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Currently the world uses 22.5% of insecticides and 10% of all pesticides in non organic cotton production, spread over 2.5% of the worlds agricultural land. Cotton is big business, making non organic cotton production one of the largest and most damaging contributing factors to global warming, serious health problems for farm and factory workers, alongside land, water and wildlife contamination.
Even in the regulated US, 7 of the 15 most used chemicals are ‘possible’, ‘likely’, ‘probable’ or ‘known’ carcinogens. The world cost of pesticide use is over $30 billion dollars. In Africa this equates to 40-60% of production costs and no regulation of potential, or known serious health risk chemicals, although serious ill health is rife amongst workers.
Psychological health is affected. As the cost of production using pesticides mounts and the potential failure of crops increases The heavy reliance on one particular type of eradication, leaves the crop open to other prey, the farmers, who are generally poor, suffer badly if a crop fails. in 1999, 500 cotton farmers committed suicide in the space of two months in the province of Andhra Pradesh,India purely as a result of debt to the pesticide companies, which cannot be repaid when crops fail.
Much the same can be said for other cotton producing areas such as Brazil, China, India.
New technology and science offer positive improvements in all areas of manufacturing, not least, in cotton production, and, by introducing the idea of innovative technology to these areas, farmers can grow, safely, economically (pesticides are not cheap) and abundantly, by allowing the soil to be nourished rather than depleted....
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