From: "Salil Tripathi" <salil61-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: profits and pesticides of union carbide
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 13:04:10 +0000


This is the time when I catch up, as I had been on the road. I think it was 
Margaret Trawick who had written, during our discussion on Union Carbide and 
Bhopal, that she could not grant the benefit of doubt to UCC because (a) it 
made pesticides, and (b) it operated for profit.

I have two responses. One, if companies do not operate for profit, where 
would the governments earn the taxes to pay for the roads, schools and 
hospitals? Where would the jobs come from, for the people around the world?

Two, what's wrong with pesticides? I don't mean this rhetorically: I grew up 
in India in the early 1960s, before the Green Revolution, and I know of the 
kind of droughts India suffered, eg in 1967. We had rationing, in other 
words, less food to eat. Since then, on the whole, India has been 
self-sufficient and self-reliant in food, at least partly because it used 
technological solutions, including pesticides, fertilizers, mechanization of 
farms, selective breeding and feeding. All of this is against the grain of 
the No-GMO lobby around the world; and pesticides, and not locusts, are 
called the scourge! I find this marvellously entertaining; I'd only point 
out that since the time India began using pesticides, life expectancy has 
gone up, and so have other statistics of social and development indicators. 
Surely, it is not anyone's intention to roll these back?

Salil

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