Why Is The USA So Bad At Organic?
A week ago I read that California is banning a chemical pesticide (chlorpyrifos) that is used in grape growing (among other crops) and is linked to brain damage in children. The real bummer is that this is the second article that I've read about a pesticide being banned for its horrible effects in less than 3 months. If we keep up this average, in just over a year we will have banned as many chemical pesticides as there are organic pesticides in total.
Want to know what's crazier than that? This article stated that the ban would happen "under an agreement reached with the manufacturer." That is, this ban of chlorpyrifos was only able to happen because the pesticide's manufacturer volunteered to do so. Because - guess what? - the federal government has taken no steps to ban chlorpyrifos.
The poison maker could have said no. Then, if California or anyone else tried to ban their product, they could have fought it in the courts. A court fight would cost large sums of taxpayer money, and would allow them to continue to sell their product for years while they dragged out the judicial process - barring some kind of injunction by a higher authority, unlikely to happen when the chemical is still approved federally.
In other words, the producer of this poison did a cost benefit analysis that looked like this:
Lawsuits by parents of brain-damaged children
+
Cost to fight ban of our poison in court vs State of CA
-
Profit generated by sale of our poison
=
Loss of $$
Conclusion: volunteer to allow ban of our poison
The problem with this math (other than the glaringly obvious ethical one) is that it only ends up with a conclusion to allow the ban of the poison if the ending sum is negative.
As it turns out, this is why the USA lags far behind China, Brazil, and the EU in banning harmful chemicals. In fact, the USA has not banned a harmful chemical in years, and only relies on voluntary withdraw by the manufacture to remove them from the market. Because of this, dozens of pesticides that are known globally to be "extremely" or "highly" hazardous, and that have been banned, or never approved, by all the other major agricultural producers on earth, are still approved and being used and sprayed regularly on crops in the USA.
I'm not sure how to look at that other than this: in order to protect the rights of corporations, the USA is literally sacrificing its children on the altar of capitalism.
The awful math above only works out in favor of humans if sales of the pesticide have already been decreasing for years. (Here's a great article with maps showing the decline of chlorpyrifos use in California.) If sales are strong, or god-forbid growing, then we will not see that particular poison banned. What we will see is an increase of instances of cancer, birth defects, brain damage, and other maladies.
This is where I see a spark of hope, though, believe it or not. The main issue keeping these pesticides in use is ignorance. Fewer and fewer people work on farms, or we might be more familiar with these chemicals. We are separated from the land where our food is grown, and so we don't know what's being sprayed on it. But we eat it.
If enough us care enough about what we consume, regardless of whether we know anything about agriculture, we can make one simple choice that could eliminate the market for these poisonous chemicals and enable them to be withdrawn from our environment:
Buy organically (& biodynamically) grown food (& wine) products.
How we spend our dollars is the most potent form of voting that US citizens have. You may feel that your vote for president doesn't matter, but you should never feel that way about the way you spend your money. We may not be able to easily change the equation that is used, but we can help ensure that the calculation results in a negative sum. By eliminating the financial support for "conventional" viticulture and agriculture, you eliminate the incentives for poison makers to continue to make poison.
Of course, in organic and biodynamic viticulture and agriculture, there would be no need to ban chlorpyrifos or any of the other dozens of terrible chemicals that get sprayed on grapes and food - because they never would have been allowed to be used in the first place.
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