and the future)
In view of what has been inflicted on the environment and more so on the poor and unaware nations, it might be worthwhile to examine the foregoing and to reflect on what the global outlook is as presented from the following sources:
The mounting risks of exposure to synthetic chemicals: accidental contact, bioaccumulation, and unpredictable synergies in the environment are much to be concerned about.
The following extract from the World Watch Environmental Magazine at (www.worldwatch.org) is worth noting.
Despite some gaps in our understanding of chemicals and their interactions with living things, evidence from laboratory studies, observations in the field have given us lessons. Some tragic experiences with pharmaceuticals have provided sharp warnings that some of the "common" chemicals now so omnipresent in our homes and workplaces, in our food and water, our clothes, our carpets, our cleaning fluids and heating vents, may be dangerously undermining human, as well as ecological health, etc. Yet, these warnings have been largely ignored. History has taken us far past the point where we could envision living without some of the services synthetic chemical provide, but it has also taken us to the point where we can no longer shrug off these warnings.
In less than one lifetime, production of synthetic organic chemicals - dyes, plastics, solvents, and the like - has increased more than a thousand fold in the United States alone: from less than 0.15 billion kilograms in 1935 to more than 150 billion kilograms in 1995. Today, there are roughly 70,000 different synthetic chemicals on the global market, and many others are emitted as by-products of their production or incineration.
Pesticides are designed to be usefully lethal. Many, however, are not meant to have toxic effects, or are not meant to come in contact with living creatures in any case, yet turn out to be both highly toxic and pervasive. For example, when polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were created in 1929, they were intended only for use in electrical wiring, lubricants and liquid seals. But old buildings are demolished and old machines are junked, and the residues that remain in them - some proving to be dangerously toxic - often leach into the ground water. Today, these PCBs - along with more than 250 other synthetic chemicals - can be found in the body of almost anyone who lives in the developed world. Furthermore, since a mother will pass some contaminants on to the developing foetus during pregnancy, even an unborn child is at risk of exposure. It has been estimated that a mother's exposure to some persistent chemicals will still be detectable five generations later.
Exposure can occur almost anywhere. Pesticides such as Dursban and methoxychlor are sprayed in offices and schools without the knowledge of workers or students. Other chemicals are pumped into livestock and poultry or sprayed liberally over fruits and vegetables only to show up on the dinner table. They are absorbed into the body through mouth contact with soft plastic toys or pacifiers, through skin contact with synthetic fabrics, and through direct consumption. Ironically, some of the chemicals most specifically intended to protect human health by killing pests that would otherwise infest food end up having the opposite effect. The residues accumulate in the tissues of people, who are vulnerable to long-term exposure, whereas the rapidly reproducing pests mutate fast enough to develop resistance.
Many of these chemicals will persist and build up in the environment long after they are released. For example, chemists estimate that the solvent chloroform, which is toxic to birds, fish and humans, will persist in water for 1,850 years. Yet, it is continually being dumped into rivers or lakes via municipal waste treatment plants and accidental spills. Phorate, an organophosphorus insecticide, was used around a South Dakota wetland at only three-quarters of the recommended dose yet persisted through the winter despite assurances from the US Environmental Protection Agency that it would degrade. The following year, it killed a number of waterfowl. The contaminated fowl were scavenged by bald eagles, which also died.
The most notorious of the persistent chemicals are organohalogens: carbon-based substances containing chlorine, fluorine, bromine or iodine. The majority is chlorine containing, or organochlorines. Around 11,000 organochlorines have been identified, most of which do not occur naturally. They include roughly 50 pesticides such as toxaphene and DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane); solvents such as perchloroethylene; and multiple-use chemicals such as PCBs. However, the relative indestructibility of these chemicals, a boon for industry, has become a threat to the environment.
The problem is not just that these substances long overstay their welcome, but also that they concentrate. Most persistent chemicals do not dissolve easily in water. They are taken up by organic matter such as algae, and tend to build up in the fatty tissue of fish and wildlife that consume the algae. Concentrations continue to increase as the fish that ate the algae in turn are eaten by predators. In this way, a predator can actually end up bioaccumulating - storing in its flesh - a larger quantity of toxin over a period of time than would constitute a single fatal dose. Sometimes the final predator is a human sitting down to a plate of fish in a restaurant.
In just a few decades, synthetic chemicals have reached the remotes ends of the earth. They run off farmland or city streets into streams and sewers, are carried downstream, circulate in the air, and later fall as rain. On Midway atoll, located thousands of miles from Los Angeles, Tokyo or Honolulu, and once thought to be a pristine environment, scientists have found DDT, PCBs and dioxin-like compounds in the black-footed albatross in concentrations similar to those in bald eagles from the heavily contaminated Great Lakes. Researchers believe that the contaminants are coming from a plume of DDT off the coast of Southeast Asia (where US banned chemical is still widely used), and from partly burned plastics from municipal incinerators in Japan and other Pacific Rim countries.
In a similarly disturbing discovery, investigators have found high levels of contamination in Northern Canadian and Greenland Inuit (Eskimo) villages. The PCBs and other persistent chemicals found in the Inuit people arrived by wind and water, and then reached them through the wild fish and game that make up the majority of their diet.
Ultimately, there is no place to hide. There is no remote rainforest, island alpine resort, or gated community on earth where the environment remains pristine. Even for the geographically-isolated black-footed albatross and the North Canadian Inuit, there is no refuge.
As these chemicals accumulate in our bodies and surroundings, so does the evidence of their harmful effects too. Although there is an indisputable connection between certain chemicals and certain diseases - benzene and leukaemia, for example - scientists are now linking chemical exposures with more subtle effects - such as deficits in learning and inability to reproduce. Scientists such as zoologists Theo Colborn and John Peterson Myers, authors of Our Stolen Future, have begun to document the diverse effects of these chemicals, but it is an Augean task: the effects are not always obvious, and many of the mechanisms remain unknown
In the North Sea, for example, approximately 20,000 seals - more than half of the seals in Europe - died in just six months in 1988. As in the case of the deformed frogs, scientists at first speculated that there could be multiple causes: poisonous algae, global warming, or a chemical spill. Then, some months later, it was determined that the immediate cause had been a newly discovered distemper virus. Although the episode had been devastating, there was a sigh of relief that the crash had been due to natural causes. But seven years later, further research showed that contact with high concentrations of synthetic chemicals, particularly of PCBs which had lodged in the fish these seals were eating, may have made the seals susceptible to the virus.
That discovery came about through a study in which healthy seal pups caught in relatively clean waters were divided into two groups. One group was fed herring from the heavy polluted Baltic Sea while the other ate herring from the much cleaner Atlantic Ocean. The study began in October 1991, and after only two years, the blubber of the seals that were fed contaminated fish contained 17 parts per million (PPM) of PCBs - concentrations three to ten times higher than those in the control seals. At these levels, the test seals showed a 20 to 50 percent reduction in natural "killer" cells, which attack foreign bodies in the blood, and a 25 to 60 percent reduction in T-cells, the white blood cells essential to orchestrating immune response. Yet, their 17 ppm was only a fraction of the hundred and sometimes thousands ppm found in the wild North Sea seals.
Although seals and other sea mammals are particularly at risk because they feed almost entirely on fish from polluted oceans, people too are at risk; in fact the fish that the test seals consumed has been destined to human consumption. The human immune system is almost identical to that of other mammals and consequently, so are the effects. Recent studies have found that Canadian Inuit children, who also eat large quantities of wild fish, produce fewer antibodies than usual when they are vaccinated for certain diseases. As a result, they too are abnormally susceptible to illness.
In addition to suppressing the immune system, manufactured chemicals may be wreaking other insidious form of damage. In the last few years, a growing body of reports has suggested that PCBs, DDT and at least 50 other chemicals now at large in the environment may be harmful to reproduction and development - both in wildlife and in people. Some scientists believe that these chemicals are interfering with the endocrine system - the body's hormone-making and signalling system, which regulates growth and development as well as behaviour and brain function. According to their findings, some of these chemicals are mimicking natural oestrogens - spreading an insidious kind of biological confusion. Others are blocking the effects of natural hormones and altering their effectiveness. Although the mechanisms remain puzzling, reports of subtle, chemically induced effects on reproduction and development have been building.
In the 1980s, dicofol, a pesticide known to be contaminated with DDT, was accidentally released from a holding pond into a marsh, and ultimately into Florida's Lake Apopka, where people collect alligator eggs for the state's multi-million dollar alligator ranching industry. The egg hunters noticed that there were very few good eggs surrounding this lake. Beginning in 1988, Lou Gillette Jr., a professor of zoology at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and several colleagues studied the effects of dicofol on the Lake Apopka alligator population and found that male alligators had penises just three-quarters their normal length, and that both the testes in the male alligators and the ovaries in the females were abnormal. They also found that, at one point, even under ideal laboratory conditions, when the eggs were protected from natural predators, only 4 to 9 percent of them were successfully hatching.
Children in the womb are particularly susceptible to these "subtle" effects of chemical exposure and may be affected even when there is no harm to the mother. During critical times in development (for example, between the fifth and eighth week of pregnancy for the arms and legs), the chemicals that interrupt normal signals may cause permanent damage. The importance of this crucial period of development was tragically demonstrated in the early 1960s, when thousands of pregnant women took prescribed doses of thalidomide as a tranquilliser during their pregnancy. As a result, 8,000 children in 46 countries were born with severe deformities: some had missing limbs while others had hands sprouting directly from their shoulders.
Exposures may also be causing declining sperm counts. Several years ago, Niels Skakkebaek, Chief of the Department of Growth and Reproduction at the University Hospital in Copenhagen, and his colleagues reported that the average man's sperm count had plunged from 113 million per millimetre in 1940 to 66 million per millimetre in 1990. Some scientists responded sceptically, pointing to a lack of comparability between the studies: they had come from different regions of the world, where climate, nutrition, and other factors were not the same. Other studies have shown no significant change at all. However, in at least two subsequent studies, declines like those observed by Skakkebaek have been observed within a region: a 1995 French study examined 20 years of donations to a Paris sperm bank and reported a decline in sperm count of 2 percent per year over the past two decades - along with a steady rise in the percentage of sperm that is deformed. And in 1996, scientists reported a similar decline of 2 percent per year in 600 Scottish men.
Each year, roughly 1,000 new substances are produced, most without much testing or review. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, there is insufficient information to assess the toxicity - the ability to poison - of more than 95 percent of the chemicals that have been released into the air, water and soil.
Many humans may be more susceptible, for they bodyweight, than the animals used in laboratory test. In laboratory studies, testing is performed on healthy rodents or animals, with few extraneous factors to confound the results. In real life, however, both human and wildlife are often exposed to additional stresses such as nutritional deficiencies, genetic defects, or physiological responses to global temperature changes. Elderly people, or individuals with asthma or other debilitating diseases, may react to levels deemed harmless to the average healthy individuals, or laboratory rodent. The "safety factors" are supposed to account for these variabilities, but we have no way of being sure that they do.
In recent tests of a few specific chemicals, endocrine disruption is believed to occur at extremely minute doses - doses 100 times lower than those associated with cancer. If serious endocrine effects have been overlooked or ignored for so long, what else are the current tests overlooking?
Determining the concentration of chemicals in the environment is a challenge quite apart from identifying the quantities released at the source. Although a paper mill may release dioxins into the air and water at levels that are not detectable by the methods normally used, for example these chemicals (and other organochlorines) can bioaccumulate in fish to concentrations 100,000 times that of the surrounding environment - and at even higher levels with each step up the food chain.
John MacLachlan of the Tulane-Xavier Center for Biomedical research and his colleagues recently showed that two weakly oestrogenic chemicals, when used in combination, were up to 1,600 times more potent than when each was used alone. And pesticides such as malathion and other organophosphates, when administered simultaneously are 50 times more toxic than when administered separately.
In the 1950s and 1960s, advertisements showed images of children frolicking amidst a strange "fog" containing the now infamous DDT and proclaiming "DDT is good for me". At the time, nothing seemed wrong; there were no immediate effects. Some 30 years after being discovered as a potent insecticide, DDT was found to be a probable cause of cancers and reproductive disorders, and by now has been banned in some 70 countries. But DDT is not gone. It lingers in the air, soil and water, and it is still being sprayed on mosquitoes.
Efforts to control the use and trade of restricted or banned chemicals have led to the development of the Prior Inform Consent (PIC) treaty, a proposed convention that would require exporting countries to provide information on whether the chemical that they are exporting is restricted or banned nationally.
The North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (NACEC) created under a side agreement to the North American Trade Agreement, is working for a continent-wide restriction or ban on PCBs, DDT, mercury and chlordane. But it is not dealing with the threats of a number of other dangerous substances, such as the organochlorine pesticides toxaphene and lindane.
Because persistent pollutants can contaminate locations far from their source, effective management of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) may not be possible without implementation of a comprehensive international agreement. The International Forum on Chemical Safety (IFCS), a cooperative group of government representatives and non-governmental organizations for the promotion of environmentally sound management of chemicals, has made a very modest start by calling for the reduction, and eventual ban, of 12 persistent organic pollutants.
In the absence of any viable means of keeping up with testing and screening, the histories of DDT, chlordane and PCBs will likely repeat themselves. Ultimately, there may be no realistic choice but to undertake a sweeping, worldwide search for non-chemical alternatives.
Where industries resist change or the cost of retooling is too high, or where government regulation is weak, public opinion can sometimes tip the balance. The United States, Canada, Scandinavia and parts of Europe require mandatory reporting of some chemical emissions.
Requiring full labelling of household pesticides and consumer products can help. Household pesticides in the United States, for example, usually list the active ingredient and a statement that close to 99 percent contains "inert" ingredients, many of which themselves cause cancer or other toxic effects. A recent ruling, however, overruled industry's pleas to keep the inert ingredients of six pesticides a secret, offering a stepping stone for more public disclosure. As consumer knowledge of the effects of chemical exposures in their homes and communities increases, so too does their influence on industry.
Public awareness can revolutionise not only the regulations of industries, but also the markets for those industries' products. For example, it appears to be consumer demand that has had the greatest impact on the use of toxic chemicals in agriculture. Partly as a result of the growing awareness of the harmful effects of pesticides, the organic food industry in the United States has increased 20 percent each year since 1990. In Los Angeles, Washington, Boston and other cities, the small "health food' shops of the past have given way to booming natural-food supermarkets, stocked entirely with organic and "chemical-free" foods.
To move faster, we may need a different kind of incentive system for industry - one that doesn't systematically tempt business to seek short-term profits at the expense of long-term health. A tax system that penalises pollution while rewarding investment in health may be part of the answer.
At the FAO website:
source: http://www.fao.org/WAICENT/FAOINFO/AGRICULT/AGP/AGPP/Pesticid/Disposal/index_en.htm 27sep02
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