2023-10-14 06:38:00
If there is a factory a little further away, with large chimneys and/or waste water pipes, from which every time you look you see large amounts of (stinking) smoke and/or ditto foaming water or derride, you will understand that this is not specifically very beneficial for you. health.
If you live next to a always-busy ring road, or within earshot of an international airport or a refinery, much the same applies.
For a long time it was the case that we thought you had to accept that, you live there voluntarily, and the economy must continue, of course, but (in good Dutch) tables are turning: companies like Tata and Chemours and 3M and Schiphol can no longer get away with it, they are being held accountable for their emissions, for the damage they cause, for concealing (sometimes for decades) what they knew, regarding those emissions, regarding that damage.
If there is a farm a little further away – whether it is bulb cultivation or livestock farming or sheds with tens of thousands of chickens or pigs – it is a lot more difficult to determine whether there are harmful consequences of what happens there for the people who work there or live in the area. , cycling along. If only because a field full of vegetables, or meadows as far as the eye can see, or tens of thousands of lilies are actually nature. Or corpses.
I am usually a calm and civilized person. But when I saw the Minister of Agriculture etc., Piet Adema, explain earlier this week that the Netherlands will not vote for a ban on glyphosate in Europe, because there is no indisputable evidence of the link between that pesticide (‘plant protection product’ according to the users and the manufacturer) and the development of Parkinson’s, for example, there was quite a bit of bubbling. In me.
Parkinson’s as an ‘occupational disease’
I read the scientific papers that very much point in that direction, I see the Parkinson’s Association pointing to that connection, I read regarding Parkinson’s as an ‘occupational disease’, I cannot accept that people’s health is being played with for economic reasons, growers, other farmers, local residents. When in doubt, do not spray!
And when Adema then explains that ‘there must first be more research’, later described by him as ‘it will be carried out more quickly’ – which suggests that research that is normally used by politicians to inform decisions, that a lot of is slowed down – I feel a kind of anger that I would rather not feel.
Adema is the minister who, when he was not yet out of office, literally referred to ‘the tractors that no one wanted to see in The Hague once more’, to support his shaky agricultural policy. I see him as cowardly and reluctant to do anything. to do that might influence the revenue model of farmers, which might anger Big Agro.
Because this is regarding that revenue model, this is regarding Bayer that earns billions from a drug that is not 100 percent certain that it has major health consequences, but there is so much pointing in that direction that you cannot and should not ignore it.
Sometimes you have to have the courage to change a system, to put people and their health above economic interests.
Dolf Jansen is a comedian and writes a weekly column for Trouw. Read his columns here.
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#doubt #spray #Fidelity
