Outlawed Herbicide Dacthal in Australia
G'Day Folks,
The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) has outlawed the use of a herbicide with links to health problems to unborn babies, effective immediately.
Dacthal is used on crops such as broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, turf and cotton, stopping weeds at the shooting or sprouting stage.
But it must be immediately pulled from sale across Australia after the pesticides authority on Thursday cancelled approval of all 12 products containing the herbicide.
Furthermore, Parkinson’s Australia are calling for another frequently used pesticides Paraquat, to be banned immediately. As of now, 70 countries (including the UK and China) have banned the use of paraquat due to its severe health risks, including its strong links to Parkinson’s disease. Despite its known dangers, paraquat remains in use in Australia, posing a serious health risk to farmers, agricultural workers, and the general public.
The main reason is that I know I’m singing to the choir. You choose to eat organic because you are all familiar with the issues of conventional farming methods and have been for much longer than myself. I also don’t want organic food to be merely the absence of chemicals. The love of good soil, healthy ecosystems and a community that maintains its relationship between eater, farmer and land is equally as important. What’s the point of living a long and healthy life if it’s not to enjoy food, nature and each other's company?
Yes, it’s absolutely brilliant that our modern world with all its technology allows some of us to study tiny parts of our world endlessly, so as to solve some problems or just make life a little better. I’m not going to take all of the wonderful things we enjoy today for granted. But we have lost the balance between common wisdom and expert knowledge. Common wisdom is in all of us, it’s our collective memory, stored not only in stories passed down, but coded into our DNA. Millions of years of learnings passed down in ways we don’t yet even understand, some of us call it intuition. And it was this intuition that grew the Organic Farming and Food movement. It was this collective wisdom that made farmers and eaters question what was being sprayed on our food in ever increasing quantities and concoctions.
I feel honoured to be growing food for a community that is not afraid to question and listens to their intuition despite the criticism they will often have to listen too. I want you to know that the Organic movement is over 100yrs old, it has grown from a very small and insignificant group of ‘wacky fruit loops’ to millions of people in almost every country today. Now maybe we are all still ‘wacky fruit loops’ but if that’s what we are called for questioning the status quo, I would rather be called that than ‘expert’!
