Farming: Highly Hazardous

After watching this video, I was able to better understand the severity of the use of using pesticides. My favorite quote from the video was when the wife of the farmer said, "Farming is supposed to be such a healthy occupation...you are in the country side and it is absolutely lovely...and then there is this dreadful hazard...it is so frustrating." When I think about farming I do tend to think about things being simple, but what do I know about farming? In other countries, like India, there are no lush, green fields of tranquility and purity, rather there are paper masks being used to prevent harmful chemicals from being inhaled. Thousands of people die every year from the use of dangerous pesticides. 

In Stuffed and Starved, Raj Patel explains that the deaths in India are not all just from unintentional chemical poisoning, rather most of the deaths were suicides, "In 2009, 18 of India's 28 states reported increased farmer suicide rates. During that year alone there were 17, 638 recorded farmer suicides, one every 30 minutes."[33] Let’s put this into retrospect. If an average college student at Hanover has 4 hours of class in a day then that means that for every hour of class there were two farmer deaths. Two farmer deaths times four is eight farmers dead by the time class is out.

So what seems to be the problem? 

• One of the problems is that farmers are not able to afford the necessary protection needed in order to properly use these chemicals; protection is just out of the question. I mean these people can barely even provide money for their families to eat every day.
• Too many farmers are in debt because they cannot repay the government for the money that they have borrowed in order to try to make a living.

These living conditions and farming conditions are just an externality to us Americans. We do not see the families destroyed everyday just so that we can have certain foods. Instead, we just want to know why the price is so darn high. Think about it. These farmers have to work with a chemical that Patel claims the World Health Organization classified as "highly hazardous" [32]. It is said that there is no safe way that it can be used. So again I ask: why do people keep using it? 

      

 "...If they [banks] don't get it, they die the way you die without air without side-meat. It is a sad thing but it is so. It is just so."

- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath [39]

-Tessa