Speaking Truth Saves Lives
in the Philippines and India

Dr. Romeo Quijano counts himself ­fortunate. Like activists elsewhere, he’s been mired in one court battle after another, but he is grateful that he and his family, unlike so many friends and colleagues, have escaped physical attack and death for their defense of civil liberties. “Romy”, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the College of Medicine, University of the Philippines in Manila, had been an activist on issues of unsafe pharmaceuticals and the plight of the rural poor. He provided medical aid for protestors resisting the Marcos dictatorship, and continues to participate in human rights campaigns.

So he was not particularly shocked when, in 1993, he was first harassed by Hoechst A.G. The transnational chemical manufacturer filed a 20 million Philippine pesos suit against him for statements attributed to Romy about possible cancer hazards associated with endosulfan, a highly hazardous organochlorine insecticide—in the same class as DDT—responsible for injury and deaths worldwide. Hoechst, since consolidated into the Bayer chemical empire, was the world’s leading producer of endosulfan.

After attracting much local and international attention, that first case was dismissed. But the public debate around endosulfan’s hazards led the Philippines government to be among the first to ban its use.

In 1997, Romy made several visits to Kamukhaan, a village on the northern island of Mindinao, with a major peasant organization based in Davao del Sur. The group obtained testimony from some of the 150 families who were reporting health damage from pesticides. They found that two decades of pesticide use on the neighboring Lapanday Agricultural Company (LADECO) banana plantation had polluted the soil and the surrounding sea, killing trees, crops, animals and fish, and destroying the livelihood of farmers and fisherfolk.

The study itself provided evidence that influenced restriction of pesticides and promotion of safer and more equitable agricultural policies worldwide. Romy became a leader in the International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN) as well as the Intergovernmental Forum on Chemical Safety, and joined the board of PAN Asia and the Pacific.

Romy and his then seventeen-year old daughter Ilang-Ilang wrote up the findings, and in 1999 published an article titled “Poisoned Lives” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Philippine Post newspapers. The Quijanos described villagers with skin problems, headaches, coughing—all classic symptoms of pesticide poisoning—as well as several deaths attributable to the pesticides used.

The plantation company coerced villagers to sign retractions of statements made in the 1997 study. Then, in August 2000, LADECO, owned by Luis “Cito” Lorenzo, Jr., at the time a political adviser to the president of the Philippines and later Minister of Agriculture, sued Romy and Ilang-Ilang for approximately 20 million pesos over their Kamukhaan exposé. Romy was briefly arrested and harassed by police, and the case was eventually dismissed. But in 2002 LADECO sued again, this time for 5.5 million pesos, resurrecting claims already declared insubstantial by the court, also demanding that PAN Asia/Pacific remove the article about the Kamukhaan poisonings from their website.

As the new case dragged on, LADECO conducted laboratory tests incapable of detecting pesticides Quijano had identified as likely causes of the villagers ailments. And the judge has consistently refused to admit testimony from key Kamukhaan witnesses.

Romy admits feeling the pressure on him and his family, though he is anything but intimidated. Romy’s prominence in international bodies certainly helps to protect the Quijanos, and he has helped link the people in Kamukhaan to struggles in India, other areas in the Philippines and other countries where pesticide use is making life tragically hard. Today, the LADECO case is in its seventh year. Romy and Ilang-Ilang have kept going, with contributions of money from PAN groups and funders of IPEN, and strong popular support. Ilang-Ilang now works as a journalist and volunteers for PAN Philippines.

Life was cheaper than cashews in Kasargod. For years the people of Padre and other dusty villages scattered across the northern district of the southwest coastal state of Kerala, India, were in awe of the ‘huge bird’—a helicopter “bringing showers from the skies.” The “bird” was not blessing the people; it was releasing acutely toxic endosulfan. As the pilot flew illegally high to avoid power lines, the insecticide drifted beyond the scattered groves of targeted cashew trees that monopolize the landscape, contaminating homes and streams and the people themselves. Over the course of twenty years, spraying was routine, and endosulfan percolated into the local water table.

Plantation Corporation of Kerala (PCK), the largest cashew producer in India, started using endosulfan in 1979, just after this state-owned corporation was launched with funds from the World Bank. By the early 1980s, along with the spraying came reports of cows born with deformed limbs. Birds, bees, snakes and ants began to disappear. By the 1990s local doctors like Y. S. Mohana Kumar, were noting increased and unusual health problems in villages like Padre, Periya and Vaninagar, problems few local people were willing to admit even to each other, but similar to those reported elsewhere around the world where endosulfan is used—thirty-seven farmers dying in Benin, two boys dead in South Africa, flower workers poisoned in Colombia, and the villagers examined by Romy Quijano in Kamukhaan. The Kasargod district was becoming another “Silent Bhopal.”

In Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, endosulfan is well documented for both acute toxic and chronic toxicity, and for persisting in the environment. It is linked to cerebral palsy and other central nervous system disorders, congenital neurological disorders, body deformations, cancers, reproductive disorders, miscarriages, and endocrine disruption. The rates of these afflictions were unusually high in villages near the cashew plantations.

In 1993, Leelakumari Amma, a civil servant in the Kerala agriculture department, took a position with the department’s office near the Kasargod village of Periya, and bought land to build a home on the border of the PCK plantation. She hadn’t heard the stories of local illness and deformity. Two years later she and her family moved into their new home, only to find that pesticide applications drifted onto her property. Soon her son, a talented young singer, lost his voice. When it returned it had a pre-puberty pitch. Her daughter developed hormonal problems. Talking to neighbors, she discovered that others reported similar afflictions, and the word was that they came from the aerial spraying of pesticides.

Leelakumari demanded that the corporation stop spraying her property. Not only did it refuse, but a PCK official came to her home and warned her not to make trouble, reminding her she had only a few years of government service left to earn her pension. Undeterred, she organized a petition to stop the spraying. PCK responded by filing criminal charges, alleging that she and twelve co-signers had trespassed, stolen endosulfan and damaged a helicopter. The accused were called to the police station where Leelakumari proved that she’d been at work the day of the alleged incident. But a month later, when Leelakumari saw postings of PCK’s intent to spray again, she’d had enough. She sued PCK—not over technical violations of pesticide rules, but for her constitutional right to life.

As her public interest attorney won a stay against further spraying, PCK pushed on to higher courts and launched a media campaign demanding that Leelakumari compensate the corporation for its losses and expenses. They dispatched a helicopter to spray her home directly. She was frightened, but the attempt at public as well as private intimidation began to generate support from local people, her government colleagues, and NGOs. By 1999, Kerala advocacy groups such as Thanal became involved, developing a campaign to ban endosulfan and expand the fight to broader pesticide reform, and they in turn linked with PAN and other groups across India and around the world.

In 2001, the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) collected twenty-five samples of blood, fat, milk, plants, soil and water from Padre village. CSE reported that all of the samples contained alarmingly high levels of endosulfan, leading the state of Kerala to ban it. Spraying was soon reinstituted following industry-sponsored studies that claimed no residues of the insecticide could be found. But then the High Court received a confidential report by India’s National Institute of Occupational Health, documenting endosulfan residues in water and blood samples collected from Padre—a full ten months after the pesticide had last been sprayed on the cashew plantation. The report linked endosulfan to “significantly higher prevalence of learning disabilities, low IQ and scholastic backwardness” among children, and “serious neurological problems and congenital and reproductive abnormalities among the region’s people.” On August 12, 2002, the High Court re-imposed the state’s ban.

At this writing, the newly elected government of Kerala promised to uphold the endosulfan ban and has begun a program of compensation for victims of the poisoning. Since the endosulfan stopped raining down, birds, snakes and ants are coming back.

The ban may be overturned by the national government, yet that will surely be only another turn in Kerala’s struggle, like the ongoing campaign for justice in Bhopal, has become emblematic of the campaign against highly hazardous pesticides. As for endosulfan, it is being considered for listing under both the PIC and POPs treaties.

Those honoring Leelakumari as one of a “Thousand Women for the Nobel Peace Price 2005” have said:

…Her most remarkable quality is her ability to draw all concerned parties into her struggle—the villagers, courts, political parties, environmental groups and doctors. When she began the struggle, she was alone, isolated, and had little knowledge of the technical aspects of pesticide exposure. All she had to motivate and sustain her was the agony of seeing her children suffering, and her neighbors concealing theirs for fear of social and authoritarian ostracism.

Her struggle has set off wide-ranging discussions on the impact of pesticides on health, with other countries such as Cambodia banning outright the use of Endosulfan. For Leelakumari, it has been a long, painful, but fulfilling haul—for the poor and the dispossessed [to whom] the system seems too powerful to take on, she has shown that courage, eventually, pays.

The stories in this article were compiled by Dr. Stephen Scholl-Buckwald, PANNA’s Managing Director, and edited by Jan Buckwald, based on work by Ilang-Ilang Quijano; Matt Power’s “The Poison Stream, Letter from Kerala,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2004; and interviews by Dr. Medha Chandra of Dr. Romeo Quijano and Jayakumar Chelaton of Thanal in Kerala.