Government’s toxic malaise causes poisonings, not spaza shops

Reading the “The great spaza mystery” (Mail & Guardian, 1 to 7 November 2024) about the deaths of six children in Naledi, Soweto, from poisoning reminds one of a report in a daily newspaper about the poisoning of farm workers in 1995 who were given “dop” from an empty aldicarb container. 

The residue of this pesticide was sufficient to poison all 24 people. 

The press focused not on the structural injustices facing farm workers — why farm workers in the new South Africa were still exposed to the dop system — but instead framed the deaths as a whodunnit. 

Aldicarb (a carbamate) is a class 1a hazardous pesticide, the most toxic category possible, the same as Terbufos, which is part of the chemical family of organophosphates. 

Similarly, to characterise the 2024 deaths of six children in Naledi from Terbufos poisoning as a “spaza mystery” is to miss to the point that this was the result of deep antecedent structural injustice. 

Everyone wants to assign blame for this tragedy but spaza shop owners are not the culprits. If we don’t tackle the upstream causes, we will almost certainly see more poisonings in future. 

Despite years of appeals to the government to ban highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs) from scientists, activists and environmentalists, and the incontrovertible evidence that HHPs such as Terbufos are responsible for numerous poisonings and fatalities in the country, regulatory action to phase out these high-risk chemicals has been abysmally slow and ineffective. 

Why is that? 

Simply put, we have regulatory failure on the part of the government, principally, but not only, the department of agriculture, land reform and rural development.

In the face of industry pressure, the willingness of the department to preference the interests of the pesticide industry and commercial agriculture has led to a failure to prioritise less toxic and more sustainable pest control approaches.

The primary Act governing pesticides is so old (Act 36 of 1947) that it predates apartheid and, despite producing a Pesticide Management Policy paper in 2010 — albeit watered down from its more muscular 2006 predecessor following industry intervention — there has been no visible progress in updating the Act based on the policy, as was intended. 

Beset by a lack of funds and the haemorrhaging of staff to better paid jobs in industry, the Pesticide Registrar’s Office in the agriculture department abdicated responsibility for maintaining a publicly accessible database of pesticides registered in South Africa and allowed industry to take over that role. 

Poor to no communication on pesticides

You cannot find out from the department’s website what pesticides are registered for use. In what country does a regulatory authority tell the public asking for a list of registered pesticides to go to an industry website for the answer, where it is behind a paywall or only dispensed at the discretion of the industry? So much for our right of access to information needed to ensure an environment not harmful to health. 

No wonder, then, that South Africa continues to permit the use of close to 50 pesticides that are deemed too hazardous for people or the environment in Europe but which are considered acceptable here. 

As Collette Solomon, director of Women on Farms highlighted, why should African bodies be treated differently to European bodies? 

This shameful double standard was noted by Marcos Orellana, the United Nations special rapporteur for toxic chemicals, in his report in 2023 when he said the European Union’s export of banned pesticides “reproduces long-standing racist and colonial patterns of exploitation”.  

Significantly, Orellana’s report, issued more than a year ago, highlighted poisonings of children by Terbufos in circumstances similar to the current Naledi tragedy.

Research at a large Cape Town mortuary published in 2023 showed that Terbufos was confirmed as the causative agent for more than 50% of child deaths in a 10-year review of child fatalities in whom pesticide poisoning was suspected. 

Since 2023, Terbufos has been listed as a “restricted agricultural remedy” under Act 36, which is supposed to trigger a requirement for “additional information to be shown on the label concerning essential conditions in respect of the display, distribution or limitation on use”. 

But even this modest restriction is slow to be enforced on Terbufos labels, as are regulations to restrict the sale of highly toxic pesticide solely to registered persons, measures that might have put some checks and balances in place.

UPL warehouse fire  

A case in point is the fire during the 2021 riots in KwaZulu-Natal at the warehouse of UPL, one of the largest pesticide companies in the world that imported highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs) without permission or a permit to store such a vast quantity of pesticides and did so without an approved emergency management plan. 

Firefighters had no idea what they were dealing with and, as a result, their efforts to extinguish the fire unwittingly spread toxic effluent into the riverine system causing fish die-offs and unknown harms to people. 

The department of forestry, fisheries and the environment had issued regulations for the Rotterdam Convention on the prior informed consent procedure for hazardous chemicals and pesticides in international trade two months before the UPL fire. 

But these regulations were withdrawn due to industry pressure because the industry wanted “more time” to consider implementation. The government’s willingness to accommodate industry interests comes with huge costs to human health and the environment.

Cheap pest eradication

Let’s look further to understand how the Naledi poisonings came about. People living in poverty in many urban settings can no longer rely on municipal services removing solid waste. 

This, coupled with inadequate housing, means residents have to deal with rats and crawling or flying insects that overrun their food supplies. They turn to chemicals that are sold in informal markets, including some of the most hazardous pesticides. They are accessible and they are cheap.

Why is it that such pesticides end up in informal markets? The pesticide industry blames the vendors for allowing products to be used unsafely, stock being stolen from farmers and illegal cross border trafficking. 

Yet, the industry has long been aware of toxic pesticides reaching informal markets via formal routes and has done little to affect any product stewardship to prevent this. 

For example, toxic pesticides registered for agricultural use are purchased at agricultural co-ops and garden nurseries without any conditions or requirements for competence in its use. Legislation exists that is supposed to keep track of sales of highly toxic products, but there is no effective register for the distribution of these chemicals. 

We need urgent action to correct the gaping hole in our regulatory oversight, our enforcement and our government’s deference to industry at the expense of the health and lives of children, farm workers, small farmers and our environmental integrity. Not to mention protecting consumers from exposures to residues of HHPs in food sold in South Africa.

The deaths of six Naledi children is not a spaza shop whodunnit mystery. It is caused by the toxic malaise in the governance of hazardous chemicals that has not been addressed despite decades of evidence. 

Professors Leslie London and Andrea Rother are in the Division of Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of Cape Town.