Wednesday, July 28, 2010

A tsunami of pesticides

The Asian tsunami of 2004 is said to have killed over 200 000 people, but as many people are killed every year through pesticides, according to this article.

ZCommunications | The Killing Fields Of Multi-National Corporations by Vandana Shiva | ZSpace:
The Bhopal gas tragedy was the worst industrial disaster in human history. Twenty-five thousand people died, 500,000 were injured, and the injustice done to the victims of Bhopal over the past 25 years will go down as the worst case of jurisprudence ever.



The gas leak in Bhopal in December 1984 was from the Union Carbide pesticide plant which manufactured 'carabaryl' (trade name 'sevin') - a pesticide used mostly in cotton plants. It was, in fact, because of the Bhopal gas tragedy and the tragedy of extremist violence in Punjab that I woke up to the fact that agriculture had become a war zone. Pesticides are war chemicals that kill - every year 220,000 people are killed by pesticides worldwide.

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