The world’s farm pesticide death toll has been cut radically with biotech seeds that carry their own internal pesticide. A new study in India has found that biotech cotton has reduced pesticide spraying by 50 percent, and spraying of the most toxic poisons by 70 percent. The reduced spraying is helping avoid “several million cases of pesticide poisoning in India every year.”

This is important progress—which should be enough by itself to embarrass Greenpeace and the other anti-technology groups opposing biotech. But the big news on the biotech crops is that they’re slashing the toll from farmer suicides, perhaps by a million deaths per year. Suicides have been the primary cause of the WHO’s estimated 10 million annual deaths from pesticides. The most frequent cause of rural suicides is debt, often because the farmer’s rice or cotton crop has failed and he has no way to pay back loans or feed his family. All he has is his ruined fields, which lie there mocking his attempts at success.

Even though the vast majorities of accidental farmer pesticide “poisonings” are mild, and pass quickly, they are unpleasant and some have lasting effects. Some professionals say about two-thirds of the acute pesticide poisoning deaths in the developing countries are intentional. The World health Organization tells us that in Sri Lanka, 70 percent of the farmers who commit suicide choose pesticide poisoning. In China, the percentage of farmer suicides by poison is 60 percent, in India 30 percent. And these are only the victims treated in hospitals. We have poor statistics on the number of farmer suicides because the farmers are rural, often far from medical care; and, there is always family reluctance to admit the shame of suicide.

Bollworm losses in India typically take half the farmer’s crop and often 90 percent. When Bt cotton was introduced, the insects were showing resistance to parathyroid, organophosphates, carbomates and cycledienes. India seemed likely to lose not just its cotton farmers, but the millions of textile jobs for its urban workers too. The suicide potential was vast.

A study in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry reported that pesticide self-poisoning had “become a fashion in the entire Sunderabad region [in the center of India], and is fast replacing hanging and immolation [setting oneself on fire].”

The Bt cotton contains a natural pesticide found in soils around the world. The bollworms are more likely to be killed by the biotech application because it’s not just sprayed in their general direction, they swallow it. That sharply reduces the development of resistance. Ultimately, if Bt resistance does develop, other pesticides could be delivered through similar biotech seeds.

Crop failures have always been a widely recognized problem for all farmers, but in the old days, farmers diversified their crops and spread their risk the low-yield way. Mostly, they could barely feed their own families, but family food security was the top priority. Today’s high-tech farming requires special seeds and purchased inputs to deliver the higher per-acre yields—but that feeds more people, saves more land for wildlife, and provides a better life for the families in the farming community.

The new problem is the concentrated financial risk for the farmers. This risk became intolerable for many when insects began to develop resistance to the more common pesticides. Indian cotton farmers found themselves spraying a dozen times per season, spending far more for the chemicals—and still losing their crops. Chinese rice farmers were faced with similar epidemic problems of such insects as stem borers and leafhoppers.

Will the quadruple benefits of fewer crop sprayings; lower costs, higher yields, and more financial security—plus reduced misery that leads to suicide—finally soften the hearts of anti-technology activists? Stay tuned.

This week’s headlines: Another huge, awful outbreak of food-borne bacteria. This time the worst, so far, in modern history; perhaps 2000 sickened, and about 20 dead. At least 500 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome.. That means liver damage—and potential death from kidney failure. More than 1000 cases of severe diarrhea. Usually it is the very young and the elderly who are most at risk of serious consequences, but this outbreak targeted young adults, mostly women.

All the known cases involved people who recently ate food in northern Germany—but scientists can’t find the source of the infections. They seldom can. The deadly bacteria appear without warning, and usually disappear before they can be traced.

At least this time we are being spared the sanctimony of the organic believers, since organic cucumbers imported from Spain were early reported as the most likely source of the infections.

People all over Europe are being warned away from eating health-protecting fruits and vegetables. Europe’s farmers are being devastated by the public’s renewed fear of eating produce at the beginning of Europe’s fresh season—and they’re demanding indemnities. The Spanish government is demanding apologies and payments for the losses suffered because Spanish farmers were accused—without undeniable proof—of sickening thousands.

In America, our response to food safety is predictable: we have a hugely expensive new Food Safety Act. We are hiring thousands more inspectors, who won’t be able to find the deadly bacteria in our food before they strike. After the people have gotten sick and/or died, many additional scientists will spend huge sums of public money failing to find the sources of the infections.

Soon, the food scare industry will be on the front pages telling us that this is the ultimate breakdown of Modern Farming, and demanding that we go back to Old McDonald’s farming methods. As they write they will know full well that the E.Coli bacteria is spread mostly through contact with infected feces. And, what do modern day Old McDonalds use for fertilizer? All food growing systems can and do harbor the bacteria, but using manure makes organic food slightly more dangerous.

All of this could have been prevented, but we refuse to use a fabulous technology that’s been known since 1904. Alarmists say it would make our foods “more dangerous.” More dangerous than liver failure? More dangerous than dead?

I’m talking—again, as I have for over 20 years—about electronic pasteurization. About streams of high-energy electronic particles basically sterilizing our ground meat and fresh produce, much as we defanged tuberculosis by pasteurizing our milk. No radioactivity. The necessary doses are so small that the food will even taste fresher—because the spoilage bacteria have been killed.

It has been approved by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Society and the medical authorities of virtually every country with a food science laboratory. But that’s not good enough for a country that resisted pasteurized milk for 40 years. It took a huge epidemic of tuberculosis to get our milk pasteurized, and an ardent group of know-nothings is still demanding the right to sicken themselves with raw, bacteria-laden dairy products

How many more must die before we protect ourselves effectively from the food-borne bacteria that have always contaminated food and always will. Preventive action is the only solution.

This is one time that being right brings me no joy.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a George Orwellian move, has just announced that it has suddenly decided to put the herbicide atrazine through yet another regulatory wringer, despite having just completed a comprehensive, multi-year regulatory review of the safety of atrazine begun in 1994. Only three months ago the EPA announced that after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies, atrazine “is not likely to cause cancer in humans” and does not affect the reproductive development of frogs and other amphibians. Atrazine has been used safely for more than 50 years in the U.S. and has been upheld as safe by the World Health Organization and the governments of Canada, France, the UK and others.

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The timing suggests that politics is the overriding concern. Atrazine was already slated for a 2010 human health review, but no such headline impact has ever been found. The new team didn’t dare bet on finding a human health flaw now. Instead, they decided to re-do the just-completed review process, betting that they can produce enough new smoke to deregister atrazine on some lesser charge. Since the review process still requires a series of expert review panels, EPA needed to start immediately or risk losing their Obama chance.

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Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides, helping farmers control weeds while protecting topsoil from erosion via no-plow and other conservation cropping methods. Without herbicides, farmers must use plows and other bare-earth weed control methods that lead to far greater soil erosion and far more fossil fuel use. Atrazine is a critical tool in the no-plow revolution: it helps combat resistance to other weed killers, maintain high soil organic carbon levels in our fields (supposedly something the EPA promotes) and protects rivers and streams from sediment pollution (another environmental good). Economic studies show atrazine provides more than $2 billion in direct economic benefits to our nation, even beyond the benefits in soil sustainability and stream pollution prevention.

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So why should you care if farmers lose atrazine? Because it will mean higher food costs, more soil erosion, less sustainable farming, and more environmental degradation. It’ll mean putting more of our farming eggs in fewer baskets. As we’ve learned with the unwelcome but inevitable return of bed bugs to our major cities, needlessly eliminating pesticides from society’s toolbox leaves us more vulnerable to the scourges of nature.

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With world population still growing and overall food demand set to double over the next 40 years, we need all the farming tools we have (and more) just to keep our heads above the rising tide of farm product demand. We’re all in this struggle together and the farmer’s loss hits our environment and pocketbooks.

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The atrazine witch hunt is being driven primarily by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a powerful eco-activist group that simply won’t take no for an answer. Review after review by the EPA, starting in the 1980s, has found that atrazine poses no health risk to humans or other risk to wildlife. Yet the NRDC knows that actual evidence is simply unnecessary; all they need is enough concocted public fear to cow the EPA into reacting to the politics.

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They’ve done it before. Nearly twenty years ago, the NRDC perpetrated one of the biggest scams ever on the American public, claiming that a product called alar, used in growing apples, was the “most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply.” NRDC ranted that alar was a “cancer-causing agent used on food that the EPA knows is going to cause cancer for thousands of children.” Alar, it turns out, was far less a cancer risk than tap water or peanut butter, as the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel finally ruled.

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Why did NRDC perpetrate the fraud? According to boasts from the NRDC’s public relations firm, it was all an elaborate (and highly successful) fundraising scheme. When their lies were exposed—sadly too late to save mass parental anguish over supposedly poisonous apple juice or to save apple farmers tens of millions in market losses—the NRDC equivocated. “We never said there was an immediate danger,” they said as they laid blame on journalists who “muddled” their report and the public who “overreacted.”

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The NRDC is now trying to do to atrazine what they did to alar. Make no mistake, the NRDC (and current political operators within the EPA) will continue to go back to the scientific wishing well until they “frighten” the EPA into banning atrazine.  This time around, the herbicides makers and corn farmers aren’t backing down. Will we stand up with them for sound science, or allow the further politicization of our regulatory agencies?

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DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. Alex Avery is director of research and education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may email them at cgfi@hughes.net

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