New Agrarian Revolution

The Dilemma Posed by the Use of Toxic Chemicals on the Land

In the year 1941 Switzerland, land-locked in its traditional neutrality between the warring nations of Europe, was hit by a plague of Colorado beetle. The Swiss authorities, fearing a serious food loss as a result of the depredations of this pest, which would be practically irreplaceable in war-time Europe, pressed their chemists to find a weapon with which to fight the dreaded beetle.

Colorado potato beetle

The research department of R. J. Geigy, a well-known Basle firm, were experimenting with a moth-proofing powder. They found that when they dusted the Colorado beetles with this powder they died as if by magic. The Swiss crops were saved and further experiments showed that the powder had the same lethal effect upon such insect: pests as lice and fleas and the innumerable predators which infest agricultural crops.

This was a discovery of enormous importance which has affected the lives of every one of us, changed the face of the countryside and altered the economics of agriculture.

Its importance was not lost upon the Swiss, who deliberately leaked it to the British and American legations. Thereupon an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger operation ensued to get a consign­ment of the precious white powder to England. The underground route across Europe, followed by escaping P.O.W.s and secret agents, was used, and the operation was carried out in conditions of the greatest secrecy and security.

And so DDT was given to the world. It immediately became a high-priority war product, for its vital use in the field of battle was immediately obvious.

Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane had been discovered in 1939 by a Swiss scientist, Paul Muller, and it was from the first a sensa­tional success in the slaughter of insect pests, such as fleas and flies. Its effect is the complete disintegration of the insect’s nervous system. When administered to animals DDT brought about a rather grim death, preceded by convulsions and spasms.

Chemical structure of DDT

There was no reason to suppose that human beings could not be poisoned in a similarly unpleasant and lethal manner by DDT, but in its use as an insecticide its toxic qualities were diluted so that human beings were apparently unaffected by it. It is also a fact that small quantities of deadly poison are always finding their way into our bodies by one means or another, often without apparent damage, and are sometimes included in medical preparations. So it was hoped, and expected, that we would acclimatize ourselves to the poison of DDT.

DDT’s first great success was in 1943 when it destroyed the infected lice in a serious outbreak of typhus at Naples. In three weeks DDT conquered the plague. Troops with DDT-impregnated clothes were effectively screened against the disease. Two years later the sad survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps were cleansed with the magic chemical without apparent ill-effects. Later DDT destroyed the malaria-bearing mosquito in India.

And so in the 1940s DDT made its dramatic and sensational entry upon the scene of man’s struggle with the inimical forces of nature. It seemed at first that some magic had been discovered by which he could at last conquer that part of nature he least understood, the insects which destroyed his food and spread disease.

Other chemicals were brought into the battle, aldrin, dieldrin and heptachlor, highly poisonous chlorines, and BCH was used when mosquitoes and houseflies developed a biological immunity to DDT.

Thus dawned the era of toxic chemicals. At first it seemed that it brought a new age in which the natural hazards attending food production had been overcome, and that the perils of insect-borne disease belonged to the past. The growing food crops were sprayed with toxic chemicals which destroyed the pests and brought about a marked increase in production; and the wonders of this new chemical agriculture were such that the produce could be eaten with complete safety by human beings. After spraying, crops had to be left for a stated time before being put on the market, in order that the effect of the poison which had killed the pests might wear off.

Malaria was reckoned to be a thing of the past. Household flies were almost curiosities.

Only a few warning voices were raised as the world entered this synthetic paradise. Those who doubted the wisdom of upsetting the balance of nature were dismissed in the same way as were those a half-century earlier who condemned aviation as being contrary to nature. Naturalists who protested at the slaughter of wild life which resulted from the chemists’ invasion of the land were told that with rising populations the expanding of man’s food production was more important than wild life. Entomologists who reported that certain insects were developing biological resistance to the agricultural poisons were answered by the introduction of new chemical marvels of destruction against which nature had not yet discovered an antidote. But nature was not long in producing both a typhus louse and a malaria-bearing mosquito which were immune to DDT.

The feeling of disquiet about this war against nature increased as the battle of the chemical spray opened up on all fronts, including the home and the back garden. The fact that it received official blessing on account of the undoubted increase in agricultural yield which it produced lulled many people into the belief that the chemists must be right and that the promised land, in some respects at least, was here.

But it was only the people in the towns who thought this. The countryman knew differently. He knew the strange, even hideous things that were happening on the edges of the cornfields, in the hedgerows and in the thickets, of animals dying strange and terrible deaths, of blinded, tottering foxes unafraid of man or even of the hounds, of acres of blighted wild flowers, and of the toxic slaughter of birds on an alarming scale. The countryman did not like this strange and frightening new world which the era of the chemist had brought.

The blind acceptance with which the new chemical paradise had been received was giving way to serious questioning. At first the magic wand of chemical agriculture was eagerly grasped, for with it the farmer was able to control pests and weeds in a manner hitherto undreamed of. They thought that at last they had the complete answer to the primeval curse on the soil in the third chapter of Genesis.

Some caution, however, had been expressed at first. A 1946 newspaper picture of a tractor spraying corn with DDT draws attention to the high seats to keep the operators above the milt. Right from the start precautions were advised for the protection of the crews of toxic-spraying aircraft. Even the semi-informed knew that we were playing with a deadly poison, and that it was only because we had diluted it so much that we too did not join the insects and the foxes in their curious little dances of death.

The strange story of the poisoned foxes happened in 1959 (So, 33 when farmers began to find foxes which did not run away when they approached them. They seemed to have lost their fear of humans. A closer look showed that these creatures were nearly blind and suffered from periodical convulsions.

The fox-hunting season had just started and many a Midland hunt was dismayed to find that the foxes would not run from the hounds and give them a chase. Instead they just waited blindly and helplessly to be killed. No less than 1,300 foxes were reported dead or dying in this mysterious way.

Various experiments were made, and there was no doubt at all in the minds of the scientists that these foxes, together with a large variety of other lowly creatures of the countryside, were one of the unplanned and unexpected side-effects of the application of certain toxic seed-dressings. These seeds had had a lethal effect upon pigeons which after eating them had died in convulsions, and whose tainted bodies had subsequently been eaten by the foxes.

The biologists were unable to prove their point for the simple reason that the chemists had produced a poison the side-effects of which were not fully understood by science. A disturbed government issued a report in 1961 which blamed this countryside slaughter on to lack of research on the part of the agricultural chemists.

John Coleman-Cooke, writing about this subject in a remarkable and disturbing book, The Harvest that Kills, it says: “One single grisly but inescapable fact emerges from the era of the great Fox Death. It is that a chemical designed for the legitimate protection of crops against pests can act in such a way in more than a thousand instances without anyone knowing what to do. The chemical which had called for immense time and the ingenuity of some of the finest chemical brains, had out-manoeuvred, as it were, its creators. It had hidden qualities which when coming into contact with processes in living creatures, defied detection.” He points out that many toxic chemicals “ultimately produce serious side-effects which do not show up either in laboratory tests or field trials.”

An even more sensational instance of how the agricultural chemists are playing with fire was the extraordinary disaster at Smarden in Kent in 1963, when a quantity of fluorocetamide “escaped” as the result of an industrial accident. Fluorocetamide is a well-known and effective rat-poison and is used in the making of insecticides.

At Smarden animals died wholesale, and a two-acre stretch of land was so badly contaminated that it became a matter of urgent government concern. Experts thought that these two acres of land were impregnated with poison to a depth of eighteen feet, No one knew how to cleanse the land of the unmanageable poison. It was beyond man’s control and completely out of hand. Man could only think of dumping it in that convenient depository the sea, and many hundreds of tons of the contaminated soil were bound in concrete and dumped in some unnamed spot in the middle of the Atlantic.

The poisoned land at Smarden still remains an intractable problem. The latest proposal is to seal it off for ever in a gigantic concrete box so that its deadly poison will be contained, for nobody knows how long it will last in the soil, how deeply it will penetrate, and what its long-term effects will be.

“Having created the monster,” says John Coleman-Cooke, “the chemists knew of no means to destroy it.”
The question which was being asked by the unfortunate residents in the neighbourhood of Smarden, is the question which surely we should all be asking ourselves.

What effect is this contamination of the countryside going to have upon man? Quantities of water from the contaminated land at Smarden were dumped into the sea at Dymchurch, and people along the South Coast not unwisely refused to buy locally caught fish in case it was contaminated with fluorocetamide. No one in the neighbourhood would eat locally shot pheasants or rabbits for the same reason.

DDT can affect man in the same way as it affects animals and insects. It is just a question of how strong the dose is. It affects the nerves and produces a kind of epilepsy. Scientists suspect that it may have long-term genetic effects. The World Health Organization sounded a warning about toxic chemicals in 1963 and referred to “serious long-term genetic and ecological problems”. The WHO investigated many accidents to humans who had been in contact with these toxic chemicals in various parts of the world. People had suffered injuries to their nervous systems. Their eyes had been affected and intestinal trouble had been caused.

In fatal cases (cautiously referred to in the report) the poison affects the whole body, heart, respiration, stomach and bowels, and there is a disintegration of the nervous system. In fact a man can be affected in the same way as were the foxes by these clouds of poison-gas which are sprayed upon the vegetables we eat.

People who undertake the spraying operations can fall victims to the poisons they are using, and have to take special precautions. When grain is sprayed before planting, the men who do it have to wear face-masks. When this grain is spilt on the ground, as it always is during sowing, it kills all the wild life who eat it. Cases are on record, both in England and elsewhere, of children being severely poisoned from playing with empty cans of insecticide. Spray-men in South America have been poisoned by their work, and at least one fatality has been reported.

DDT and similar poisons in our bodies can have side-effects we do not suspect. The poison can get into the system and cause fatal complications in a comparatively mild disease like influenza. A man who spent several days spraying his orchard with a toxic chemical, later collapsed with acute cardiac failure, the cause of which the pathologist was unable to determine, and so an open verdict was returned at the inquest.

You don’t have to be in contact with the spraying of the chemicals to become affected by them. DDT has been found in human milk and it is thought that pregnant women are liable to be affected by it and can pass it on to the unborn child with results which can only be guessed.

The residues of pesticides in the food we eat is a problem which has been investigated by various official committees, and several attempts have been made to calm the public’s fears.

By 1964 it was reckoned that over half the total acreage under crops was being chemically treated. Many of the staple foodstuffs bought in the shops contain hidden toxic residues. Traces of these chemicals have been found not only in vegetables, but also in meat, butter and milk. DDT is lavishly used in food factories, storage premises and slaughter-houses. This ubiquitous poison has in fact been found all over the world. So widespread has DDT become in natural life-cycles that it has now been found in the bodies of penguins and seals in the Antarctic.

Since 1943 this white powder, which came out of Switzerland as a life saver, has, with other similar chemicals, become a worldwide flood which is upsetting the balance of nature, poisoning the countryside, slaughtering animal and insect life, destroying flowers and other inedible growths, and which is now seeping into our own bodies, the effect of which we cannot know. Certainly the chemists and the scientists cannot tell us, because they do not themselves know. They are playing with a force they are unable to control and only partly comprehend, as was clearly seen at Smarden.

It is a dangerous and ignorant presumption to imagine that what will harm and kill animals will not harm us.”The authorities have been dismayed”, says Colcman-Cooke, “to find that the chemicals which promised such a Golden Age British farming are poisoning the whole environment.”