The Rural Voice, 1991-11, Page 14Martin Mills Inc.
Lucknow Division
COMPLETE LINE
OF ANIMAL FEED AND
VETERINARY SUPPLIES
HOG — BROILER — LAYER
TURKEY — BEEF- — DAIRY
VEAL — FISH -- PST FOODS
Martin Mills Inc.
Lucknow Division
Lucknow
519-528-3000
Or
1-800-265-3006
10 THE RURAL VOICE
CUTTING THE HYPE:
WHAT'S THE REAL RISK?
Robert Mercer is editor of the
Broad water Market Letter, a weekly
commodity and policy advisory letter
from Goodwood, Ontario LOC IAO.
Don't let your visitors from the
city drink that first cup of coffee with-
out telling them it has 75 times more
naturally occurring carcinogens than
all the manmade pesticides in a nor-
mal daily diet. The average peanut
butter sandwich poses a natural hazard
75 to 200 times greater than ethylene
dibromide, a fumigant that was
banned in the early 1980s.
Just in case your ecological vegeta-
rian friends get upset over your con-
cern for their health, quote the work
from the University of California,
which found of 375 synthetic chemi-
cals screened on rats and mice, half
are suspected of causing cancer. At
the same time, of 52 "natural pesti-
cides," chemicals which plants use to
fight off pests, half were. Bund to fail
the same test. Nature is Clot kind to us.
The question remains, however, are
naturally occurring carcinogens any
better or worse than synthetic ones?
Once again, the currently estimated
risk from consuming pesticides in a
typical diet is 100 times less than the
risk from naturally occurring carcino-
gens in raw mushrooms.
It would certainly be nice to have
no risk, but life is not risk free. There
arc risks and there are benefits. There
is risk in driving a car; that's why we
carry insurance. Anything is toxic in
high quantities. For instance, coffee,
tea, and cola drinkers consume enough
caffeine in three months to kill them if
it were all consumed in one day. It's
the size of the dose that really counts.
Consumers often get all worked up
about measurements of one part per
million (lppm). That's 32 seconds in
any one year. One part per billion
(Ippb) is one cent in $10 million dol-
lars. I'd call that pretty safe.
There's always room for improve-
ment, but without crop protection
chemicals, it is estimated yields would
drop 30 per cent. To recoup that loss,
more land would have to be brought
into cultivation. This would be erod-
ible land, and the ecology could be
badly changed.
Use of crop protection chemicals is
being reduced — their cost alone dic-
tates a very conservative approach to
their use, and methods of application
have become far more accurate and
time specific. But to ban them out-
right is cause for alarm by farmers and
consumers. Crop failures, starvation,
and far higher food prices could be an
immediate result.
Crop chemicals are easy targets for
environmental activists. They are
chemicals and they are manufactured.
Seldom do people talk of the steps the
industry has taken to be environment-
ally friendly. The industry is not all
bad. It is, in fact, proactive in trying
to reduce packaging. (The manufac-
turers' association has a guideline of
50 per cent reduction by 1995.)
It has also worked with govern-
ment on setting out new guidelines for
the warehousing of agri-chemicals that
better protect the environment and the
workers. Once again, the program
calls for a phase-in of the facilities that
must be used by 1995. The more
stringent standards call for contain-
ment of water and run-off, drainage
that is not connected to local systems,
and tighter fire resistant buildings.
Finally, in this environmentally
aware era, the industry is moving to
dry formulation wherever possible.
It's far easier to contain and clean up
should there be a spill, it allows much
smaller packets to treat much larger
acreages, and there is also the
advantage of using soluble packaging .
Try to take an opportunity to tell
your friends about the benefits of crop
chemicals. There are disadvantages,
there are risk-, but there are benefits.
Perception is not reality. Remember,
pesticides don't even come close to
being included in the top 25 leading
causes of death.°