Has corporate farming hurt America? Are you worried about pesticides.?

Question

Twenty-three years ago a cloud of gas escaped a Union Carbide plant in India, making a pesticide, and killed five thousand people. Of the people who survived, their children are having birth defect problems. Since them Dow has bought the plant, but is refusing responsibility.

Answer 1

Lets see the rational here... water is the basis of life, yet a blast of hot steam will kill a person.  Soils have an abundance of elements yet in the wrong proportion will kill plants; ie. unbalanced pH, high nitrates, etc.  As humans we overconsume sugars and a lack of exercise and now we have an abundance of childhood diabetes.  We have a variety of elements to work with in this world to control disease, viruses, bacteria's, prions, etc.  We try to manipulate these elements to our benefit for food, fiber, profit.  

The Dow incident is most unfortunate, yet people were in control and also lost control of those elements.  Corporate laws are keeping them from admit fault, yet it is obvious as to the cause.  

Corporate farming is the cause and effect of a variety of factors from political and financial affairs of this country.  Is Wal-Mart hurting this country... Target... Wal-Greens, Cub (grocery), any corporate entity buying products from oversees hurting this country?  Answering this will answer your question.  

Worried about pesticides...  in a concentration as that found at the Dow plant, yes, absolutely.  In the concentrations found on a common farm.... no.  Are there residual levels, probably; to the extent the first person answered your question, probably; yet with today's modern equipment we can measure down to the ppb (parts per billion) or greater.  PPB measurements could probably tell you what was put in the ground a million years ago.  Is this rational for today's environment, probably not as there is by far greater good being realized from the use of pesticides and herbicides than harm.  GMO products are helping to greatly reduce the amounts of pesticides herbicides needed for today's crop production.  Yet if groups want to step in and analyze the soils from historical purposes we are doomed to move forward.

Answer 2

So, is this a question about farming, using pesticides or the Union Carbide fiasco?  As tragic as it was, accidents happen and it doesn't matter whether you're living next to a petroleum refinery, flour mill, coal mine, nuclear power plant or Twinkie factory, any of those could explode.  Your car has a fuel tank with gasoline that could also explode under the right conditions.  I don't remember all the details of the Union Carbide accident and maybe management could have done better, but stuff like that happens.  There are Japanese people that were born deformed and brain damaged after their parents consumed fish caught in mercury tainted waters, there are limbless people who were born to mothers using thalidimide, the anti-nausea drug, Brits with Jakob-Cruetzfelt variant from eating BSE tainted meat, luekemia victims after Chernobyl, low IQ kids in American slums who ate lead paint chips, innocent southeast Asian people with their legs blown off by landmines planted many years before,  Japanese disfigured by the atomic blasts, Italians who died after consuming industrial olive oil sold as human use olive oil and Holocaust survivors.  

As bad as it seems, that's a simple fact of living.  Accidents happen, people get hurt and often times the next generation are the ones that pay for it.  No use in bemoaning what happened 23 years ago, just make sure it doesn't happen again.

Answer 3

I'm taking a university course on soil pollutants and soil remediation. Early on in the course we where shown a map over the US colored after the soil concentration of a very toxic pesticide. It turns out it's been acumulating in the ground for the 30-40 years it's been in use. To the point where 60% of us farmland is considered "polluted". But remember the definition only applies to industrial pollution so 60% of us farmland is "industriallly polluted" by means of pesticides.

So, that would be a yes to your question.