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The town that banned pesticides

A one-of-its kind citizens’ movement and referendum lead the people of Mals, a small town in Italy, to ban all synthetic pesticides, writes Heena Khandelwal

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(Rigt) Philip Ackerman-Leist in A Precautionary Tale, a book on Mals.
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The need to regulate chemical pesticides in farming, and instead use organic manure cannot be overemphasised. Yet India is a far way off from achieving this. Just last month, 48 farmers died in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, after spraying a mixture of pesticides on their cotton crop. In Rajasthan, only 16.3 per cent farmers use organic manure, according to a recent study. In contrast is Mals, a small municipality in northern Italy that recently became the first one in the world to ban pesticides.

Located near the country's border with Switzerland and Austria, Mals is in South Tyrol province in the eastern Alps and has a population of around 5,300 inhabitants. Traditionally, the area has had rolling green pastures, hay meadows and grain fields. Thanks to climate change and commercial monoculture farming, apple growers had bought land in the area and converted them into orchards.

Since South Tyrolean apples are much sought after, farmers made as much as Euro 25,000-40,000 per hectare. But this came at a cost — apple trees required lots of pesticides, and the residues had begun appearing in crops grown in nearby fields, even on those certified as organic. Tainted organic farms risked losing their certification for at least three years. It was at this point that the villagers decided to take a stand.

An organic dairy farmer named Günther Wallnöfer, who had transitioned to organic farming in 2001, was the first to realise this, writes US-based academic Philip Ackerman-Leist in A Precautionary Tale, a book on Mals.

"Initially, he was unnerved when apple orchards were established next to his meadows in 2010. Although there was a required buffer of three metres between his hay meadows and the new orchards, he felt the need to analyse his hay for pesticide residue. 
The results confirmed his worst fears. Günther then reached out to Mals mayor Ulrich Veith for help, and that's how the movement began," says Leist, a professor at Green Mountain College, in Poultney, Vermont, United States.

Word of Günther's predicament quickly spread among the community, local organic farming associations and environment groups, says Leist. Soon, volunteers started a series of discussions, which were joined by more and more people, and groups sprang up to help in the initiative. "One group, Adam & Epfl, used guerilla art to encourage resistance, doing things such as placing brightly painted serpents throughout the town in the middle of the night. A group of women, tired of the lack of female voices, quickly became the initiative's social media and communications hub," recalls Leist, who stumbled upon the movement while leading a study tour in South Tyrol in 2014.

Leist had heard that a referendum was underway and took his students to meet one of the activists. "The people of Mals had put forward a referendum that would ban all synthetic pesticides from the 95-square-mile township. The referendum was passed with the support of three-fourth of participating voters," he adds. ?

Could this ever happen in India?

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