A tragic accident

One day, three boys were working in their father's cotton field, removing weeds.

By the time they finished work, they were hungry.

There was a corn field next to the cotton field, so the boys picked some corn and ate it.

Fifteen minutes later they started to vomit. They were taken to hospital, but one of the boys died.

CORN

What had caused this tragedy?

The previous day, the boys' father had sprayed his cotton field with a very toxic pesticide called endosulfan. Some of the pesticide had gone into the next field, and was on the corn that the boys ate.

When you have eaten something that makes you sick, you VOMIT: what you have eaten comes back up from your stomach and through your mouth.

Endosulfan is an extremely poisonous pesticide that has been banned in many countries. For some time it was not used in West Africa, but it was brought back again to kill a kind of pest, called a bollworm, that destroys cotton crops.

It is easy to see how dangerous endosulfan is: the earthworms die as they try to get out of the ground, then the birds that eat the earthworms die too. One farmer explained:

"Fields smell awful two or three days after spraying because almost every living thing has been killed and starts to rot."

BOLLWORM

Why have the farmers started using such dangerous chemicals again?

The problem is that if a pesticide is used too much, the pest becomes resistant to it: in other words, the pesticide no longer kills that pest. Then other, stronger pesticides have to be used. This is what happened in the case of the bollworm that destroys cotton in West Africa. The bollworm became resistant to other pesticides, so farmers started to use endosulfan again.

When a pest becomes RESISTANT to a pesticide, the pest is no longer affected by the pesticide.