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CHEMICAL DISASTER
source: www.sustainablecotton.org
www.simplelife.com/
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Conventional cotton farming uses only about 3% of the farmland but consumes approximately 25% of the world’s insecticides and more than 10% of the pesticides (including herbicides, insecticides, and defoliants). It is estimated that less than 10% of the chemicals applied to cotton are accomplishing their tasks, the rest are absorbed into the plant, air, soil, water and eventually, our bodies.- Worldwide: an estimated 25 million people are poisoned by pesticides every year, which translates to 48 per minute.
- USA: 84 million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on the 14.4 million acres of conventional cotton grown in the States in 2000 (5.85 pounds/acre), ranking cotton second behind corn in total amount of pesticides sprayed*. These pesticides contaminated the groundwater of 16 states.
- Ethiopia: as part of their third 5-year plan, 60% of the fertile Aswan valley was devoted to cotton production. Local people were forced onto fragile uplands contributing to the deforestation that has been partly responsible for Ethiopia’s current ecological crisis.
- India: the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal, site of the world’s worst industrial disaster, was producing carbamate pesticides largely for use on cotton. The Bhopal gas leak killed over 2,500 people and deaths continue at the rate of one a day. Over 80,000 people have been seriously and irreversibly affected.
- The C.I.S. is our second largest supplier of cotton. In Uzbekistan, where cotton production is particularly developed, the Aral sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, is now an ecological disaster area. Between 1960 and 1989 its area decreased by 40%.
According to the US Department of Agriculture
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