Uganda is one of the Sub Sahara African countries with the greatest potential for organic farming because of her comparative advantage of having pollution free environment.
Through promotion of organic farming, small-holder farmers can learn the organic equivalents and apply them to raise productivity and quality of output for sale at premium prices, raising their incomes and reducing poverty. A good example is the organically grown cotton grown in Lira is sold to Phoenix in Uganda and exported to China with genuine organic label.
However, use of DDT against mosquitoes can adversely affect the country’s organic farming potential. In many developing countries where DDT was used in the 1960s, organic farming is no more.
Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) was first synthesized by a German chemist Othmar Zeidler in 1874. In 1939, Dr. Paul Müller independently produced DDT. Müller found that DDT quickly killed most vectors. The use of DDT increased enormously on a worldwide basis after World War II. However, problems related to extensive use of DDT began to appear in the late 1940s.
According to Tony Prato; a professor of resource economics and management at the University of Missouri-Colombia, just as Plutonium, DDT is as highly persistent and potent substance and very hazardous to living organisms even if used in minute doses. The biological half-life of DDT is about eight years — it takes about eight years for an animal to metabolize half of the amount it assimilates. Although the build-up of DDT in environment can be reversed, it can take more than 15 years to break down in the environment.
The use of DDT was banned in the United States in 1973, although it is still in use in some other parts of the world. DDT can cause human carcinogen — damages the liver, the nervous system, reduces reproductive success, can cause liver cancer and can damage the reproductive system.
The use of DDT will increase the degree to which humans and ecosystems are exposed to the risk from pollution. For example, there is a health risk to humans who drink water with concentrations of DDT. This can impair human health, worker productivity decline, and cost production and provision of health service will rise since more money will be needed to be spent on defensive expenditures in order to eliminate the adverse effects of the DDT pollution.
Ends
