Throwing Away The Scientists Is Delivering A Growing Food Crisis

In 2025, Kenya, its farmers, and its consumers, will be delivering a world demonstration of why scientists have been pleading for government policies on pest control to be evidence-based, as they instead get swept up into a tide of misinformation.

For, with its ban of eight pesticides on political grounds now ravaging its exports, slashing its domestic food production, and sparking a surge in food prices that will be greater, this year, than for any other country in Africa, it has set out on a path that recently took Sri Lanka to famine and near-complete economic collapse.

Yet it is now so ‘groomed’ by a group of extravagantly funded activists that it shows no sign of stopping..

It has been an imperative for these activists to present themselves as ‘saviours’ of the people from mass poisoning in order to raise huge private donations, but what no one has confronted is the degree to which this has moved them into dishonesty.

A case in point is a pesticide called Chlorothalonil, one of the world’s most widely used fungicides. In Kenya, it has been the crop protection of choice for diseases from potato and tomato blight to mildew, botrytis, and black spot; as well as stem, yellow, and leaf rust on wheat, and coffee berry disease.

The campaign against pesticides in Kenya homed in on Chlorothalonil precisely because it is so widely used, with moves such as testing vegetables to show they have detectable residues.

However, no-one would care about residues less toxic than a cup of coffee, so they needed to present Chlorothalonil as poisonous. Thus, in rounds of press releases, reports, and briefings, the group deceived journalists and the public alike, claiming the residues were from a highly hazardous pesticide (HHP).

In fact, highly hazardous pesticides, classed as 1b by the World Health Organisation are not allowed to be sold to the public in Kenya, with the one exception of rat poisons. For crops, the Pest Control Products Board deems them an excessive risk, because so few farmers follow the application instructions.

But Chlorothalonil is not an HHP. When it is ingested, as in eaten and drunk, it has been found through extensive testing to be non-toxic, but it can cause eye irritation if it gets into people’s eyes – less than the irritation caused by laundry detergent, but still painful – which sees it classified by the World Health Organisation as a Class 2 Moderately Hazardous Pesticide.

However, protecting people from chemicals that are ‘toxic’ HHPs brings in far greater donations, so the activists made up their own classification, and reclassified Chlorothalonil as an HHP.

To make it poisonous too, when it has a clean card on poisoning anyone, they turned to cancer. Chlorathalonil is not a carcinogen, nor even a probable carcinogen. It sits in a cancer risk classification by the International Agency for Cancer Research, Class 2b, where there is no actual linkage to cancer risks but it remains a possibility – coffee was similarly classified by the IARC as a Class 2b cancer risk for 25 years.

By contrast, hot beverages are Class 2a ‘probable’ carcinogens, as is red meat, while in Class 1, which covers established carcinogens, sit both sausages and bacon.

So the toxic cancer risk the activists saved us all from is equivalent to coffee – except if you drink it hot, in which case coffee is more risky than Chlorothalonil.

And, for this, our fresh vegetable exports have halved as producers are left without control of powdery mildew, downy mildew, botrytis and a host of other diseases. Our coffee exports are plummeting as coffee berry disease and coffee berry borer savage our cherries. Fall Armyworm is resurging, so too is the Maize Lethal Necrosis virus, carried by the leafhoppers and aphids that protection has also been removed fort.

Nor has the deceit ended there. The activists frequently cite bans in Europe as proving that pesticides are dangerous, knowing full well that in 2019, the European Union adopted a Green Deal climate change strategy that committed to phasing out half of all pesticides, regardless of health and safety data. Moreover, in 2009, Europe had adopted a regulation removing the need for any evidence of harm (from the compulsory tests) to trigger pesticide bans, and allowing precautionary bans where there was no such evidence,

Chlorothalonil is one of now dozens of EU precautionary bans that have sparked sometimes violent protests by farmers as it works to meet its 50% strategic banning target – which is why, to this day, Chlorothalonil is still protecting US farmers and farmers all over the world based on its actual levels of health and environmental impact,

And then there is the fourth pillar of deceit, which has made a mockery of our elected politicians. The activists in 2019 petitioned parliament to have Chlorothalonil and a bevy of similarly faked ‘toxins’ banned, thus forcing consideration by the parliamentary health committee.

The committee’s honourable members, being elected politicians, were moved by the horror of Kenyans eating all that toxic, carcinogenic food every day. But, as non-scientists, did not probe into the scientific facts: nor even the oddity of all those HHPs knocking around in a country that doesn’t allow HHP sales to farmers.

Instead, they pressurised the PCPB to ban the ‘horrifically toxic’ Chlorothalonil, and seven other pesticides too.

Moreover, they decided against any impact assessment on food security, because the activists told them the bans would have no impact on food production.

That breached FAO and WHO guidance in ensuring alternatives exist before banning, and left dozens of pests for which there is no organic control in existence, without protection in Kenya,

As ever more farmers and groups working with smallholders report the consequently mounting food losses, the truth will come out. The only remaining question is whether we are going to have to be like Sri Lanka, as far as spiralling food prices, starving families, and havoc to lives, human health, and livelihoods, to realise pests destroy food.

After that, maybe we can look at the deceit those fundraisers inflicted on everyone and ensure their claims, too, are properly checked.

• Ojepat Okisegere is the Farmer and CEO Fresh Produce Consortium of Kenya