{"id":189169,"date":"2018-03-27T23:45:24","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T18:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=189169"},"modified":"2018-03-30T01:07:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T19:37:56","slug":"restore-fertilizers-lift-the-ban-on-the-pesticides-glyphosate-and-paraquat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/restore-fertilizers-lift-the-ban-on-the-pesticides-glyphosate-and-paraquat\/","title":{"rendered":"Restore Fertilizers & Lift The Ban On The Pesticides: Glyphosate and Paraquat"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Chandre Dharnawardana<\/a>\u00a0\u2013<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr. Chandre Dharmawardana<\/p><\/div>\n

Paraquate was an excellent\u00a0<\/span>herbicide which was banned by a previous government mainly because farmers who went bankrupt due to\u00a0 <\/span>government rice policies used paraquat\u00a0 <\/span>to commit\u00a0 <\/span>suicide! Gyphosate was the other popular herbicide\u00a0 <\/span>banned in 2015, ensuring that the farmer and even the wealthy tea planter should commit suicide. Pethiyagoda, a long-time doyen of the tea industry has resigned, possibly in total disgust. At last, the minster of agriculture, finally sensing disaster and bowing to scientific evidence on the safety of glyphoate has presented a cabinet paper to lift the ban on glyphosate. Paraquat too should be immediately re-approved with its availability restricted\u00a0 <\/span>to technically proficient companies who can be hired by individuals desiring to use paraquat.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a Professor of Chemistry and University President\u00a0<\/span>who in a small way\u00a0<\/span>pioneered environmental science and food technology in the 1970s at the J’pura university, and as a supporter of scientific agriculture, I wish the Minister success in re-approving not only glyphosate, but paraquat as well.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The tea industry has been loosing some 6 billion per annum, while its multiplier effect drives the loss \u00a0 <\/span>since 2015 close to 30 billion. Carefully crafted propaganda claiming a \u201cKapra Beetle\u201d further hurt the industry. Meanwhile, the\u00a0 <\/span>eco-pundits who got asbestos banned point to the tea monoculture and its soil, and call for closing the estates. Other\u00a0 <\/span>eco-pundits and masters of the Toxin-Free Nation claim that paddy is ecological unsustainable, using up water and eroding the soil and push to convert the paddy fields into \u201cnatural\u201d wet lands and marshes.\u00a0 <\/span>Rice and flour are\u00a0 <\/span>increasingly imported\u00a0 <\/span>by the government, while\u00a0<\/span>downgrading\u00a0<\/span>its fertilizer subsidy schemes. Farmers are told\u00a0 <\/span>to make their own \u201corganic fertilizer\u201d or buy the\u00a0<\/span>\u201cbio-film\u201d sponsored by the Presidential secretariat, but now alleged to be a scam.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The farmer has to control weeds and pests. Glyphosate<\/a> was banned at the behest of the JHU politicians who abandoned Rajapaksa. Venerable Ratana and followers and\u00a0 <\/span>God-Natha psychics had already committed the Rajapaksa government to\u00a0 <\/span>ban Glyphosate. The herbicide has a safe track record of over four\u00a0 <\/span>decades in all advanced farming countries, with some countries using almost a thousand times Sri Lanka’s\u00a0 <\/span>annual usage per hectare of agrochemicals and pesticides (world-bank data).\u00a0<\/span>Nevertheless, large amounts of fake \u201cresearch\u201d news against these pesticides reside in the internet.\u00a0 <\/span>Individuals selling their products claiming to \u201cdetoxify\u201d and \u201crejuvenate\u201d clients\u00a0 <\/span>sell\u00a0 <\/span>alternative diets\u00a0 <\/span>to \u201csave the earth, save the environment, and \u201cfight agro-business\u201d. Even the GMOA has fallen for this, and some medics\u00a0 <\/span>are undoubtedly avid readers of questionable Internet \u201cGurus\u201d like Dr. Mercola or Dr. Stephanie Seneff. The latter has spun theories \u201cproving the toxicity of glyphosate\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>and sells a program that guarantees a life span of 110 years (free of glyphosate!) if you adhere to it, for a fee.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Mercola spread the claim that CKDu is caused by a glyphosate-arsenic-hardwater complex that was hypothesized\u00a0 <\/span>by Dr. Jayasumana and\u00a0 <\/span>authored (in a little-known pay and publish\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cjournal\u201d) jointly with a \u201cmedium\u201d claiming psychic powers linking her to God Natha.\u00a0 <\/span>This substance imagined in 2014 has not been found by any one including Dr. Jayasumana who busies himself in electioneering.\u00a0 <\/span>But many militants of the\u00a0 <\/span>GMOA believe that Dr. Jayasumana and associates have \u201cproved\u201d that CKDu in the Rajarata is caused by this imagined glyphosate complex, although the WHO team who studied CKDu patients found no evidence for glyphosate in their biopsies. Even though glyphosate is absent from the arena of the crime, they still want it banned as a \u201cprecaution\u201d !<\/span><\/p>\n

The force that propelled\u00a0 <\/span>the ban is the public fear of \u201cchemicals\u201d that has been cleverly fanned\u00a0 <\/span>by the local elite who\u00a0 <\/span>ape the elite of California and Europe. The poor suffer their hunger while the rich search for \u201cclean food\u201d. Surely\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cyou cannot go wrong by eating clean food\u201d. This simple \u201cmotherhood and apple pie\u201d statement is linked to the claim that \u201cnatural\u201d food, unaffected by \u201cchemicals\u201d must be clean. This is then equated to \u201corganic food\u201d, while \u201corganic food\u201d is\u00a0 <\/span>a movement initiated by the proto-Nazi\u00a0 <\/span>Dr Rudolf Steiner who talked of a\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cspiritual and biodynamic\u201d foundation for food.\u00a0 <\/span>Steiner founded \u201cAnthroposophy\u201d, a sort of mystical hodge-podge\u00a0 <\/span>claiming that\u00a0 <\/span>the human race is \u201cevolving\u201d through the different races, with black people\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cat childhood\u201d, Asians \u201cdegenerate\u201d and white Europeans the most civilized. He envisaged a world where the population was limited to an elite with the lebensraum and resources to grow natural \u201cbiodynamic food\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>called\u00a0 <\/span>\u201corganic food\u201d. This movement linked nicely with the misguided Eugenics movement in pre-Nazi\u00a0 <\/span>Europe and became a successful\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cbio-foods\u201d business.<\/span><\/p>\n

In countries like Sri Lanka,\u00a0 <\/span>the elite \u201cinternationalist\u201d upper classes (who unconsciously equate themselves with the white masters of colonial times) and the nationalists resonate together on \u201corganic food\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>Nationalists claim that\u00a0 <\/span>\u201ctraditional agriculture\u201d made \u201cSri Lanka\u00a0 <\/span>the granary of the East\u201d and identify with \u201corganic food\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>Multinational food businesses with supermarket chains like \u201cWhole Foods\u201d capitalize on the public belief in\u00a0 <\/span>\u201corganic food\u201d. That only\u00a0 <\/span>about 2% of the world’s food supply is \u201corganic\u201d, and the\u00a0 <\/span>impossibility of bridging the remaining 98% are ignored. The\u00a0 <\/span>enormous success of insecticides like DDT in saving human lives, and in opening up previously inhabitable regions for habitation have been turned topsy-turvy by emphasizing\u00a0 <\/span>the dangers of excessive use.\u00a0 <\/span>The clarion call of Rachel Carson’s \u201cSilent Spring\u201d was\u00a0 <\/span>weaponized by the organic food movement, with baseless attacks on the Green Revolution which saved India from mass famine, in the nick of time. A Rudolf Steiner could lament that if not for the green revolution the world would have two billion fewer brown-skins.\u00a0 <\/span>Although industrial fertilizers and Urea came into being in the early part of the 20th century, these activists consider it\u00a0 <\/span>\u201ca Western plot\u201d to use up the excess Nitrogen explosives of the 2nd world war!<\/span><\/p>\n

These attacks of the elitist white supremacists found strange bedfellows with the anti-establishment left in attacking\u00a0 <\/span>giant agro-business. As many of these are based in USA and Europe, the attack on \u201cindustrial agriculture\u201d became a part of the cold war.\u00a0<\/span>Fake news snippets against glyphosate are routinely posted by Russian agencies when ever Glyphosate comes for review by the EU parliament. Such news gets circulated on the internet by unsuspecting \u201cnatural foods\u201d zealots. Even today, when Glyphosate was mentioned in the Sri Lankan parliament, Mr. Dinesh Gunawardena, a scion of Sri Lanka’s Communist party unhesitatingly linked it with American capitalism, while Ven. Ratana claimed that \u201ca man from America\u201d has come to Sri Lanka to agitate against the glyphosate ban imposed by Sri Lanka in 2015. Ironically, President Sirisena’s victory is also allegedly a triumph of American machinations in the murky waters of Sri Lankan politics!<\/span><\/p>\n

Given this political backdrop, the ban on glyphosate was effectively based on pseudo-science and political propaganda. Venerable Ratana became a credulous victim of the God Natha\u00a0 <\/span>group and\u00a0 <\/span>campaigned that\u00a0 <\/span>fertilizers were laced with arsenic and cadmium. They took samples abroad for analysis but did not do elementary arithmetic to estimate how the \u201ctoxins\u201d get diluted in the soil.\u00a0 <\/span>Yellow-robed \u00a0 <\/span>demonstrators at the Fort railway station\u00a0 <\/span>took the message to the country. A canard claimed that\u00a0 <\/span>glyphosate sold to \u201cthird-world countries\u201d are \u201csubstandard\u201d. Prophets of doom came on television falsely claiming affiliations with the London University, UK and predicted Sri Lanka’s toxification from cadmium due to agrochemical use. Gunadasa Amarasekra, Ven. Ben Nalaka\u00a0 <\/span>and other\u00a0 <\/span>nationalists needed no \u201cfacts or evidence\u201d to support banning pesticides and calling for\u00a0 <\/span>compost instead of\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cfertilizers laced with toxins\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>Peer-reviewed science is lame against such forces.<\/span><\/p>\n

In reality, the fertilizer standards of\u00a0 <\/span>Sri Lanka are at least an order of magnitude stiffer\u00a0 <\/span>than those of most countries. Repeated analyses of the soil, water and food\u00a0 <\/span>show that Lankan rice is quite safe to eat, and that the waters of Rajarata rivers and tanks are safe to drink. \u00a0 <\/span>The latest study was\u00a0 <\/span>by the J’pura University Professor Kamani Wanigasuriya and\u00a0 <\/span>the University of North Carolina. Those who get CKDu drink water stagnating in their private wells. Laboratory mice fed such water also get kidney disease. However,\u00a0 <\/span>in the short term it is politically hip to attack Monsanto, claim a land\u00a0 <\/span>full of toxins, demand \u00a0 <\/span>closing \u201cunsustainable\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>tea and paddy plantations, get to\u00a0 <\/span>import rice,\u00a0 <\/span>tea, etc., \u00a0 <\/span>and\u00a0 <\/span>collect\u00a0 <\/span>the commissions<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":171829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\nRestore Fertilizers & Lift The Ban On The Pesticides: Glyphosate and Paraquat - Colombo Telegraph<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/restore-fertilizers-lift-the-ban-on-the-pesticides-glyphosate-and-paraquat\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Restore Fertilizers & Lift The Ban On The Pesticides: Glyphosate and Paraquat - 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