Views » November 18, 2008

Paving the Road to Hell

By Terry J. Allen

Find the common thread and win a free Prozac prescription: Treating cattle for lameness and fever drives vultures to the brink of extinction; planting biofuel crops fuels forced labor and sickness; drilling wells for the poor poisons a country.

Not so long ago, millions of vultures swirled in dark, majestic clouds above the Asian subcontinent and performed a vital role: By eating carrion and waste—everything from ritually laid out human corpses to dead livestock—the scavengers cleansed the environment and checked infectious disease. Then, in the ’90s, the birds began mysteriously disappearing, until today, when 99.9 percent of them are dead.

Scientists finally linked the massive die-off to the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, widely used to keep lame or fevered livestock on their feet. Alive, South Asia’s cattle and other livestock provide milk and labor. Dead, owing to lack of disposal alternatives and religious proscriptions against eating beef, they are abandoned to vultures. Diclofenac residues, mostly in cattle corpses, caused fatal kidney disease in the vultures that feasted on them.

“[Diclofenac] seems to be effective, very safe, very cheap,” J. Lindsay Oaks, a veterinary professor at Washington State University, told the veterinary newsletter JAMVA News in 2004. “It just has this unexpected environmental consequence: … the first clear case of pharmaceutical product causing major ecological damage.”

Several knock-on effects of the die-off are under investigation. With the vultures’ ecological niche empty, rat and feral dog population may be expanding in South Asia, along with the diseases they carry. In India alone, rabies, spread primarily by the country’s estimated 5.5 million feral dogs, kills 25,000 to 30,000 people a year, mostly rural, often children.

Rabies is also metaphorical in Burma, renamed Myanmar by the mad-dog junta, formerly known by the deliciously sinister acronym SLORC. Its belief in astrology led the regime to move the country’s capital—locks, stocks and thumbscrews—to a remote mountain location. Its reliance on numerology bankrupted much of the population by voiding decimal-based currency and printing new “lucky” nine-based bills.

More serious than this superstitious insanity are the junta’s disastrous human rights and developmental policies, including a scheme that combines both: raising energy self-sufficiency, export income and carbon credits by planting the oil-rich jatropha plant on 8.36 million acres (an area the size of Maryland).

The junta deployed its army to oversee forced and prison labor, and to confiscate land for the biofuel. People were “fined, beaten and arrested for not participating,” the Ethnic Community Development Forum documented in its 2008 report Biofuel by Decree.

Around the world, the precipitous switch from food crop to biofuel has raised food prices and undermined supply. In Myanmar, the jatropha scheme exacerbated the post-typhoon famine, and was so ill-planned that up to 75 percent of the plants died, and the small amount of oil processed sometimes damaged its machinery.

The unintended effects are not confined to starvation and damaged engines. Jatropha yields a ricin-like poison that a competent chemist can extract. Ricin makes the U.S. Homeland Security list of potential terrorist weapons and is so deadly that 1 gram can kill 36,000 people. Washington should know. During World War II, it tested but did not use bombs spiked with the neurotoxin, codenamed “Compound W.”

Reports have surfaced from Burma that hungry or curious children have become sick after eating the sweet jatropha nuts. The infectious disease watchdog organization ProMED recently posted a report, still unconfirmed, that people have been dropping dead after being bitten by a worm-like organism that feeds on jatropha.

And one more example of vast unintended consequences: Aid organizations, seeking to provide clean water, dug tube-wells in impoverished Bangladesh. Now, most of the country’s 130 million people use 8 million to 12 million shallow wells, and most of the population is being slowly poisoned by the naturally occurring arsenic that the wells inadvertently tapped into. Arsenic poisoning starts with sores, progresses to gangrene and ends with cancers.

So whether it’s the environment or the economy, fools—with intentions good or greedy—rush in. Without long-term planning, regulation, follow up and oversight, unintended consequences will range from worrying to catastrophic.

Go ahead and take that Prozac — but don’t forget, the residue you pee will survive water treatment and end up in your neighbors’ drinking water. 

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  There are no comments on this article yet. Start the discussion below.

• register a new account »Posting Security

  To participate in our forums, please register for a free account.

  Username Password

    Remember me
  

  Retreive lost password »

Also featured Russia’s Monroe Doctrine
All Work, No Play
The View From Ohio

Full contents
Previous issues
Subscribe and save!

Also by Terry J. Allen

• Restless Vagina Syndrome
  It's not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner's), that you don't… morePosted on October 27, 2009
• Capitalist Health Insurance for All
  Here's what corporations know, but don't want you to find out: Private insurance… morePosted on September 15, 2009
• Zicam: Homeopathy Fails the Sniff Test
  The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has caught itself in a trap of… morePosted on July 14, 2009
• More Drugs, Please
  Few actions so perfectly combine stupidity and cruelty as denying pain relief to… morePosted on June 23, 2009
• Confessions of a Terrorist
  Dear Senator Patrick Leahy: I write from my sleeper cell outside Hardwick, Vt.,… morePosted on April 26, 2009