I am really fed up with the yearly burning of fields in Mexico!

[callous taoboy]

I live hundreds of miles from the border and our air quality in town is extrememly bad. The hills were completely shrouded in smoke this morning and it smells awful, eyes are irritated as well as throat. Soot and ash are covering my car. It seems to be getting worse each year.

What can be done about this? Who do we write / call? This cannot be good for one's health, especially considering the amount of pesticides that are being used on the fields and then released into the air each spring as the fields are torched.

[Avalux]

1. Can't do anything.

Unless you want to try to convince the Mexican government what they're doing is wrong and bad for the environment and people's health (ha!). They don't care and don't expect our government to put pressure on them either.

[callous taoboy]

2. It just seems weird that

each year it's the same three week period of super-foul air, yet you don't hear much about it in the press. You'd think that asthma sufferers would be up in arms about this. You'd think that we'd have some hard data on the amount of harmful chemicals in the smoke. The effects on me are really bad, and they include just a general feeling of low energy and inability to think straight. My boss even spoke to me after a meeting the other day and asked if everything was o.k., and I told her the smoke was killing me. My boss never has concerns about my performance.

[Avalux]

5. Where are you? I'm in San Antonio and depending on the wind -

we are affected also - heavy yellowish haze in the air. And you're right, don't hear anything about it. My eyes are watering like crazy today.

Guess it just speaks to the futility of dealing with the Mexican government; they really don't care, which is evident if you've ever been to the Gulf coast around Corpus Christi and seen the crap that washes on shore.

[catabryna]

3. The yearly asthma attack waiting to happen!

And, I do believe you are right about it getting worse every year. I lived in the Austin area for 8 years until about a month ago. It's worse than cedar season! Once those billows of smoke come to town, they remain until a good rain helps clear the air for a couple of days.

[callous taoboy]

4. I've about had it myself-

This same thing used to happen in Oregon when the grass-seed farmers would torch their fields, but I believe that the public outcry was so great that they had to modify this practice.

Why are people so bloody stupid?

[Warpy]

6. Not bloody stupid, bloody poor

It's not like they can afford herbicides. They wait for those weeds to germinate then they burn 'em off, along with the previous year's stubble. Then they plant.

It's what most folks did before mechanization and chemicals.

[callous taoboy]

7. Wrong:

http://www.american.edu/TED/mexpest.htm

also:
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1988/10/mm1088_06.html
-snip-
MEXICO CITY--Boca de Lima is a collection of huts scattered among lush green fields in the coastal state of Veracruz. Seven hours by bus north-east of Mexico City, it has no electricity, no running water and one general store. It is far removed from many aspects of modern life, with one notable exception: "Of course we use pesticides," says Alfredo Gutierrez, a farmworker and father of nine. Next door to Gutierrez's home, a man stands in the middle of a lime orchard spraying weeds from a silver canister strapped to his back. The blackened land behind him looks as if it had been hit by a flamethrower. The man, who wears no protective clothing, not even gloves, explains that this is a much cheaper way to kill weeds than hiring someone to do it by hand. No, he doesn't think the pesticide will get into the limes.

Pesticides are big business in Mexico, but controls on the use of many chemicals--including several banned in the United States--are lax, experts say. Still permitted, for example, are DDT, aldrin, clordane, and clorobenzolate. Even pesticides considered scientifically "safe" can be dangerous in a developing country like Mexico, when semi-literate farmers ignore or cannot understand warning labels or instructions for proper use. Too big a dose of a pesticide, or a pesticide applied to the wrong crop, can be fatal.

plus:
http://www.beyondpesticides.org/news/daily_news_archive/2003/05_22_03.htm
Fear of Pesticides Wafting Over Texas
(Beyond Pesticides, May 22, 2003) Plumes of smoke that could contain poisonous pesticides amassed in the skies above Houston last week, according to the Houston Chronicle. The smoke, suspected to be from burning fields and rainforests in Mexico and Central America, has appeared in years past as well. Although the smoke that emerged last week has not been tested for pesticide presence, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) tested the smoke in May 1998 and detected trace amounts of toxic pesticides, some of which are banned for use in the United States.

Many developing nations still use or have only recently stopped use of extremely toxic chemicals which the U.S. has deemed unsafe to use within its own borders. The U.S. ban does not mean that these chemicals are not manufactured in the U.S. or do not find their way into the country. Workers in Mexico burning fields that have been saturated with insecticides and herbicides stir up a toxic mixture that travels into the atmosphere and is carried by winds. TCEQ spokeswoman Adria Dawidczik commented, "We are pretty much at the mercy of Mother Nature on this. We can't tell another government how to take care of its agriculture. It's just part of global air pollution. This is the same thing as us getting dust from the Sahara Desert."

From Mother Jones:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1995/01/schrader.html
On a single scorched block in Villa Jua'rez, Sinaloa, Mexico, four young men have leukemia. Another died of the disease last spring.

The cluster of sickness may have nothing to do with the tons of toxic pesticides that flow into every water source available to the residents of this small farm town; it may be unrelated to the four nearby airstrips where farmers load planes with pesticides to spray over the surrounding fields; it may not be linked to the work that brings young men home soaked to the skin with the chemicals they apply to crops.

But while there has been no comprehensive study of the tragedy, you can search far and wide and not find a single doctor who thinks it is anything but the pesticides that are making the young men of this flat, hot valley sick.

[Warpy]

8. Pesticides and herbicides aren't used by the small

subsistence farmers. They can't afford them. They still do slash and burn, just like poor folks all over the globe.

If Mexican agribusiness is doing this, though, there really needs to be an outcry against it. The Mexicans are catching the worst, of course, but that stuff does travel, and there's a reason a lot of cheap pesticides are cheap: they're banned here.

[NNadir]

9. I know what you mean.

I once travelled from Mexico City through the mountains to Cuervenaca. I nearly choked to death.

My host told me "the peasants" (his word) burn the fields and that's what was going on. (I drove over the mountains at night, and didn't see for myself.)

It was horrid. I don't know how people live through that.

[IDemo]

10. This practice is not limited to Mexican farmers

It is also still the norm in the Palouse region of Idaho.

On the lack of concern by the US government (EPA) over health issues caused by field burning: http://www.earthjustice.org/news/display.html?ID=1091