Human Waste Used By 200 Million Farmers, Study Says

Facing water shortages and escalating fertilizer costs, farmers in developing countries are using raw sewage to irrigate and fertilize nearly 49 million acres (20 million hectares) of cropland, according to a new report--and it may not be a bad thing.

While the practice carries serious health risks for many, those dangers are eclipsed by the social and economic gains for poor urban farmers and consumers who need affordable food, the study authors say.

Nearly 200 million farmers in China, India, Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America harvest grains and vegetables from fields that use untreated human waste.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[javaman]

nightsoil has been used for thousands of years. nothing new. I bet you, some of the fruits and veggies that you buy at your local super market that come from overseas, a portion of them were grown using nightsoil.

[KillTheMessenger]

"nightsoil"

Best euphemism of the day award!

:-)

[JBS]

An archaic euphemism - dates from colonial America; back when everyone used chamber pots rather than stumbling to the out-house in the dark. No flashlights.

Properly composted, manure is manure, no matter what animal produces it.

[hellinabucket]

First it was pharmaceuticals showing up in our drinking water, will pharmaceuticals in our food be next? No wonder so many are dumbed down-they're all on xanax!

[Nyland8]

Using untreated human waste is a terrible thing. If the human waste at least goes through minimal treatment - a sufficient amount of time in composting or, better yet, a digester tank with elevated temperatures that recaptures the Methane - then the dangers can be mitigated. But totally untreated raw sewage is NOT suitable for growing food crops and the number of health hazards that may arise are legion.

8

[confuseddemocrat]

The unsanitary practices used by these farmers in developing countries coupled with the politicization and emasculation of the USDA and FDA by the Bush administration....and then we wonder why we are experience more frequent outbreaks of food poisoning which is caused by coliform bacteria

[KillTheMessenger]

When was the last time you got sick? Just asking, because if you were to go to one of these sites, you would be guaranteed to get sick on day one.

[mamacat]

My Dad grew up on a farm, and he said that they had been collecting the human waste on the farm for hundreds of years for use on the fruit trees. Nothing new here, just the fact that people in the cities don't know what goes on down on the farms.

[jvarga]

If its in the soil at the base of a fruit tree it won't be on the fruit? As opposed to if its dumped on a field of say, lettuce, where its in contact with what you actually eat.

[mamacat]

Hundreds of years ago, we did not know about germs and bacteria. Putting raw sewage on top of lettuce sounds like a pretty bad idea to me, too.
Putting raw sewage in a ditch around a fruit tree, then covering up the ditch as appropriate, may seem disagreeable to our sensitivities, but makes as much sense as using fertiliser, I believe. The raw sewage used was not just from humans, but from all of the farm animals. Without the fertiliser, the rocky soil would not have been nearly as productive. With the fertiliser, they were able to export prized fruit to other countries.

I read accounts from 20 years ago that in China human waste is still used in their rice fields.

[Mort]

This article is such a waste!

[auramac]

I have ulcerative colitis and am currently in beween jobs and remissions.

Could it be- have I finally come across a viable job opportunity?!?....

[mouselion]

"There is a large potential for wastewater agriculture to both help and hurt great numbers of urban consumers," said Liqa Raschid-Sally, who led the study published by the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

With the right site-and-region-specific design programs in place, it could be doo-able.
Permaculture design has addressed technologies that are possible for developing nations relating to human waste.

[Mort]

Don't you mean doo-doo-able?

[JBS]

Mort, God is gonna' get you for that ... and if he don't, we will.

[indyleftist]

You know now that I read this story again I wonder if this story was planted in the media by the fertilizer industry.

Maybe if people are outraged by third world county's use of organic fertilizer scotts/miracle gro can have the United States taxpayer subsidies "charity" to those countries. Using their products of course

Just a theory....

[indyleftist]

I don't see the story here

If you go down to your local sewer treatment center you find that they make fertilizer out of our used toilet water. Have been for a while.

And there's nothing wrong with it either. Plants like waste products and are great at recycling them.
There is a lot of phosphorus in particular that come out of it.

BTW They sell it as organic fertilizer. I would imagine a decent % of American organic food is grown with human fertilizer.

[JScott]

Indeed there is a regional wastewater treatment facility near LA harbor and right next door is a
'organic' fertilzer plant. And then there's the story of the couple on vacation and they go to a restarurant where they get the fresh fish from the pond and cook it to order, and the outhouse bathroom is right in the middle of the pond. And isn't there something about using water hyacinths to clean up waste water a lo tech solution?

[KillTheMessenger]

The story here is that these people do not have a water treatment plant with access to a microbiology lab. They do not treat their sewage and they don't do daily quality control like the plants you are talking about. This sewage is 100% guaranteed to be contaminated. Many live, some die. It's that easy.

[sparkey]

And yet, the FDA can't figure out why people in the U.S. are getting sick from eating food grown in Mexico, India and China. I'll bet the top people in the FDA don't eat anything from those countries.

[KillTheMessenger]

They can't figure it out because they have to sift through millions of tons of produce from tens, if not hundreds of thousands of sites to find a single contaminated sample. That part of the problem has nothing to do with this situation. Here we don't have to look for where the contamination comes from, at all. We already know. We simply keep ignoring it because WE are not the people at risk.

[mollysgran]

"Although farmers have used human waste as fertilizer for centuries, cities and governments have more recently looked down on the practice. But in countries like Ghana, officials do not have the money or infrastructure to provide alternatives." by Danielle Nierenberg on October 11, 2007

From: Real organic agriculture: Using human waste as fertilizer". in a blog by Danielle Nierenberg.

Very interesting article.

[KillTheMessenger]

Farmers have been dying from associated diseases for centuries. Sounds cool. We just ignore a problem that has an easy solution because we don't care to spend the money and it wasn't such a big deal in the past anyway. People were used to dying. So why change that now just because we can?

[neuron]

Like my grandfather always said, "Don't sh*t where you eat."

[KillTheMessenger]

How about we help these people to stop the practice and install proper water and sewage treatment everywhere? Now wouldn't that be better than pretending that "the bad" is better than "the worst"?

It's not like we don't know how it's done. We have centuries of experience with these techniques. And it's not even expensive. It's just that these people have neither the expertise nor the minimum amount of free resources to implement the required facilities. And the world community as a whole would not even feel the financial strain that would solve the problem, it's so low in the noise.

But the sad truth is that nobody cares. We rather read articles which say that "there is no problem because it's only a couple of million dead people a year". What if your child were one of the couple of million? Still no problem?

[JBS]

And what exactly is "proper water and sewage treatment"?

If you read the whole article, it says there are "low-tech solutions for "treating" human waste ... employing appropriate and time-tested indigenous practices."

Settling ponds and composting have been used for centuries to "treat" both human and animal wastes. In fact, they're used quite extensively by large American factory farms in the beef, pork and poultry industries. Pigs, cows & chickens make a LOT of waste. You got to get rid of it somehow.

Solids get separated; the liquid can be used for irrigation and the solids get composted ... and sold for BIG BUCKS at your local garden center.

Get ye to a library and peruse some back issues of Mother Earth News.