How Nepal turned the tide on its ‘pesticide poisoning’ trend
Early data suggests the move is having an impact; by the 2022/23 financial year, reported deaths had fallen by as much as 30 per cent.
Dr Ghimire, now a doctor in the department of clinical pharmacology at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, is rightly proud of his teams work in restricting access to pesticides.
“This is the best thing I have done,” he says.
The issue is not unique to Nepal. Across the globe, consuming a pesticide remains one of the most common means of suicide, according to the World Health Organization.
Pesticides ‘nearly as dangerous as chemical nerve agents’
Roughly 140,000 people die annually of self-induced pesticide poisoning, with the bulk of fatalities in low and middle income countries like Nepal, where the toxins can still be bought in small bottles for just a few pence in local shops selling everything from beer to biscuits.
For pesticide manufacturers – most of which reside in the West, including the UK – making their products so easy to buy makes good commercial sense. However, most suicides are impulsive, rather than planned, hence the reason such products are so tightly controlled in West, and normally only available from specialist stores under strict licencing conditions.
“The worst of these pesticides are nearly as dangerous as chemical nerve agents”, Prof Michael Eddleston, head of the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (CPSP) at the University of Edinburgh told The Telegraph in 2019. “In many countries it remains the case that you can buy them in a local store and keep them on a shelf at home. Imagine being asked to keep a bottle of sarin stored safely under the stairs and that’s what you are dealing with.”
Today, a mounting body of research shows that curtailing access to the most dangerous pesticides in developing countries dramatically reduces suicide deaths without impacting agricultural output.
In Sri Lanka, which had one of the world’s highest suicide rates in the 1990s, deaths fell by more than 70 per cent over 20 years after specific, hazardous pesticides were phased out in 1995. Meanwhile Bangladesh saw fatalities fall by 65 per cent between 1996 and 2014 after 21 dangerous products were banned, and South Korea halved pesticide-related suicides after new restrictions in 2011. Nowhere recorded a hit to farming yields.