Comm: "In programme one Earth Report followed Russ Dilts of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as he traced the route of pesticides from Thailand to Cambodia. Dilts found claims by the manufacturers to exercise controls through 'product stewardship' to have no meaning in Cambodia."

Russ Dilts: "After a week in Cambodia on the toxic trail, we're back in the city of Bangkok. During this last week our colleagues here have been contacting the government and the industry association and specific multinationals, to see if we can meet with high-level policy makers, with business leaders, and if we can make any visit to actual factories. Andrew."

Andrew Bartlett: "Hey, how are you?"

Russ: "Good, good, good."

Andrew: "How was the trip?"

Russ: "It was great. Got back last night, got the dust washed off. What we found in Cambodia is what I've been seeing since '93, but worse.

"We're seeing all the major players flooding across from both borders, so pesticides flowing in from, from Vietnam and from Thailand. Stuff that's banned, 1As, 1Bs, 1As, 1Bs. We went to stores and just taped the racks from top to bottom and there are all the usual suspects, every multinational company, plus the Thai firms, plus the formulators out of Vietnam. They do have their sub-decree out, but as usual they, how can a small government, new government like Cambodia's deal with the pressure of multinational companies? Companies we estimate spend over $1 billion on sales and marketing alone, in the 12 countries of Asia we work in. $1 billion just on sales and marketing, and that clearly just overwhelms anything that can be done by a staff of two in a Cambodian ministry. Anyway, what's - that's my news. What's happening here?"

Andrew: "It's been very frustrating trying to get a meeting with anybody. Nobody wants to talk to us."

Comm: "For nearly three months, we had tried to get an official reaction to FAO findings but did not succeed. Finally we had to make do with a recorded exchange between Andrew Bartlett and Wyn Ellis of the Asia Crop Protection Association which represent industry, and with Rolf Dieckmann, Group Manager of Bayer Thailand."

Wyn Ellis: "Hello."

Andrew Bartlett: "Wyn, hi. Russ, Russ Dilts and the rest of the crew are now back here in Bangkok, I mean they want to discuss the issue of product stewardship. Companies like Bayer have these wonderful policies in which they state that they'll do whatever they can to protect human health and the environment, and yet these chemicals are freely available and the companies must know this is happening, everybody who goes to Cambodia knows this is happening. What, what is the industry doing about this?"

Wyn Ellis: "I think that there are two issues here. The first is that Bayer cannot, Bayer Thailand cannot be responsible for what is happening in Cambodia."

Andrew: "Okay, we know that the Cambodian government has difficulties in enforcing these current laws, and if the company knows that happens, then shouldn't the company consider stopping the production and sale at the top of the distribution chain, if it knows that further down the chain, these things are being misused?"
Wyn: "Yeah well I mean I'm not in a position to, to, to you know, to advise which chemicals are safe, which chemicals are not safe. If you have a question regarding specific products, and it seems you do have a beef about Folidol here, you know, I think that we, we would always be bound to refer you back to the particular relevant manufacturer or producer."

Comm: "A few hours later we got through to Rolf Dieckmann, Group Manager of Bayer Thailand."

Rolf Dieckmann: "What kind of, I mean what, what, what are you looking at?"

Andrew Bartlett: "Well I think, I think there's an issue here of responsibility, and if you know that a product is being used illegally and is being used in a situation where it's very dangerous, then you have to take responsibility for what's happening down the distribution chain, especially if you have a policy on stewardship."

Rolf Dieckmann: "Which you know we do have. Since I've been here I've obviously tried to find out what the products are that are going, if any, into the neighbouring countries. Obviously we know there is cross-border, illegal cross-border trade with agro-chemicals, okay, but exactly what products they are, we haven't confirmed yet, the only thing we found was some products coming in from Vietnam. Well I appreciate the, the feedback and as I said that's a big concern for us, particularly all this information, and we will take this further."

Russ Dilts: "Okay. Okay, thanks very much."

Andrew: "Thank you."

Comm: "The Pesticide Action Network (PAN), which monitors pesticide use worldwide believes the company is already aware of the problem."

Sarojeni Rengam: "I know that PAN Germany and the Bayer co-ordination group has brought this issue up to Bayer, and they basically have answered by saying that they, they do not know what happens to their pesticides once it goes, you know, to, to a country like Cambodia, where they say they have no control, but what we are saying is that this is, you know, they're making a profit out of this, huge profit, and they should be responsible not only on the production and sales but how it is used in the field. If it is causing pesticide problems then it should be withdrawn. It should not be used in those kinds of conditions."

Comm: "Several weeks after our telephone conversation in Bangkok there was an official reaction. Industry still seemed to perceive that the problem is fakes rather than their own products. "Industry condemns the illegal trade in counterfeit pesticides and continues to work with governments and the distribution chain throughout the region to implement tougher action to eliminate this threat." The only person prepared to be interviewed on camera was the ex-governor of Bangkok, Dr Bhichit Ratrakul."

Dr Bhichit Ratrakul: "I understand why you cannot find anyone to talk about this, because the business itself is 30 billion per year. It's a huge amount of money, 30 billion a year, and without that this kind of big business, people would not like to touch, and I think that now under new constitution, we have to protect the quality of life. The government has sole responsibility to protect the quality of life of the people. We have to look at different angle, that investment, that's a business opportunity, that's economics, but this is life and people."

Comm: "Dr Bhichit Ratrakul is behind an innovative scheme."

Bhichit Ratrakul: "When I became the Governor of Bangkok thought that 10 million people in the city of Bangkok has to consume this kind of contaminated vegetables every day without knowing that those are the deadly poison products from the farm, and I just want to let the people learn and avoid the contaminated products. Later on I found myself that not just only to let the people know in advance what's going on, but we asked the, even with the local government, to do something to prevent that kind of product to be sold in the market."

Comm: "In just three years Bangkok has safer vegetables."

Russ Dilts: "We're in Si Moom Wong market. This is the largest fresh market in Thailand, 16 hectares. Literally thousands of trucks pass through here daily. Unlike what we saw in Cambodia, where vegetables were sprayed with pesticides and hours later went to the market, the vegetables here are inspected, they're inspected for a safe level of residue before they go to the market in Bangkok, before they get onto the tables of consumers."

Comm: "With nearly 2,000 truckloads of fresh produce arriving each day, the technicians manage to test around 70% of the produce. Just 5% is rejected each month."

Bhichit Ratrakul: "The consumer always think that without the holes, without the scars on the leaf of the vegetable, is good to consume. In fact, anything on the vegetable that you can find, a hole or a scar on that, means it's pesticide-free."
Comm: "Encouraged by the Thai authorities and royal household, many farmers have already turned to more ecologically sound farming. In Chainat district, farmers have started their own insectory. First they collect insects from the field, then they select and breed natural predators like the assassin bug which eats worms, and the ladybird beetle which consumes aphids. The insectory's success can be measured by its popularity as farmers come from neighbouring districts in search of 'green' bugs. For Dr Ratrakul, looking after Thai interests alone is not enough."

Bhichit Ratrakul: "We not just only try to solve the problem particular just only for Thailand, because some day for the Thais people, maybe we have to import vegetables from Cambodia, from Burma. In that case, we would be able to, we will not be able to solve the problem. I think that we have to look at the law to minimise the importation and the production of the pesticides. We have to tackle the problem on the basis of regional approach. Not just only the capital of Thailand, Bangkok, not just only the country of Thailand, but the whole region of SE Asia should be working together."

Comm: "The ecologically aware farmers in Thailand are part of a wider movement which began in Indonesia. Known as integrated pest management of IPM, this way of farming only resorts to pesticides when they are absolutely necessary."

Russ Dilts: "In Cambodia, we saw farmers caught on what we call the pesticide treadmill. We're now in Indonesia, flying to West Java, where we'll see an alternative to this poisoning of the fields. Farmers here are both creating and spreading an ecological method, an ecological approach to agriculture. We're going to go on our first stop to look at the beginning of the movement, a movement led by farmers themselves. Some have called this is the quiet revolution, something that's happened from village to village and farmer to farmer.

"This movement started actually in 1986, when then President Suharto banned the use of 57 formulations of pesticides on rice, and declared that farmers should learn about integrated pest management and more ecological methods of farming. Since then a very strong national programme has grown.

"In this district alone, over 23,000 farmers at last count have graduated from farmer field schools. What we're seeing here is going on simultaneously in nearly 200 districts of Indonesia. Here this movement is led by 400 farmer trainers, trainers who have, farmers who have graduated from a field school and then moved on to more complex activities, organising science and field studies and working to build their communities. If aliens landed on earth, the first person they would meet would most likely be a rice farmer. It is the largest single employer on the planet. Over 1 billion people make their livelihood from farming rice. IPM, or integrated pest management, starts in the rice field. This is the book, this is the classroom. We learn about the ecology of the field and how it functions.

"Bill Settle, behind us, the stranger in the rice, is an agroecologist from the University of California. He also spent five years in rice fields in Java looking at ecology, the ecology of the insect community, the aquatic ecology and soils, seeing soils as a living entity, the foundation of IPM. This is an unsprayed rice field. It is full of insects. Bill is now with the farmers as they do an observation and a collection and do their own agroecosystem analysis."

Bill Settle: "What we have here is about a three hectare plot of land, and in this three hectares we have at least 1,000 species of insect. Maybe only 1% would be actually causing problems, so our job has been to try and figure out what exactly is an immune system in a rice field. You might think of the, the spiders and the beetles and the predatory flies as the white blood cells, in, in, in the body of this rice field, and the alternative food sources and these plankton-feeding and organic matter feeding insects, would be like the, the immunisation."

Female translator: "The stemborer starts off in the seed bed and progresses to the young larvae than then burrow into the plant causing what we call a dead heart."
Bill Settle: "In our analogy of, of a rice field immune system, you have to look at pesticides as something comparable to the Middle Age practice of bleeding the patient. They didn't know about white blood cells, they didn't know about antigens and antibodies, they, they would, would bleed the patient to remove the bad humours. Now, this is effectively what you're doing with pesticides. You're killing of the immune system of the rice field by using insecticides."

Bill Settle: "She's saying that this is a dragonfly and that it's useful for eating brown plant hoppers as well as other, other pests. From the from a farmer uses an insecticide early in the season to the time in which he might see a resurgent outbreak of, for instance, the brown plant hopper, is usually going to be about 30 to 40 days, and unless that farmer understands the mechanism, what's going on in the field, that is the pesticide is actually killing the beneficial insects, as well as the pests, they aren't going to necessarily intuit the fact that they sprayed 30 days after transplanting and 60 days after transplanting they have a brown plant hopper outbreak. That's why you need an educational programme that looks at cause and effect relationships of what's going on in the field. An education is a long-term investment, and it's, it's going to cost some money. It's going to be literally an investment."

Comm: "Understanding the ecology of the field entails more than gaining a knowledge of bugs and plants. Here farmers are learning about soil properties and discovering solutions for themselves."

Female translator: "Before we had the farmer field school we didn't have the confidence to speak. We were just force fed packages from above, from the government. We had to use them without any explanation as to why we should follow these instructions and packages."

Comm: "In a neighbouring district, IPM has increased farmers' understanding of their crops and helped them develop management skills which have led to a thriving agribusiness."

Russ Dilts: "What we see here is something that started very small. It started as a field school about eight years ago. If we look here, we see something that many corporations or organisations attempt to do but have trouble with it. It is a strategic plan, beginning fully with problem analysis, goal analysis, programme matrixes down to actual activities. This group took on the problem of seed. They're now producing their own quality seeds and distributing them across ten villages. They took on the problem of high prices of fertiliser. They're now producing organic compost and fertiliser, and last year they sold 35 tonnes of this.

"This is a clear example of the jargon word empowerment. Power that can be created by people and by communities as they gain control over their lives and over increasingly broad issues that affect them. This is the essence of IPM. In this whole hampa ran here, this whole set of contiguous fields, is completely pesticide-free. You notice the traditional method of fish-growing - this canal along the edge is full of fish, which you cannot have with pesticides in the field. The women here are doing a seed selection process. They're in the field selecting the best tillers and the best grains, and they're selecting quality seeds off an area larger than 50 hectares. For thousands of years, farmers have been the selectors and breeders of rice. This changed some during the green revolution, and it's changing now as we hear of GMOs. GMOs and seed control by a handful of multinational companies instead of by millions of farmers. We're seeing now where farmers are coming back and regaining control over seed, over something very vital to their lives."

Comm: "Preparing rice seed for sale doesn't end with selection, but the farmers think it's worth it."

Female translator: "The reason we grow our own seed is because if we buy it from the market the price is higher and the quality is less good. We've tested our seed against government labelled seed and found our seed to be better quality. After people try it they want to keep buying it."

Comm: "The farmers sell their seed through their own IPM co-operative store which is also the site of their organic fertiliser enterprise. Like their seeds, the farmers are convinced their produce outstrips commercial competition."

Male Translator: "The results are better with the organic fertiliser because the soil becomes more fertile and the plants are healthier because there's more organic matter in the soil."

Comm: "With large numbers of farmers converting to IPM, there's little demand for pesticides."

Russ Dilts: "What's interesting about this store is that we just came out of Chilloncha Village. There, there used to be a lot of small kiosks selling pesticides, like we saw in Cambodia. Now there are none. If you want to get insecticides you come here, to the capital city of the sub-district, and even here your stocks are, are small and limited, and you're moving over to fungicides, herbicides and bio agents, though we do find a few things here that are in the process of being banned. The law's unclear now, they should have been banned several years ago."

Comm: "The ecological methods developed by IPM farmers are not confined to rice."

Russ Dilts: "We're not in Pangalengan sub-district, in the hills of West Java, about 40 kilometres south of Bandung. We're going to see some farmers doing cabbage. This is the major crop in this area. After Cambodia, and from what we've heard in other places, many doubt that you can grow cabbage without using chemical pesticides. People further doubt that farmers can train other farmers to grow cabbage without pesticides. What the farmers are doing here, they'll be examining plants. They do a transect across the field on marsh plants, they're measuring height, they're checking for leaf damage, they're checking for insects, they're checking soil to see the moisture, doing analysis of the various factors in their agro ecosystem. This is the observation and data collection. One, one important thing about a field school is that it's held in a village in real farmer fields. As the farmers are working, people passing by in the road, including this man, who sprays, will stop to see what's going on. They'll recognise farmers they know, they'll begin to ask questions. This is how IPM starts to spread across a community."

Comm: "In a field nearby, farmer trainers examine the extent of leafminer infestation in a pesticide-free potato patch, which has been set aside as a test site. They collect the yellow fly traps which attract the leaf miner and replace the sticky plastic. Before returning to their lab, they gather leaf samples."

Russ: "What we're seeing here is farmers involved in a scientific process. These are farmers who've been traditionally ignored in this. They have a store of local knowledge, a store of experience in their fields. In IPM this is especially important, because biology is ferociously local. We have variances from field to field, we have variances from season to season, and habitat and microclimates vary to a great degree. Farmers have traditionally been offered package solutions. They've been seen as problems. Here we've seen how farmers are actually looking at parasitoid populations, looking at effects on, on other insects, capturing over time, data, analysing data, which allows them to access other forms of knowledge, allows them to link to research efforts in other parts of the system."

Male translator: "After we get the data on parasitoids and leaf miners we plot it across the season. Through this graph we can see that the critical period of leaf miner infestation occurs 40-60 days into the season."

Comm: "Understanding the ecosystem of their fields helps farmers reduce the amount of pesticide they use. This leads to other benefits."

Male translator: "There's no special market for IPM products. I get the profits up front because I save on inputs, especially pesticide. I still hope for a special market for IPM products, which will give us more motivation to develop this kind of agriculture. On potatoes I've cut the cost of production by 30% while on cabbages between 50-60%. And I can use the savings the cover my daily needs and other productive activities."

Comm: "As a farmer trainer, Isep conducts many different field experiments."

Russ Dilts: "In this field we're seeing farmers tackling clubroot. They're using a combination of agronomic measures, cutting the roots, and also applying some local, traditional botanicals, to assist in keeping the infection from spreading, so farmers are becoming expert, farmers are gaining a foothold in a number of cropping systems; rice, rotation crops like soybeans and even the complex highland vegetables."

Comm: "IPM doesn't mean all pesticides are banned."

Russ: "We're not saying that we can instantly get rid of all pesticides in the production of vegetables. What we can do, however, is go from a very high, in fact egregiously high level of pesticide use, down to something more rational, and this is simply done by farmers learning how their crops work, observing insects, observing disease, building on their local knowledge of agronomic practices, so we can cut it down up to 80% almost immediately. From there, farmers begin to do their own experiments on local problems and work toward a more organic agriculture."
Comm: "Anxious to share their knowledge, the farmers, who've formed a national network, have also set up a newspaper."

Male translator: "First the 'newspaper' is important because farmers are scattered across the country and we have IPM farmers throughout 11 provinces, and second we need to share new ideas and innovation across farmers."

Russ Dilts: "Farmers comprise the largest silent majority on the plant. This is changing. Their newspaper, Putani, goes out in 10,000 copies a month. It reaches policy makers, the general public and the farm community. It is written and developed and distributed all by farmers. There are a range of advocacy issues that farmers are tackling. Just while we've been filming, groups of IPM farmers have met with national parliament, with the national commission on human rights, and in West Sumatra, at the province level, a major protest was televised when farmers were trying to get pesticides out of their agriculture, so farmers are working on the simple principle of speak truth to power. Take real issues from the field and make sure they're heard. Farmers are gaining voice."

Male translator: "We really hope that through this media we develop a process for empowering farmers because no-one can really empower farmers except farmers themselves. Farmers must do it themselves."

Russ: "We've come to the end of the toxic trail. We've seen the damaging effects that toxic chemicals, pesticides, can have on the environment, upon human health and even upon the crops they're supposed to protect.

"We've ended up here in Indonesia, seeing something different, seeing farmers who are gaining voice, taking charge and pushing for a more ecological agriculture. Now's the time of choice. Are we going to go down the same path, which may threaten our very existence, or are we going to side with farmers and ecology?"