Posted on 08/19/2004 6:48:52 AM PDT by blam
Sewage waters a tenth of world's irrigated crops
12:01 18 August 04
NewScientist.com news service
A tenth of the world’s irrigated crops - everything from lettuce and tomatoes to mangoes and coconuts - are watered by sewage. And much of that sewage is raw and untreated, gushing direct from sewer pipes into fields at the fringes of the developing world’s great megacities, reveals the first global survey of the hidden practice of waste-water irrigation.
And, however much consumers may squirm, farmers like it that way. Because the stinking, lumpy and pathogen-rich sewage is rich in nitrates and phosphates that fertilise crops free of charge, suggests the survey presented at the Stockholm Water Symposium on Tuesday.
“Wastewater irrigation is in an institutional no-man’s land,” said Chris Scott of the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute, co-editor of the study. “Water, health and agriculture ministries in many countries outlaw the practice, but refuse to recognise that it is widespread.”
He estimates that 20 million hectares of the world’s farms are irrigated with sewage. A quarter of Pakistan’s vegetables, including salad crops, are grown in sewage effluent, the study found.
And business is booming. One farmer in the heart of an un-named West African city grows 12 crops of lettuce a year from his sewage farm. In many fast-growing megacities, clean water is in desperately short supply, where sewage is plentiful. And the sewage pipes keep flowing even in the dry season, when irrigation canals often dry up.
Toxic waste
Farms hooked up to sewage pipes make big profits. The study found that in parts of Pakistan the price of fields watered by sewage pipes is twice that of neighbouring fields irrigated with clean water.
In Mexico, Jordan, Israel and Tunisia, sewage is specially treated to remove pathogens and make it safe for irrigation. But in India, China and Pakistan, the study found that treatment is rare. The sewage is added to fields complete with disease-causing pathogens and toxic waste from industry.
Sewage is probably the biggest source of water for urban farming, which provides an estimated one fifth of the world’s food, said Scott. In Hyderabad, the Indian city where he works, “pretty much a 100 per cent of the crops grown around the city rely on sewage,” he said. “There is no other water available.”
Many consumers would not buy produce at markets if they knew it had been grown in sewage, he agrees. “Often farmers take the produce to distant markets, where customers don’t know how it is produced.” And farmers themselves run the greatest risks of disease, he points out.
But the study concludes that banning the practice is not usually practicable. “We need to recognise that sewage is a valuable resource that grows huge amounts of food. So instead we should help the millions of farmers involved to do it better,” said Scott.
Fred Pearce, Stockholm
Ensure-Our-Domestic-Food-Supply PING
The Clinton Administration wanted to move much of U.S. food production to third-world countries.
Won't the vegans and PETA get a real kick out of this?
The people that died last year at the Chi Chi's in Pittsburgh was from vegtables grown in sewage from Mexico.
One more reason my wife and I have been putting in a garden the last several years.
Millorganite fertilizer is sludge from the City of Milwaukee waste water treatment systems. It works great.
Florida uses treated wastewater for golf course irrigation (recall a story from earlier this year where city crews tied into the wrong waterline?)
It's the same sort of thing going on over there, It's just that we process it and remove most of the nasty stuff (pathogens, etc.) first.
When will you be ready to ship your produce out to the FReepers? I'll take a BUSHel of everything you grow!
Yummy! (BARF!)
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Eat sh*t pal!"
Anyone having salad for lunch?
Geez, this practice has been around since the beginning of mankind. It wasn't that many years ago, before all the regulations, that our waste department had the biggest red tomatoes growing in the, um, poo pile from undigested tomato seeds.
Now PETA will have another reason we should be vegans. Recycle!!!
Eat simply, that others may simply eat.
Let's not forget that this situation is series - this situation gives a whole new meaning to the old "East Sh*t and Die" line.
Next to the canal is where some locals grow food. I've seen a woman enter the hut, do her business and not five minutes later drop a bucket into the canal and water the plants.
It's the reason why I don't eat lettuce, tomatoes or pretty much any vegetable or fruits when I'm in Asia.
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