Pesticide Woes

Almost every household in these villages put in potatoes, plant tomatoes, sow corn, and collect grapes to make their own wine. Long ago they discovered that to have good crops they needed to apply pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Every year, when the first potato weevil appears, or the first curl on the leaves of the vine, the owner goes to a feed and seed store to buy powders of whatever, mix them with water, and apply with a pulverizer, generally a manual one of fifteen liters that the applier carries on his back like a backpack. Exceptionally, the applier will wear a face mask. Not so many years ago it was always the men of the household who would do this task (though women have since taken it on), and they would possibly smoke a cigarette while they filled the pulverizer with water, or even while they applied the final product. The clothes they would wear for the rest of the day, and they might or might not wash their hands before eating an afternoon sandwich. The box and sealed plastic bag the powders had come in would then be thrown in the regular trash or burnt. 

This was obviously not an ideal situation. So the European Union decided to change it. But instead of promoting research on products that would harm the environment and the people as little as possible, they decided to clamp down on the distribution of the current poisons. Now anyone who plants a kitchen garden and decides to do something about the pests eating their tomatoes, peppers, or potatoes, has to attend a special course of twenty-five hours. In that course they are simply taught how to protect themselves and how to apply the product, which most already knew, and simple math to learn proportions, which most had already forgotten. At the end, they get a license that allows them to buy a certain quantity of phytosanitary products. They must afterwards return the empty containers to the store where they were bought. Otherwise they won't be allowed to buy any more. Those who have motorized pulverizers of over a hundred liters have to have them pass a technical inspection. If he doesn't, the owner can be fined for using the machine. 

The problems with this are various. The first is that many who use those products are older people who now have to go to class and pass an exam. Most of these never finished school and have no idea how to study. Others, such as my husband, work, and don't have the time to attend those classes. Faced with the impossibility of obtaining pesticides, many will simply give up their kitchen gardens and buy as little as possible at the greengrocer's. This measure favors the large, commercial farms and punishes the individual gardener, who plants because that's what he's always done, and because that way he spends less on food. Many fields have already been left fallow, and many more will join these. The last problem is that this measure doesn't take pesticides out of the food chain. It just regulates their use more than before. The large chemical companies never lose. They just redirect their merchandise.