June 14, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan India's industrial pest NEW DELHI - "Think Green", says a government advertisement in major Indian newspapers, exhorting people in the national capital to collect and plant tree saplings distributed free of cost. The same advertisement also encourages people to protect the saplings from pests with benzene hexachlorite (BHC), forgetting that the pesticide has long been banned by the government itself. For years, environmentalists have tried to shake officialdom and citizenry out of a blase attitude toward a range of deadly chemicals produced by India's pesticides industry, the second largest in Asia after Japan's. Activists are now urging the Indian government to quickly sign a United Nations treaty adopted on May 23 in Stockholm, which calls for the elimination from world chemistry of 12 of the worst offending Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP)s. Eight of these are pesticides. "India should hasten the process of signing the treaty and ratifying it to benefit from its provisions of clean processes, material, products and capacity building for ultimate chemical safety and cleaner development," says Ravi Agarwal of Srishti (Creation) a New Delhi-based environmental group. Additionally, India faces the danger of turning into the dumping ground for the world's dirty industries if it continues to delay signing the Stockholm treaty, Agarwal says. On its own, India has officially banned nine of the 12 POPs covered by the Stockholm convention, which has already been signed by 91 countries and the European Commission. Of the remaining three, one is the notorious pesticide DDT, while the others are industrial chemicals and unintended by-products. But as the newspaper advertisement shows, actual implementation of any ban is a difficult proposition, starting with the fact that basic information on stockpiles of DDT and other obsolete pesticides is not officially available in India. India and China remain the only countries in the world which manufacture and promote the use of DDT, whose effectiveness has been steadily eroding through resistance to it. Although India has completely banned the use of DDT in agriculture, farmers take advantage of the fact that the ban on the cheap pesticide does not extend to anti-mosquito spraying in malaria control programs. The result of its continued use is DDT levels in mother's breast milk in India is among the highest in the world. The capital city Delhi is the worst affected area, according to a survey carried out by the environmental group Toxics Link. Environmentally, the large-scale use of DDT has been traced to the sudden depletion of vultures from the Indian skies, forcing the Parsis, an ethnic community, to suspend "sky burials" in which the corpses of their dead are left to be eaten by vultures. Not only does India manufacture and use vast quantities of DDT - it is also a major exporter of the chemical, which is in high demand by farmers in the neighboring countries of Nepal and Bangladesh. Investigations carried out by Greenpeace International in Nepal and Bangladesh show that much of the stock there is substandard and apparently entered those countries through clandestine formulators who worked on old pesticides released into the Indian market. A 1998 report by Greenpeace links "Indian companies to exports of POP pesticides including Aldrin, Chlordane, Heptachlor, DDT and BHC to a number of countries, including those nations where their use has long since been banned". According to records available with Toxics Link , between April 1998 and January 1999 India exported 212,847 kilograms of DDT, and the importers included Japan, New Zealand, Italy and Australia. Says an executive at the government-owned Hindustan Pesticides Limited, which boasts of the world's biggest DDT manufacturing faculty, "We have permission to manufacture 10,000 metric tons of DDT annually, but since this country can use only half that amount the rest is exported." Equally distressing to critics is the case of Aldrin, a POP whose use has been banned for use, manufacture, import and export since 1996 but continues to be readily available through retail outlets across the country. Agarwal says Aldrin continues not only to be locally available, but also exported to countries where it is legally banned as well. More than 200,000 metric tonnes of Aldrin was exported from India between 1998 and 1999. "This not only illustrates the loopholes in the pesticides legislation in the country but also the apathy of enforcement agencies," says Madhumita Datta, campaigner for Toxics Link. According to her, the lack of a clear pesticides policy is giving ride to a trend where manufacturers are encouraged to graduate to deadlier pesticides which may have longer and graver human health and environmental effects, not only in India but also in importing countries. Aldrin, for example, is steadily being replaced by Chloropyrifos, a chemical originally meant for termite control but which is now extensively used on crops such as paddy, maize, wheat and vegetables. India now consumes 3,000 tons of Chloropyrifos a year and exports another 1,000 tons to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Australia, Saudi Arabia and Argentina. This is in spite of the fact that it has been phased out in the United States and Europe for its high toxicity and endocrine disrupting properties. (Inter Press Service)

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