Farmer dies of Leukaemia due to pesticides

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/wine/8274192/French-winegrowers-warned-over-pesticide-use.html


And our local farmers have all been saying that nothing they spray is harmful to man, animal or the environment???   And that because they have GlobalGap certification and because no one has complained, that they must be doing things right !!!???

There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see.

Or is money and profit (from their vines)  more important than human health ?

Face the facts. South Africa is a " 3rd World"  country, with much  "softer laws"  [ Act 36 of 1947 is 64 years old and long overdue for a revamp!!]  and our National Dept of Agriculture, Municipalities are unable or unwilling to enforce the law so as to protect innocent bystanders from exposure to clouds of toxic spray drift that get blown out of the vineyards, orchards and fields and into adjacent residential areas and schools.

Our local Municipalities, true to form, are useless when it comes to accepting that they have a responsibility to protect their citizens as enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. They are too busy lining their pockets and enriching themselves with the spoils of "corruption"  to realise that they have a responsibility to the citizens who pay their generous salaries.

If the farmers want to poison themselves that great, let them do it. However, labor is cheap in South Africa and its the poor, down-trodden and "voiceless"  farm-worker who gets the brunt of the poison. You dont see the farmer doing the spraying on his tractor now do you?  One wonders if things would change if the farmer had to apply all these toxic pesticides himself ??  

Clearly there is a problem and its reared its ugly head in France.     

How long will it take before South Africa wakes up  and smells the roses ??

The consumer will, at the end of the day,  force change.  There is already a shift towards organic wine and I guess that within the next 5-10 years Europe will only be importing "organic wines"  from South Africa, if at all.  The wine industry will therefore need to quickly wake up, change the way that they think, or else find that no-one wants to buy their product.

Perhaps the farmers are the innocent victims here. They do, after all, rely on the smiling "gifsmous", the multi-millionaire "purveyor of poison", who seems to have convinced them that the solution to every problem, every disease, lies in a bottle of  "gif" !!    Anyone who has seen  a centrifugal mist blower at work, will soon realise that 60% of the chemical gets blown into the air and carried away on the wind. What a waste!!  But then the more chemical that is used, the happier the supplier.  

Things do need to change!!