In 1956, pesticides almost did not exist in Vietnam. In the first half of 2020, our country imports more pesticides than gasoline.
From the beginning of 2020 until June 15, the General Department of Customs announced that Vietnam had imported US $ 308 million of pesticides and raw materials to produce this item. For comparison, in the same period, Vietnam imported 249 million USD of gasoline.
In a report three years ago, the World Bank confirmed that up to 50-60% of rice farmers used pesticides at a rate exceeding the recommended level; 38-70% of farmers in the southern provinces are using pesticides at rates exceeding the recommended level. According to the organization, about 20% of farmers who are using pesticides violate current regulations, use illegal imported pesticides, ban or even counterfeit them.
Import value of some items (million USD) from the beginning of the year to June 15, 2020. Source: General Department of Customs.
In the middle of this decade, the General Department of Environment confirmed that in Vietnam, there are “hundreds of polluted residues due to plant protection chemicals”, and these points have a high risk of affecting the environment. and public health.
It was not until 1957 that Vietnam began to “learn” how to use pesticides in agriculture. For the next thirty years, the use was still considered “balanced” by scientists. But the past two decades have witnessed a trend of abuse; as well as a manager’s struggle with the farmer’s habit.
From solution to dependence
In 1957, according to the curriculum of pesticides used by the Agricultural Academy, “chemical methods have almost no place in agricultural production”.
In the winter-spring crop of 1956-1957, a large epidemic of thorns and leafworms broke out in Hung Yen. The North lost its crop. Production of paddy per capita dropped to 286 kg compared to 304 kg in 1956. For the first time in Northern Vietnam, 100 tons of pesticides were used to kill insects.
Farmers in Tam Hiep commune (Chau Thanh, Tien Giang) sprayed insecticide with brown leaf hopper in 1978. File photo: Tran Bieu.
Truong Quoc Tung, Permanent Vice Chairman of the Vietnam Association of Plant Science and Technology, called the years 1957 to before 1990 a period of equilibrium, when plant protection drugs were the decisive factor to extinguish pests and diseases. widespread. “Without drugs, crop pests could reduce yields by 40-60% on a large scale, locally, which could be lost,” he said.
Before the Doi Moi years, Vietnam never used more than 9,000 tons of plant protection products per year, equivalent to only 0.3 kg per hectare. Subsidized economy shifted to market, distribution network of this item across the country, handed bottles of pesticides, herbicide packages to farmers.
The opening of the economy, the lifting of embargo and the opening of the export market for agricultural products have changed the landscape of agriculture. From 2000 to 2010, the amount of pesticides used increased from 36,000 to 75,800 tons, 2.5 times higher than the previous ten years. The number of registered drugs increased by 4.5 times and the value of imported drugs increased by 3.5 times.
Me Linh is an example of a transformation in agricultural economics. In the 1990s, Me Linh people changed from growing rice to making flowers. Early in the morning or in the late afternoon, the winds blowing in the village always carry a strong pungent odor, when farmers go to the fields to “beat” medicines.
Mr. Bay was only married then, with his own residence. Husband and wife are divided 22 lands, pour capital into planting flowers. The rice plants retreated to small swamps at the edge of the village, leaving the fertile fields to flowers that dominated the Northern garden house in the 1990s, roses and daisies.
“Cold 10 degrees C, just use a bit of cotton swab a little, intensive black flowers overnight overnight fresh,” he remembers using the drug, the mouse did not dare to catch the field.
Nearly thirty years of growing flowers, Mr. Bay has always been proud of the farmers of his hometown better than other places in terms of qualifications and skills. One of the lessons they learned for themselves, is “growing flowers, one day without spraying is losing food”.
Persimmon is the most grown flower in the Me Linh region. Photo: Giang Huy.
According to the statistics of the Me Linh District Plant Protection Station, each year Me Linh commune uses an average of 9.2 tons of plant protection drugs, the amount of medicine used on 206 hectares of roses is over 8.2 tons, or about 40 tons. kg / ha / year, 4 times higher than the national average.
In 2019, the whole district accounts for 1/6 of the city’s medicine use. “Me Linh is one of the districts using pesticides in the top of Hanoi, due to the large area of flowers and vegetables,” said the leader of the Hanoi Department of Plant Protection and Plant Protection.
In a 2015 OECD Development Organization report, the phrase “excessive use of pesticides” was mentioned four times to describe Vietnam’s agricultural sector.
In the same year, the Ministry of Health estimated that over 11 million people were regularly exposed to pesticides and the estimated number of chronic poisoning people was about 2.1 million, excluding consumers.
The escape has not been successful
In fact, Vietnam’s imports of pesticides (official) have been on the decline for more than 3 years. In 2017, our country imported nearly 1 billion USD of pesticides and raw materials, mainly from China. This number until 2019 “only” to 864 million.
The past decade has witnessed strong regulatory declarations of agrochemicals at risk of affecting health and the environment. In 2010, the Food Safety Law was promulgated by the National Assembly of Vietnam, resulting in a change in the management and registration of lists of plant protection chemicals used in agriculture.
From 2010 to 2015, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development removed 14 active ingredients and 1,706 products with scientific evidence of harm to public health and the environment. “Vietnam is the country with the safest pesticide in Southeast Asia today,” said Mr. Huynh Tan Dat, Head of Plant Protection Medicine Department (Plant Protection Department).
However, Minister Nguyen Xuan Cuong, in a conference in 2018, still affirmed that “there is still a big shortcoming that abuse is harmful to producers and the community, reducing product competition, reducing ecology.” environment, causing land degradation ”.
Western Tuu farmers sprayed on rose field. Photo: Thanh Hue.
Hanoi farmers realize the quality of land has been declining for about ten years. “The soil keeps going pale, burning a turn of gold above, from brown to yellow, not rag”, Mrs. Phan Thi Hoe in Me Linh was bewildered. The soil was hardened, stocky, where the water flowed to, drained and the soil was dry and curved.
The 2011 winter-spring flower season, pink on more than one acre of Ms. Hoe’s field did not give flowers, stunted plants, and scattered little flowers with the tips of her fingers, although she still maintained the 5-year roadmap to replace seedlings and medicated regularly. once. “The soil is contaminated by long-term spraying”, Ms. Hoe concluded. It is time to “change the land”.
She invested 20 million VND to buy alluvial soil of the Red River and poured it into four acres of fields. But pesticides are something you can’t help but want to keep flowers beautiful. Batch of “alluvial Red River” type 600 thousand a car, can only hold for 5 years. This spring, Mr. Hoe moved to find people pouring dozens of new land vehicles to replace.
In Me Linh, when chemical-free soils are no longer able to produce flower buds, farmers will have two ways to “change new soil”.
Sporadic farming households, such as Ms. Hoe, bought alluvial soil and dumped it on infertile soil. The second way, for people with capital, is to completely remove the barren field, rent land far away. They go to places where the soil is still fertile and has not been much impacted by chemicals.
The sense of “contaminated soil” is not unique to Mrs. Hoe. The World Bank, in its report on agricultural pollution in Vietnam (2017), shows examples of rice-intensive areas in the Mekong Delta “that have become dead zones, free of snails, frogs, fish, mice and other creatures that used to live there. “
But the organization also assessed one of the biggest difficulties for Vietnamese managers is facing the farmer’s practices: “Although, smallholder farmers contribute significantly to agricultural environmental pollution. , but their activities, as stated, are almost impossible to monitor. ”
Farmers would rather change the land than change the farming practices. In the list of 4,000 products, biological drugs account for less than 19%. The banned chemicals can still be easily purchased on the Internet, or silently traded among small traders. Customs still keeps arresting billions of dong of illegally imported drugs.
In Me Linh now, in the fields, alternating with daisies, pink is a few slices of cabbage fields, squash, cucumber, which need less pesticides than flowers to rest the land, in the hope of a few years. more will “revive” to return to a new life cycle of flowers.
Mrs. Hoe saw the pests and diseases increasing after every flower, and missed the old days of “giving up half a month without smoking, flowers still blooming”. The only remedy now that flower growers like you think of is to apply more medicine.
According to VnExpress.net
