Poison Spring (17 page)

The testimony against neonicotinoids was fast and furious. “The honeybee industry is very concerned since the EPA has failed to adequately address our comments about realistic risk to pollinators posed by sulfoxaflor,” said George Hansen, president of the board of the American Beekeeping Federation. “The EPA continues to use flawed and outdated assessments of long-term and sublethal damage to honey bees.”

“The sun is now rising on a day where pollinators are no longer plentiful,” said Rick Smith, beekeeper and farmer. “They require protection three hundred sixty-five days a year in order to be abundant at the critical moment their pollination service is required by the plant. EPA’s assessment process has chosen not to use long-established and accepted published information concerning pollinator foraging habits in the Environment Hazards Section of the sulfoxaflor label.”
36

Europeans, too, have begun taking on their corporations and government regulators over the bee crisis. The neonicotinoids are just another version of DDT, except more insidious and toxic, writes the British environmental author George Monbiot. Neonicotinoids are “ripping the natural world apart.” Just as the producers of DDT claimed innocence for their golden spray, the manufacturers of neonicotinoids claim their products are harmless to all life save the target insects. “[W]e have gone into it blind,” Monbiot writes. “Our governments have approved their use without the faintest idea of what the consequences are likely to be. The UK is collaborating in peddling the corporate line that neonicotinoid pesticides are safe to use—they are anything but.” Governments that “should be defending the natural world have conspired with the manufacturers of wide-spectrum biocides to permit levels of destruction which we can only guess. In doing so they appear to be engineering another silent spring.”
37

Chapter 6

Agricultural Warfare

Dr.
Mohamed
Abou-Donia was waiting for me at the Raleigh-Durham airport. It was an early September morning in 1983, and I had taken the day off from Washington to visit Dr. Abou-Donia at Duke University, where he was a professor of pharmacology. An Egyptian-born American expert in neuropharmacology, Dr. Abou-Donia gave me a tour of his laboratory, where for several years he had doggedly investigated the impact of pesticides on the nerves and brains of animals and people.

I wanted to meet Dr. Abou-Donia because I knew from his research papers that he was not a typical scientist; indeed, his research had caused tremendous concern and anger among EPA staff. And I had a hunch that the research Dr. Abou-Donia had published would offer insight into something much larger: the structure, behavior, and effects of organophosphate chemicals used both in chemical warfare and on the American farm.

Dr. Abou-Donia is one of eight children, the son of a textile merchant in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, Egypt. In the 1950s, he remembers, his childhood neighborhood was full of Greeks who were forced to flee Gamal Abdel Nasser’s fervent nationalism. Dr. Abou-Donia received an undergraduate degree in the chemistry of pesticides in Alexandria in 1961, then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate in pharmacology, specializing in the chemistry of drugs and poisons.

His training complete, and newly married to an American wife, Dr. Abou-Donia returned to Alexandria, where he took a position in the department of plant protection in the college of agriculture of Alexandria University. Soon, however, he began to feel oppressed by the stifling educational and social conditions of his country. He was not merely a good scientist, but an honest man. This proved to be his undoing.

In the summer of 1971, some thirteen hundred water buffaloes dropped dead near cotton fields in the Nile delta that had been sprayed by leptophos, a highly profitable compound manufactured by Velsicol.

When the Egyptian government asked Dr. Abou-Donia and several other scientists to look into the tragedy, the scientists began by feeding experimental buffaloes crops contaminated with small amounts of the suspected poisons.

It quickly became clear that for the experimental buffaloes, leptophos caused paralysis and death. Yet—in a scene that has become all too familiar in the United States—the scientists working with Dr. Abou-Donia tried to sabotage the findings. Then the Egyptian minister of agriculture interrupted the experiment and sequestered the results. Because the university where he worked would not fund research that had been banned by the agriculture minister, Dr. Abou-Donia suddenly found himself on his own—all because he had done honest science.

The political strong-arming of his research made a deep impression on the young Dr. Abou-Donia. Outside his own circle of colleagues, he began noticing a strange parade of scientists and government bureaucrats arriving at Alexandria’s luxurious Hilton Hotel to break bread with the multinational corporations selling pesticides to Egypt and the rest of the world.

His research on water buffaloes stymied, Abou-Donia decided to look into the effect of leptophos on chickens instead.

Once again, he found that the nerve agent caused irreversible (and lethal) damage to the experimental animals. Less than two weeks after the experiment began, young chickens rapidly began to lose weight and feathers and had great difficulty standing upright. A loss of muscular coordination (known as ataxia) caused swift paralysis and death from respiratory failure. Like the buffaloes before them, the birds were suffocating because their lungs failed.

Even before Dr. Abou-Donia published his warning about leptophos, news of the spray’s destructive power had crossed the desks of EPA staff. Agency chemists Gunter Zweig and Donna Kuroda were particularly alarmed by what they had heard from Wendell Kilgore, a University of California professor who had been in Alexandria in 1972 and had learned about the plight of the water buffaloes and the obstruction of Dr. Abou-Donia’s work.

Kuroda had also spoken to Robert Metcalf, an internationally renowned entomologist from the University of Illinois, who told her to do everything she could to keep leptophos off America’s dinner table. Zweig then urged his senior colleagues to reject Velsicol’s application for spraying leptophos on lettuce and tomato crops.

Not long afterward, Ronald Baron, an EPA scientist working out of the primate and pesticide effects laboratory in Perrine, Florida, found leptophos “capable of inducing a delayed neurotoxic response,” a somewhat diplomatic way of saying leptophos kills after a few days of exposure.
1

Despite the growing evidence being compiled by the world’s scientists, EPA’s political bosses were determined that Velsicol would get the chance to sell enough leptophos in the United States to cover the bulk of the country’s supply of lettuce and tomatoes. EPA regulators dismissed Baron’s discovery; injecting poison under the skin of chickens, as Baron had done, was not the same thing as feeding the poison to the birds. It was the dose that mattered, they reasoned, not the poison itself: senior EPA scientists were convinced the poison could be applied to food at low enough levels that it would not harm those who ate it.

And of course EPA scientists deferred to the authority of the Velsicol company itself, which naturally claimed that leptophos had been given a clean bill of health by the company’s researchers.

In fact, leptophos had not been tested by Velsicol scientists; the work had been contracted out to a company called Industrial Bio-Test, which, as I will discuss in detail in the next chapter, did the dirty work for chemical and pharmaceutical industries so they could get their products approved by the government.

So even though evidence was mounting that leptophos would likely do to people exactly what it had done to water buffaloes and chickens in Egypt, Velsicol insisted to the end that the EPA should approve leptophos, and the EPA agreed. By 1974, the agency was prepared to look on while millions of Americans ate lettuce sprayed with 10 parts per million of this neurotoxin, and tomatoes with 2 parts per million.

In fact, the dangers leptophos posed to people were evident in Velsicol’s own manufacturing plant at the Bayport industrial park, just thirty-five miles from downtown Houston. More than sixty workers making leptophos from 1973 to 1976 suffered horrible effects. Within only a few months of working with the solid, waxy substance, workers became confused; at least two were paralyzed.
2

The evidence against leptophos was becoming irrefutable. Zweig and Kuroda, the EPA chemists who first sounded the alarm about the compound, sought the support of another EPA colleague, Howard Richardson, a medical doctor and noted government pathologist. Richardson examined the slides IBT had used in its experiments with chickens treated with leptophos, and he found the results “highly questionable and unreadable.”

That was August 27, 1974. Just a few days later, Richardson and his wife Mary, also a physician with the EPA, left for a month in Europe, where they learned that the European chemical industry and European governments had reached an understanding that under no circumstances would they allow an insecticide like leptophos to get into food. When the Richardsons returned to the United States convinced that leptophos was too dangerous to use safely, their stance added pressure within the EPA to revoke Velsicol’s license. When news of the suffering of the Houston workers finally leaked in early 1976, the compound’s toxic career in the United States was abruptly brought to an end.

When Velsicol appealed to keep leptophos on the market, a committee appointed by the EPA administrator declared that the compound “can lead to a progression of neurotoxic effects including central and peripheral neuropathy, ataxia, weakness, paralysis, and ultimately death.”
3
This was, of course, music to the ears of Mohamed Abou-Donia, whose findings on the poisoned water buffaloes in Egypt had started the ball rolling. But as was true for the EPA’s Zweig, Kuroda, and Richardson, Dr. Abou-Donia did not make many friends in the chemical bureaucracy of Washington.

“Leptophos pushed me out of Egypt,” Dr. Abou-Donia told me. “I said to my American wife that if we stayed at the University of Alexandria, we would have to go on the take. So we left for the United States because I treasured my integrity, and because I really wanted to do good science. At Duke University I have done that. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that the United States and Egypt have this in common—both countries have the same chemical bosses. The people that did the bribing in Cairo and Alexandria are also the people that create all this terrible mess with the regulation of pesticides in Washington, D.C.”

When the Reagan administration came to power in 1981, things only got worse, he said. “All the doors of EPA were shut on my face. EPA regulators said they no longer were interested in the delayed effects of nerve poisons. We desperately need to know more about these agricultural chemicals because they are used in such large quantities by so many people all over the world. You hear that a farmworker was poisoned by this or that organophosphate toxin—and that’s it. At Duke University we are completely cut off from farmworkers and the entire agriculture of North Carolina. The state university has its extension agents, but they don’t talk to us and we don’t talk to them. And you know that the only people who want me to get back on pesticides research are the chemical warfare people of the U.S. Army.”

Clearly, the fate of poisoned farmworkers has been considered far less urgent than guaranteeing profits for chemical companies; farmworkers, especially migrant workers, being at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, carry little ammunition to counter the powerful voices of industry lobbyists. There are few stories more illustrative of this power imbalance than the tale of the work carried out by the Owens brothers.

In the early 1970s, the National Science Foundation and EPA awarded a grant of $600,000 to study pesticide exposure among migrant farmworkers to Clarence B. Owens, a professor of agronomy at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Owens was an ideal scientist for the study: an academic who did not mind working with his hands or mingling with workers at the very lowest strata of society. An African American scholar with compassion for migrant workers, Owens decided in 1976 to become a migrant farmworker himself. He would join America’s untouchables, the ever-replaceable appendices to America’s giant chemical farms, who were little better off than serfs in nineteenth-century Russia.

“The people perish. They are accustomed to the process of perishing,” Leo Tolstoy wrote in his 1899 novel,
Resurrection
. “Customs and attitudes to life have appeared which accord with the process—the way children are allowed to die and women made to overwork, and the widespread undernourishment, especially of the aged. And this state of affairs has come about so gradually that the peasants themselves do not see the full horror of it, and do not raise their voices in complaint. For this reason, we, too, regard the situation as natural and proper.”

I don’t know if Owens knew Tolstoy’s work, but he clearly had similar concerns: he wanted to see with his own eyes how migrant farmworkers in America are also accustomed to the process of perishing as they work our land and harvest our food. He worked alongside the workers of the Lawrence and Adams crews (two small groups of migrants named after their crew leaders) as they moved from fields in central Florida to coastal and then central North Carolina, central Pennsylvania, and New York’s upper Hudson River Valley.

Owens joined these workers so he could experience their exhaustion, hunger, and humiliation and observe what was happening to them as they worked in the midst of plants loaded with pesticides. As part of the research, Owens and his brother, Emiel, a professor of finance at the University of Houston, took blood samples from the workers. They also recorded what the workers ate, carefully watched their health, and studied their physiological and social behavior day and night for the entire 1976 harvest season as the Owens brothers and their fellow farmhands gathered corn, tomatoes, peaches, squash, cucumbers, gladiola flowers, potatoes, tobacco, and apples.