The organophosphorus insecticide banned by the European Union is used to promote flowers in Taiwan. Ten times the concentration of poison fog floating everywhere, environmental pollution is difficult to measure

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The pesticides that the European Union wants to ban, but Taiwan uses it to help the lotus flower blossom? In the domestic lotus industry, organophosphorus insecticides such as Taosong and prednisone are used to promote flowers, and the concentration is many times higher than when it is used to kill insects. The "washing" spray method not only has a direct impact on the health of farmers, but also poses a serious threat to the ecological environment. and it doesn't comply with the regulations on the use of lotus spray at all.

Organophosphorus is a kind of pesticide with strong toxicity. Doson is more controversial in the world, and the European Union has decided to ban it this year. However, the lotus industry in China has been using organophosphorus agents to promote flowers for more than 40 years, and farmers rely heavily on it. Not only do the farmers' associations make no secret of teaching the method of spraying flowers, but agricultural units have also acquiesced in it for years.

It is tacitly understood that Lianwu has no legal anther. But in order to ensure the harvest, everyone sprays, and if you don't spray, you don't feel safe. However, the most serious damage is the health of the farmers themselves.

Most of the ruddy lotus, fog and winter fruits are based on improper promotion of flowers (Photo _ Cai Jiashan) Ten times the concentration of poisonous fog, farmers bear the brunt, and environmental pollution is incalculable.

From July to November every year, it is the flowering period of lotus flower pesticides. Farmers will come up with insecticidal prednisone or tausong, but unlike insecticidal dilution of 1000 to 2000 times, the flowering agent must be thicker, with a maximum dilution of only 200x, which is equal to ten times the usual concentration. Only in this way can it cause "stimulation" to the fruit tree, let the old leaves fall, and urge it to grow new leaves and sprout flower buds.

A Pingtung farmer in the Lianwu Garden complained that during this period, the neighboring fields kept spraying pesticides, because the flowers were sprayed more than once, and the high concentration of toxic spray spread everywhere, causing ecological catastrophe and killing all the insects, not to mention possibly polluting his field.

He also questioned what impact such a thick pesticide would have on children and residents when some lotus gardens were right next to schools and communities. Not to mention the farmers themselves who bear the brunt.

The air photo of Qiang Garden Primary School shows that the campus is very close to the Lotus Garden.

"if you use three cans of Taosong in two minutes and spray it twice in a few days, how can you do IPM if you spray it like this again? How to do biological control? " He angrily pointed out that this old habit of "destroying flowers with hot hands" runs counter to the direction of today's policy.

Although the lotus flower industry generally believes that this method of promoting flowers will not cause the final pesticide residues, because it will take three or four months from bud germination to fruit harvest. However, this farmer observed that some lotus parks are "traditional" and will be sprayed several times. When the fruit trees blossom and bear small fruits, how can they ensure that they will not remain on the fruit at this time?.

The risk of food safety is low, but farmers are highly exposed.

In order to understand the situation of organophosphorus residues on fruits, "upstream and downstream" obtained two lotus spray samples that had been sprayed with Taosong flower in Pingtung Lianwu Park, and sent them to Teng Dems Inspection Company for 373 pesticide residue tests.

The results showed that there were four and six pesticide residues in the two samples, including Taosong, which were 0.03 ppm and 0.05 ppm, respectively, but lower than 1 ppm of Lianwu. According to the analysis of the reasons, because Taosong is a non-systematic pesticide, it must be exposed to it before it will remain, while the lotus fruit really grows after it blossoms and does not come into contact with pesticides. If it is sprayed in the small fruit period, as long as there is bagging, it will not be exposed to Taosong.

Therefore, farmers generally think that the anther will not remain on the fruit, and there is no doubt about food safety. But the farmer may not have thought that the total body exposure when he sprays a ten-fold concentration of anther is likely to be much more than the daily dose per person.

Why does lotus flower use insecticide to promote flower? A "beautiful misunderstanding" more than 40 years ago

Most fruits use growth regulators, so why do lotus farmers use pesticides to promote flowers?

This must be recalled to a "beautiful misunderstanding" before 1949. According to an interview by sociologist Yang Hongren in the book "how the Community moves: factions in the hometown of the Black Pearl, the Local Master and the overall Construction of the Community," Wang Denan, then director of the fruit tree department of the Fengshan Tropical Horticulture Experimental Branch of the Agricultural examination Institute, recalled:

"at that time, there were farmers in Neipu Township who left some weight when they sprayed pesticides on the rice fields. I wanted to say that it was a pity to lose them. It happened that the rice fields were next to the lotus garden, so they sprayed the remaining pesticide net lotus trees. Who would have known that coincidentally, the lotus tree lost a lot of leaves, but the lotus tree blossomed a little earlier, not only in a neat time, but also in more numbers than before. "

This pesticide is the insecticide "prednisone" (farmers often call the factory name "prednisone"). If you can urge to blossom early, you can grab the sales opportunity, so the trick of pesticide reminding flowers has become a well-known skill of planting lotus fog.

The technological evolution of lotus flower promotion is actually a brilliant chapter in the collection of grass-roots wisdom in Taiwan's agricultural history. After spraying to promote flowers, farmers have successively developed multiple techniques such as ring carving, soaking, root cutting, shaving heads, and covering black nets, turning from summer fruit to winter fruit, and the lotus fog produced in winter is redder and more profitable, and the cultivated area has grown vigorously ever since.

Immersion is also one of the tricks (photo courtesy of Lai Rongmao) the last shot of a series of tactics: spraying high concentration insecticide

As a result, lotus flowers blossom and bear fruit half a year earlier, and now most consumers think that lotus flowers are harvested in winter, but they do not realize that this is an artificial green miracle.

In order to subvert nature, farmers use all kinds of tricks to suppress lotus trees, covering black nets to block photosynthesis, ring peeling to cut off water transport, shaving their heads to cut off all leaf nutrient supplies, and soaking them to make it difficult for their roots to breathe ⋯⋯. All these "adversity" are to make fruit trees feel a sense of crisis and want to carry on the family line. In agricultural terms, it means to force fruit trees to change from vegetative growth to reproductive growth in order to "regulate the period of production".

Although the flower-promoting technology continues to evolve, it has not been abandoned as the origin of the pesticide. After the black net, immersion, ring carving, and root cutting are "ready for blossom" (Note 2), when the net is opened, it is still necessary to "shoot" it, that is, to spray a thick round of insecticide. Farmers believe that only in this way can the fruit trees "move."

Shaved head (photo courtesy of Lai Rongmao) spraying to promote flowers is illegal, and the industry is used to it

Lotus farmers have been spraying flowers for years, and the whole industry is used to it. A fruit farmer surnamed Zheng said, "without spraying to promote flowers, farmers will not be able to eat and sleep," because a whole year's harvest cannot be gambled. Another farmer surnamed Luo put it more bluntly, "if you don't spray, you will drink the northwest wind!"

The reporter also called the Fengliao Peasant Association to say that they wanted to buy anther, and the service staff taught generously: use prednisone for the first time, and then spray "poison silk book" (Taosong) five days later.

Huang Chin-Liang, chairman of Taiwan's Lianwu Industry Development Association, explains that in the past, farmers used prednisone, which was cheaper, but later some experts said that cheap drugs might have poor solvents and were more likely to cause drug damage, so many people switched to Taosong, while others used both. If you encounter a cold spell, the stability of prednisone is poor, and the leaves will fall off. With Taosong, the same concentration will not cause drug injury.

However, prednisone is not on the list of recommended medications in lotus mist at all, and it is illegal to use it, and Taosong can only be used to deal with powder beetles in lotus mist.