Duque, banana men bring tiff to Arroyo

Last month Health Sec. Francisco Duque urged President Arroyo to issue an executive order banning aerial spraying of fungicides. Four causes were cited in his memo:

• A 2003 study showed health ruin by spray drift in Sitio Camocaan, Davao del Sur. A later DOH-paid research there and in a banana plantation found 82 percent of respondents exposed to drift 10-12 times a year, with 52 percent having skin, blood and digestive ailments.

• The World Health Organization reviewed and affirmed the studies in a personal letter to him.

• Since some countries ban aerial discharge of pesticides, RP must do the same with fungicides. A precautionary ban can come first under the Rio Declaration that lets states pre-empt potential health hazards. Thence, the banana industry must prove itself clean.

• An inter-agency consultation with stakeholders has drawn up mitigation measures.

What is Duque talking about, banana growers asked in their own letter to Arroyo a month later? They proceeded to debunk the health chief’s claims.

Camocaan is a small village in one barangay in one of eight provinces that plant 600,000 hectares to the export fruit. Three-and-a-half years since the DOH study was made, residents reportedly are still asking who among them were found to be sick and of what. Not one of them has been referred to the municipal or provincial health officers under Duque.

There’s a clear gap, and it becomes wider in the purported WHO letter to Duque. The banana growers have long been asking him to release the international body’s report. But all the secretary has done is to say that the WHO, same with the UP College of Medicine, had affirmed the earlier researches. News leaks have been contrary, though. WHO and UP peer reviewers reportedly found the studies lacking, slapdash and inconclusive. Obviously, only full public disclosure will show the truth.

The banana men treated the Rio Declaration as just a pronouncement, not a treaty. Even if it were a pact, they said, singling out their industry for preventive ban is discriminatory. “It’s like banning motor vehicles or use of gasoline as precaution against carbon monoxide, or a thousand prescription medicines on grounds of possible side effects,” they cited parallel health issues. One plantation manager earlier made an example of unregulated spraying by grain farmers of chemical pesticides. The US National Research Council once warned that only one in ten pesticides in common use have been assessed for health hazards. Banning pesticide use would of course drive 13 million rice and corn farmers to the poorhouse.

Unlike anti-aerial spraying NGOs, the banana men complain that they were never consulted as stakeholders. Two Manila Catholic bishops were present in a Palace meeting last month, but not the one from Davao who cries that his signature was forged in an anti-spraying manifesto. The banana industry association has 36 members: three are big plantations and one is an exporters’ federation; the rest are unions of 30,000 agrarian reform beneficiaries. Owning one or two hectares each, they will go out of business when forced by health authorities to hire one manual sprayer per hectare of farm-cooperatives. Land reform succeeded in the Davao region because of the banana option. It will soon collapse, they warned Arroyo.

–Jarius Bondoc (The Philippine Star)

E-mail: jariusbondoc@workmail.com