Our meeting with FMC about Furadan
Wildlifedirect.org
By: Admin
Poisoning wildlife
Apr 16 2009
What a week of ups and downs! We were so pleased when FMC announced the withdrawal of Furadan from Kenya, and welcomed the opportunity to meet a team from FMC here in Nairobi. All our colleagues came, with stacks of evidence of the damage that Furadan is causing to our lions, vultures, waterbirds and fish. We were sooo hopeful…like naive fools. Of course FMC are not really interested in wildlife per se, and we’ve been warned that their local distributor won’t give up without a fight over their deadly product. The scariest thing we heard from FMC was that they “will reintroduce Furadan once the right conditions are in place” course they wouldn’t divulge what those were.
Most of us in the meeting (represented by WWF, Nature Kenya, various bird groups, Living with Lions and others) felt that our concerns were not really being acknowledged, at least the FMC officials were not able to officially accept that their product was devastating Kenyan wildlife. We were told that the Government chemist who has analysed all our samples did not have the correct testing kit and were therefore producing false positives. The advice to us, look for another source of poison. This didn’t jive well with all the other evidence we have, eg. people admitting to using Furadan, purple grains on carcasses baited for lions, purple grains on snails for the bird hunting in Bunyala….How much more obvious does it have to be??? FMC were just as adamant that Furadan is just a name used to define any pesticide. AAARrrrrrrggghhhh it is so frustrating.
The other problem is that the government chemist charges 20$ for each sample while the other organization KEPHIS charges nearly 100$ per sample. We just don’t have the resources to analyse samples that are still in the freezer!
The meeting was fairly polite but I personally didn’t feel as if we made much headway, FMC maintain that there is no credible evidence that their product is killing Kenyan wildlife, but they do admit that there is potential and that they have withdrawn the product as a precaution. They also expressed many valid points about the alternatives, the black market and competitors flooding the market, issues we chewed on for a while.
We asked many questions – but I especially loved this cheeky one “If you are an ethical company, why not just stop producing Furadan altogether”. Ouch. I don’t recall the answer.
FMC have a series of other meetings with the government, obviously they are more concerned about the authorities and we totally understand this. We just feel that it’s equally important that consumers and citizens have the right to information, opinions and a place on the negotiating table. Sadly, many people fear the response from the authorities - I don’t for a minute deny that our ‘officials’ and ‘leaders’ can be heavy handed. In general once elected our Kenyan leaders forgot (or perhaps never learned) what being a civil servant is all about, Servant is the key word.
The truth is that while Furadan is misused for poisoning wildlife, even when it’s used for agriculture, it is not used safely in Kenya anyway - people do not use protective gear when applying this deadly pesticide.
KWS who admit that our lions and other predators are in trouble, are not really coming out strongly about the risks to our lions posed by Furadan. Meanwhile the Pesticide Control Products Board (PCPB have a statement that sounds like their interest is in protecting products not people or the environment.
Thankfully the public are listening though and we want to thank all of you who have written in support or donated towards our work to end the poisoning of wildlife in Africa.
What I can’t get my head around is how our government can defend the use of a chemical that is banned in Europe and for which the US EPA has found there is no safe way to use it in a country of educated people who also have excellent enforcement. In Kenya the people who use Furadan don’t even know how to read the label and none of them use any form of protective gear. That alone should make the officials question whether it’s safe for human use.
There are rumours going around that thanks to all the negative publicity (especially the decline of lions), there is support for a Furadan ban in certain quarters of our government, so fingers crossed, perhaps we’ve reached someone who actually does care and is willing to do something about it! Our challenge will be to effect a ban on the actual chemicals not just the trade names - Carbofurans.
Keep reading right here, we’ll updated you here and on the stop wildlife poisoning blog.
Article at: http://baraza.wildlifedirect.org/2009/04/16/our-meeting-with-fmc-about-furadan/
