THE FUTURIST Interviews Tomas Brückmann On Creating a Chemical Free Future For Farming

As the world’s farmers strive to produce more food, they rely on ever-increasing quantities of pesticides—which includes products to kill weeds, insects, and any other organisms that might threaten crops. Environmental groups warn that the extra food comes at a heavy cost, however, of severe harms to the health of farmers, consumers, and ecosystems everywhere. Tomas Brückmann, a project manager on pesticides and biodiversity for Friends of the Earth Germany—the German chapter of Friends of the Earth International, a worldwide federation of environmental groups—spoke about the pesticide dilemma with Rick Docksai, an assistant editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

THE FUTURIST: How would you characterize the overall pesticide use in Germany? Where is it trending—upward or downward?

Thomas Brückmann: The use of pesticides in public gardens is much too high, and on farmlands we have extremely high use of pesticides. And every year it is increasing. You have an enormous increase of glyphosate in Germany, and I think also in South America (editor’s note: Glyphosate is a popular weed-killer produced by agro-chemicals company Monsantor and marketed under the brand name Roundup).

THE FUTURIST: Why is pesticide use going up?

Brückmann: Farmers want to make a profit. With the high prices of food on the market, farmers are trying to meet the demands.

THE FUTURIST: What hazards do pesticides pose to wildlife?

Brückmann: We have had near extinctions of several bird species in the last 20 years in Germany, such as the grey partridge, northern lapwing, and the crested lark.

And we have large numbers of toads dying off. Toads live one or two months per year in ponds and the rest of the year on farmlands. So if we spray pesticides, it’s possible that we will kill the toads.

We also have a decreasing population of butterflies. And butterflies are a source of nutrition of the birds. The first to die, if you spray pesticides, are the butterflies, and a lot of the birds follow. This is the chain.

Additionally in Germany, we use a lot of herbicides, and this results in mass elimination of farmland weeds. Those weeds are another source of nutrition for other birds.

From the beginning of the 1990s, we have had a new group of pesticides produced by Bayer. This group is called neonicotinoids—same chemical that is in cigarettes. This group kills bees and is more dangerous than any other compound of pesticides. Henk Tennekes, a toxicologist in the Netherlands, called it “a disaster in the making.”

THE FUTURIST: What effects might pesticides have on human health?

Brückmann: An example of that would be a farmer in Saxony. His cows exhibited a disease, and then the farmer contracted the same disease. This disease is a strain of botulism, and it is known as a disease for cows, not for people. The doctors analyzed his blood and they found abnormally high concentrations of glyphosate.

We have a lot of new diseases—cancer, hormone disruptions, and others. In lesser developed countries, you have even worse problems. Farmers are using pesticides that are not allowed in the United States or in Europe. The multi-national companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, they have a big responsibility to protect people in farming countries from the use of pesticides, but they have not.

THE FUTURIST: I would like your thoughts on the “buffer zones” that I am told are constructed along some rivers that run near farms. How much protection can they provide the rivers from farms’ pesticide and fertilizer pollution?

Brückmann: Buffer zones are good possibilities to reduce the input of pesticides into rivers. But beyond buffer zones, we demand eco-farming, with 20% of the farmlands set aside for non-use, and along with that the use of better techniques, for instance, crop rotation (editor’s note: Crop rotation consists of alternately growing one crop on a field in one season and a different crop on the same field the following season; and every few seasons, growing nothing on it).

THE FUTURIST: Crop rotation would be a non-chemical alternative method for increasing farm produce?

Brückmann: It is. Our ancestors developed crop rotation to reduce insects, to produce more wheat and so on, and to improve the nutrition of the soil. If you use crop rotation, insects cannot settle there and live there through the next winter.

THE FUTURIST: What about weeds? What options do farmers have for controlling weed growth without herbicides?

Brückmann: We recommend use of regionally adapted plants. They are better protected against insects, against weeds, and against adverse climate conditions.

I will point out also that in Germany, consumer organizations in 2011 protested to the German government to reduce pesticide use. And now we have a pesticide-reduction action program—the government’s plans to reduce pesticides.

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like once you mobilized on the dangers of pesticide use, the government responded very quickly.

Brückmann: We have corporations and environmental NGOs fight together against the use of pesticides. And in Germany, more and more people buy organic food, since it is inexpensive and widely available in markets.

And all European Union member states have to develop programs to minimize use of pesticides (editor’s note: The Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Pesticides, approved by the European Commission in 2006, requires all EU member states to develop action plans to minimize pesticides’ potential harms to ecological and human health).

But the current regulations are not enough. Before a grower can use pesticides, the governmental agencies check it. But yet we have more and more diseases and damages to the environment through the use of pesticides.

Each farmer uses a lot of pesticides at the same time, and the combination of damages from multiple pesticides are not checked. Reactions between two compounds are very dangerous, and a lot of farmers use more than 10 different pesticides in one season. Therefore, a lot of people continue to become ill.