By Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. Courtesy The Island

The rationale for banning agro-chemicals in May 2021 and going all organic” was mostly the claimed (but false) poisoning of the food chain” by chemicals”. It was well known that organic farming even at its best can only supply a tiny fraction of any nation’s food requirements, unless drastic steps are taken (like halving the population and forcing all to be vegetarians; see https://www.dh-web.org/green/CD-Mueller-OrganicL.pdf). Today, having realized the impossibility of providing the vast amount of organic fertilizer” needed even to get minimal harvests and avert famine, the government has done a knee-jerk purchase of nano-fertilizer from India.

A government working in the crisis mode has NOT asked if nano-urea can be a health hazard to farming communities, and instead accepted what the Indians say. The product was launched only on 31st May 2021 and sells in India at about $3-4 for a 500ml bottle. It is claimed that 11,000 farm trials were conducted by the Indian National Agriculture Research System in the preceding years. Looking at the published materiel I suspect that these only looked at yields and did NOT monitor the health of the farming communities. The preceding years even overlapped with the pandemic when health chaos prevailed.

Whether with DDT, thalidomide, glyphosate or nuclear waste, the impact on human health requires studies over several generations. With conventional materials, tests on micro-organisms and smaller animals with short life spans provide useful information. But this is not true for nanoparticles as their toxico-kinetic pathways are still quite unknown. Although the Indians say that the nano-urea has been tested for bio-safety and toxicity following Indian government guidelines as well as OECD international guidelines”, no details have been published. It is an open secret that there are no accepted OECD guidelines for the toxicity of various nanomaterials. The earliest nanourea declared nearly two decades ago in the CN1269774C Chinese patent, other products like the hydroxy-apatite nanourea from SJP university which is a few years old, or the Indian product which is only a few months old, have not been adequately investigated for their environmental and health impact.

The claim by the Indians that their product is eco-friendly” and safe to humans is an unsubstantiated statement, very likely to be false.

Nanoparticles are ultra-small. Their size is that of Covid-19 Corona virus particles. Being ultra-small, nanoparticles penetrate into foliage, roots or soil extremely efficiently. These materials, especially when sprayed, can get into human skin, eyes, ears, lungs, intestines etc., and instantly penetrate through epithelial layers into every organ and cell, womb and fetus, brain and neuron, chromosome and gene. They will act with high efficiency becoming hundreds of times more toxic than the parent substance from which the nanomaterial was manufactured. While the nanoparticle penetrates the foliage like a magic bullet”, their action on soil and leaf organisms, and pollinating insects can be akin to a cluster bomb” that destroys indiscriminately.

Lung inflammation, granuloma, and focal emphysema are found in studies on SiO2 nanoparticles. Gold nanoparticles are used in food technology and found to cause chromatin changes in the nucleus of human lung fibroblasts, making changes in gene expression in mouse fetus leading to lung cancers. Silver nanoparticles enter the intestinal mucus barrier and increase oxidative stress, damaging cell membranes, DNA, and chromosomes as well. Even at low concentrations, the toxicological effects of silver nanoparticles become evident, while abnormal cell damage, shrinkage, apoptosis, and skin cancers occur at higher concentrations.

Use of nanofertilizers creates a sophisticated agricultural industry that is the future. Nanofertilizers will increase yields, but they should be deployed with highly sophisticated safety clothing and usage protocols. Full-face masks and overalls should be unpenetrable to nanoparticles. The nanomaterials must be applied by trained farm technicians with the discipline of semi-conductor clean-room” technicians who engage in the fabrication of nanomaterials.

My research on nanomaterials at the National Research Council of Canada since the 1980s have been for optical and electronic technologies where sealed fabrication plants are used in manufacturing. Similarly, in the context of agriculture, I have long advocated that the steps beyond the green revolution are these sophisticated technologies, but deployed within sky-scraper” grow towers sealed from the environment, thereby freeing up farmland for reforestation. The alternative of using these technologies in the unprotected environment is like releasing synthetic viruses (nanoparticles) into ecosystems whose evolutionary tools have no defense against them.

Let us forget about the environment for the short term and ask about human safety. Where is the necessary nano-impregnable clothes and masks for the 1.2 million farmers who spray the nanourea? Furthermore, Nanourea should be sprayed so that the flora and fauna other than the targeted plants are spared. The long-term effects of such exposure are UNKNOWN at present.

In contrast to nanomaterials, conventional agrochemicals have been used for many decades. Substances like glyphosate or DDT have faced large-scale studies and periodic reviews sinCe the 1970s. The large-scale health study of the US government on Glyphosate with its adjuvents involved monitoring some 54,000 farming families over nearly a quarter century, ended in 2018 and established its safety. There had been many in-depth studies on most agrochemcials, and in many countries. In contrast, nanofertilizers have been available for a very short time, and we do not have reliable health-safety guidelines for these new materials.

The agricultural policies of the present government, or the previous government had been increasingly set by pseudoscience activists mesmerized by elite-class propaganda about creating toxin-free environments for themselves. They get their cues from wealthy environmental NGOs in California and Europe that list genetically engineered food as Franken-food”. The local movement was strengthened by nationalists who equated traditional agriculture to organic farming”, and by leftists who heroically” target multinationals like Bayer-Monsanto.

So an unlikely combination of Colombo-7 tree-saving (Ruk-Raekaganno”) types, Buddhist monks like Ven. Ratana, Marxist-inspired MONLAR activists, Nath Deviyo” inspired shamans like the late Ms. Senanayaka of Helasuvaya”, misguided academics like Dr. Nalin de Silva and their acolytes, lined up with medical doctors like Anurddha Padeniya of the GMOA, and Sanath Gunatilleke of California inspired by figures like Stephanie Seneff and Dr”. Mercola.

Their band wagon blamed every non-communicable disease on agrochemicals. The rise of an unusual form of Kidney disease, now believed by many researchers to be caused by geologically polluted water containing fluorides and other salts was a trump card for them. A staunch supporter of traditional agriculture (and traditional medicine) could write (quite incorrectly) that Paddy and other cultivations have been done in this country for thousands of years without chemical fertilizer. During these times there were no serious CKD problems. Started using Chemical Fertilizer from 1950s and after about 20 – 30 years serious CKD problems arose”.

Meanwhile scientists themselves had rightly begun to express serious concern over the excessive use of agrochemicals and the degradation of the soil and environment. This had begun to occur after the arrival of an uncontrolled free” market, further primed by subsidized fertilizers.

So, the stage was set for tighter restrictions on agrochemicals. Instead, the Toxin-Free bandwagon set the pace. First came a ban on the popular herbicide RoundUp” by the Sirisena government. Ven. Ratana was Sirisena’s prime mover in agriculture. This debilitated all agricultural sectors, causing a loss of at least three times the bond scam, and created the prospect of a collapse of tea exports. However, ideologically driven movements do not learn from evidence, and the present government decided to outsmart not only the Srisena government, but all other nations, by becoming the first to go 100% organic” by banning all agrochemicals.

That ban was imposed like a bolt from the blue in May 2021. Even the military was diverted to making compost, while shipments of chemical” fertilizers and pesticides were turned away. That it was impossible to generate enough organic fertilizer, containing at most a mere 2% of nitrogen to replace urea fertilizer with 46% N dawned on the government planners only when their yeoman efforts failed. This had been predicted in our earlier articles, already during the Sirisena era when the threat of the so-called toxin-free” agriculture had loomed over the country.

So, in trying to create a toxin-Free nation” based on 100% organic, a desperate government has come to its very antithesis, i.e., very high technology that deals only with artificial materials that are beyond anything organic or inorganic. It plans to explode a cluster bomb of nanoparticles on a fragile ecosystem and an unsuspecting citizenry.