LEISA's Farm

Small farmers and pesticide use in Ecuador

Posted by Mundie

In 2004, a BBC radio programme: Dying to Make a Living told about how potato farmers in Carchi, Ecuador were suffering from serious health problems associated with pesticide use. Many of the pesticides available in Carchi are rated as “highly toxic”. While use of these pesticides is actively promoted in Ecuador and other developing countries, they are greatly restricted in places like Europe and the United States.

Stephen Sherwood defended his PhD research last week at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, based on his ten years’ working with farmers in Carchi. In his thesis, he details his search to understand why farmers continue to use highly toxic pesticides even though they are harmful.

Carchi is considered to be one of the most productive farming regions in the Andes. Farmers there produce 40% of Ecuador’s potatoes in smallholdings that have become more and more intensified since the 1960s. Intensification methods such as use of pesticides have led to soil and biodiversity deteriorating, and productivity is now on the decline.

Sherwood found a conundrum: farmers all believed that they need pesticides in order to have good yields in their potato crops. However, they also saw that pest problems were increasing. At the same time, the majority of the rural people in the area were suffering from neurological damage and many were dying, because of pesticide poisoning - with the most toxic pesticides being responsible for 90 % of the worst health problems.

At first, Sherwood and his colleagues assumed that they needed to provide farmers and policy-makers with better information about the harmful effects of pesticides. He documents in detail their long journey to train farmers on alternatives to toxic pesticide use through Farmer Field Schools, as well as through meetings with industry and government agencies, public education campaigns, radio shows and reports.

 But all their efforts failed to get the government to stop promoting the use of (highly toxic) pesticides - and farmers kept going back to these cheap and easily available products as well, even though they knew about viable alternatives.

So, Sherwood found, information is not enough. Too many people benefit from pesticide sales, and therefore do not want to recognise or take responsibility for the problems. In fact, farmers were blamed for their improper use of pesticides. Government and pesticide companies preferred campaigns to promote the safe use of pesticides. Sherwood has found that such "SUP programmes" are ineffective – not only do they reach too few farmers, but they do not focus on the fundamental cause of the problem (high toxicity), focusing rather on managing the effects (ie, to decrease their exposure).

One of his study's conclusions is that farmers will only stop using highly toxic pesticides if the government imposes restrictions on their use - but the government will only do this if it is forced to, by international regulations and control measures.

Also see LEISA article from 2007: It's time to ban highly hazardous pesticides

Download Stephen Sherwood’s thesis: Learning from Carchi: Agricultural Modernisation and the Production of Decline

and now ... plant clinics reach the Netherlands!

posted by Karen

A local nursery and garden was holding an open day this weekend. My neighbour and her friend are keen allotment-holders, so in beautiful early summer sunshine we went along to see if we could get some inspiration and interesting seedlings for our gardens. We were not disappointed, finding lots of interesting herbs and fruits to buy and try out. They even had a section called "lost vegetables", selling seedlings of rare and underutilised vegetables.

 

But what really surprised me, especially after my blog post last week on how plant clinics are reaching Africa, was to find the very same thing, tucked away in a small nursery in the Netherlands - nothing less than a plant clinic, complete with two experts, microscope, a host of reference books and a queue of people looking for advice about what to do with their diseased plants.

Good ideas travel fast it seems!  

Global Plant Clinics now truly global

posted by Karen

I have been following reports in the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper about a livelihood project in Katine, Uganda. It intrigues me for various reasons, firstly because I spent quite some time in Uganda and still have friends living there. Secondly, I am curious about the idea of developing a whole sub-county of 25,000 people. How will it work? Is it sustainable? How much local involvement was there in the planning of it? and many more questions.

So I was interested, and I have to admit, pleased to see a recent post on the Katine website pages, about the "plant clinic" which has been set up in the local market (read the post here). Briefly, agricultural extension workers or specialists set up a small stall in a market or well-visited area, and farmers can bring diseased crops to them for advice. Also known as a "hospital for crops", I first heard of this initiative when we published an article about the Global Plant Clinic initiative in the LEISA Magazine in December 2007 (click here to read it). It talked about plant clinics in Bangladesh, Bolivia and Nicaragua. So to hear they have been taken up successfully in Uganda now is good news. We recently heard from people involved in promoting the plant clinics (CABI UK among others) that they are also spreading to Nepal. We hope to publish a follow-up article soon.

 Which takes me to another question ... what is the key to such an idea that can take off and work well in so many different contexts and cultures? If you know of other examples or have interesting insights, we'd like to hear from you for our upcoming magazine on scaling -up and sustaining the gains - tell us more in an email to: leisasfarm (at) gmail.com

Will EU pesticides ban push up biological treatment?

With the new EU pesticides legislation, alternative methods in crop protection are likely to find increased favour in the future. We may expect an increasing demand for biological controls and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) methods, according to Jack Shamash in an article on Developments in Biological Control* in Horticulture Week, Jan. 23, 2009.
Shamash reports about conditions, costs and planning of these methods and views recent research data and new techniques in relation to different crops.

Suggestions for further reads:

• LEISA Magazine Vol. 23:4 (Dec. 2007)  on Ecological Pest Management (EPM) - about the difficulties small scale farmers in different parts of the world still experience with regard to pest management, about the need for an ecological perspective and the necessity of knowledge building. ---You do know that all LEISA Magazine articles are readable online, don't you?
• Key elements of ecological pest management on the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education website

* Signing up to Horticulture Week is free.

European Parliament votes for ban on 20+ pesticides

After years of debate and lobbying by different parties, yesterday the European Parliament voted for a ban on at least 22 pesticides which cause cancer or damage to hormones. Some campaigners on the green side say the new laws do not go far enough. And there will still be arguments over exactly which specific products will be banned.
Read different points of view in this article by Dominic Hughes on BBC News.

Global Plant Clinic

In a previous (click) blogpost we told you about the Global Plant Clinic videos, made available on YouTube by Eric Boa.

The Global Plant Clinic (homepage: click here) provides plant health services and supports plant health clinics in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The clinic has a diagnostic service, which covers all plants and types of problems.
For an overview read the article on GPC in  LEISA Magazine's Ecological Pest Management issue (vol 23:4, December 2007). Co-author Eric Boa blogs on GPC on the BSPP Blog.