Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
gardens to its coasts lined with coconut palms, dominate promotional
posters and videos for India.
“Don't be fooled,” warned Sugathakumari, an environmental activist
born and raised in Kerala. “You can't even drink our coconut water without
geting sick.” She did not see a mythical landscape of spices and coconut
palms. Instead, when she looked at the state's landscape, she saw mono-
crops of pineapples, rubber, and other cash crops, all regularly sprayed
with the pesticides furadan and endosulfan, two poisonous chemicals
leaching into the watersheds.2 Promotional images of the state for travel
and tourism belied how its greenery was produced.
It was the year 2010. The Kerala Forest Research Institute had just re-
leased a study documenting that the fingernails of pineapple pickers in
Kerala were falling off after they had been exposed to an unknown cock-
tail of chemical pesticides. This was not an unusual story, Sugathakumari
emphasized to an audience gathered for the 2010 Indian Biodiversity Con-
ference in the capital of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. She reminded the
crowd that, earlier in that same decade, several children in a northern agri-
cultural district of the state had been born with severe physical deformities
after their parents had been exposed to endosulfan, a harmful chemical
classified as a persistent organic pollutant by the scientific community, be-
cause of its ability to linger in the environment for years. For over a quar-
ter of a century, these agrarian communities had been repeatedly sprayed
aerially with the chemical to control pests on nearby cashew plantations.
Kerala had become a toxic place: its lush greenery was now drenched in
poisonous pesticides, bad for human health and the environment.
Sugathakumari was one of the keynote speakers at the 2010 conference,
which had atracted environmentalists, students, government oicials,
and farmers from throughout the state to share research and news about
environmental issues. W hile conversations and panel discussions were
often somber, in response to recent news stories about pesticide poison-
ings and agriculture's threats to biodiversity, another news item cheered
up the gathered people and dominated the speeches: Kerala's recently
issued organic farming policy. Internationally renowned environmen-
tal activist Vandana Shiva was so impressed with the state's policy that
she spoke of it at length at the closing ceremony. “Kerala is and can be a
