Flint, Michigan, meet Kauai, Hawaii -- where minority children are being exposed to
a different kind of chemical.
Doctors in Hawaii are concerned that an increase in serious birth defects – including babies born with organs outside of their bodies -- may be related to the spraying of extremely high levels of insecticides.
Corn crops in Kauai (mostly grown for export to the mainland) are subjected to 17 times the level of insecticides as in the mainland – with no buffer zones between the spraying and the community, as in some other states. The crops are GM’s that have been specifically designed to withstand the pesticides – but children’s bodies haven’t been.
The chemical companies that own the land have avoided modern EPA compliance with a decades-old permit that “grandfathered-in” their toxic waste discharges.
As in Flint, Michigan, the children being sacrificed to greed are largely minorities.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/23/hawaii-birth-defects-pesticides-gmo
Pesticides in paradise: Hawaii's spike in birth defects puts focus on GM crops
Nelson, a Californian, and other local doctors find themselves in the eye of a storm swirling for the past three years around the Hawaiian archipelago over whether a major cash crop on four of the six main islands, corn that’s been genetically modified to resist pesticides, is a source of prosperity, as the companies claim – or of birth defects and illnesses, as the doctors and many others suspect.
SNIP
Waimea, a small town of low, pastel wood houses built in south-west Kauai for plantation workers in the 19th century, now sustains its economy mostly from a trickle of tourists on their way to a spectacular canyon. Perhaps 200 people work full-time for the four giant chemical companies that grow the corn – all of it exported – on some 12,000 acres leased mostly from the state.
In Kauai, chemical companies Dow, BASF, Syngenta and DuPont spray 17 times more restricted-use insecticides per acre than on ordinary cornfields in the US mainland, according to the most detailed study of the sector, by the Center for Food Safety.
SNIP
Nelson, the pediatrician, points out that American Academy of Pediatrics’ report, Pesticide Exposure in Children, found “an association between pesticides and adverse birth outcomes, including physical birth defects”. Noting that local schools have been evacuated twice and children sent to hospital because of pesticide drift, Nelson says doctors need prior disclosure of sprayings: “It’s hard to treat a child when you don’t know which chemical he’s been exposed to.”
Her concerns and those of most of her colleagues have grown as the chemical companies doubled to 25,000 acres in a decade the area in Hawaii they devote to growing new varieties of herbicide-resistant corn.
SNIP
In the process of what he called “doing my homework”, he discovered that the companies, unlike regular farmers, were operating under a decades-old Environmental Protection Agency permit to discharge toxic chemicals in water that had been grandfathered from the days of the sugar plantation, when the amounts and toxicities of pesticides were much lower. The state has asked for a federal exemption for the companies so they can avoid modern standards of compliance.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I can't imagine how the corn would be profitable after the cost of shipping it all the way across the Pacific.
Hawaii has a very progressive state government. I don't understand how this has been allowed to go on.
Maybe the former administration made sure the incoming one didn't know about the exemption? Even so, now that this is known and out in the open, it is incumbent on the State to sue for recompense (they'll have to, as the chemical companies will say "no proof!"
and stop the excessive pesticide use immediately. Corn isn't indigenous to Hawai'i anyway is it? What's the matter, they didn't want to poison kids in red states for fear of turning them blue?
