 Agriculture on the move. My name is Philip Sidney, your host. Today we are discussing a very important topic, and that is pesticides, the use of pesticides. So you will hear about the delisting, the banning of pesticides, the hazardous pesticides, and everything pesticides today. And with me there are three individuals. With me to my right is Mr. Peter Alexander, who is the pesticide registrar. And next to him is a rose between two thorns. We have Colletta Charles-Leo, who is a senior environmental officer. And of course next to her is Mr. Christopher Lubin, who is the owner of FDEL Pest Control Solutions. Welcome to the program, Lady and Gentleman. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. Mr. Peter, I know you were not new to this. That's why you said you're not coming back here again. Pesticides. Before I get anywhere with the delisting, tell us the role of the pesticide board. The pesticide board is the regulator for pesticides and toxic chemicals in Zendushia. The issue in performance, we do pesticide registration, and we do monitoring of pesticides in the agribusiness places. So people like FDEL, they want to register a new chemical. They come through. Yes, they have to come with an approved label, an application, and the certificate of analysis. Plus the MSDS sheet for the pesticides. It is reviewed. It is taken to the board for registration. Okay. So that's how registration works. Okay, recently I heard there were a number of pesticides hanging around. And they were still in use. I know some other countries, they were banned. But I heard recently that you all did list about three hundred and ten pesticides. Tell us about this. In 2019, the approved pesticide list for Zendushia was submitted to the FDEL for review. The findings of that review indicated that there are more pesticides registered than the entire European Union. We have more pesticides registered than Guyana. Zendushia? Yes, we have more pesticides registered than Jamaica. On our approved list of pesticides, we have fifteen highly harmless pesticides. And we have four pesticides that meet the carcinogenic. So that's very important for the board to take a decision in terms of the listing and banning of those pesticides. Now, for us now, we're going to ban four pesticides. All pesticides containing malefion in the ban. All pesticides containing diazena. All pesticides containing carburetor. And all pesticides containing chloropyrifers and chloropyrifers in the banning of those pesticides. In terms of the delisting of pesticides, we have three hundred and ten pesticides in the list of our approved pesticides. We think we're pesticides that are no longer being manufactured. The pesticides whereby the formulations have changed. And pesticides that people have not imported for the past ten years, we're going to list those pesticides. And if in case somebody wants an important permit for those three hundred and ten pesticides, we're going to ask them for information, latest information on those pesticides. And then we're going to re-register those pesticides. So they can be re-registered? Yes, once you commit the latest information. Because we are pesticides that were registered in the early 1980s. So in 2023, a lot has happened in terms of the chemistry of those pesticides. It is very important for the board to review the approved pesticides and take this very important decision to make sure that the products that people are using now, the farmers and the structural best control, those pesticides are safe for human health, the environment and plant health. I already mentioned malacyanin, and I'm coming to Mrs. Leo because at one time, I think in your, before being the old user of the malacyanin, are you still using that? Yes, so we still use malafianin as one of the pesticides that, you know, for adults, they'll decide in killing the adult mosquitoes. Because we recognize, like all other pesticides, that there are negative effects of using the pesticide. And of course, the administration of health, the health and safety of our solution public is our number one concern. Hence the reason we're looking at alternative pesticides that we can use to ensure that it is effective at getting rid of the mosquitoes at the adult stage, and it poses as a little hammer to the human population. So this is definitely something that we are currently working on. The field of malacyanin is on the listing. It's banned on the listing. We're going to ban malafianin. So how does that effect use you as your department? So, like I said, we're going to be looking at alternatives. But we have seen, which is the sad thing, we have seen resistance to some of the other alternatives that are actually out there on the market. So we've had resistance testing done with the Caribbean Public Health Agency, and they saw that resistance, which is one of the reasons that we went back into using malafianin. So we are looking at, because it's been a couple of years since we've used some of these other pesticides, we're looking at if we still have resistance to it. Because if we continue using just malafianin, we may develop some resistance to it. So where does that leave us? But malacianin has been used for a long, long time. But I think it's been a couple of years, for a good couple of years, we did notice it at the ministry. We were using other pyrophytes, other chemicals. It was only in 2015 that we started using malafianin again. And we're trying our best to promote not just the alternative pesticides, but we're looking at improving the education, the sensitization that we're doing with our general public. Because if we focus on just the use of chemicals and we don't address the situation at the root, the problem is just going to persist. So in many instances, people call us and they ask us to come to do the fogging. But when we go and we do the fogging, it only kills the mosquitoes at the adult stage. It won't get rid of that mosquito that you have in your drama and your containers, your tires and so forth. So we're really trying to encourage persons before we even get to the point where we need to use malafianin or we need to go in to spray any chemical in any neighborhood that they're doing what it is that they're supposed to do at their home. So just ten minutes walk around your home and ensure that you have no mosquito breeding sites, any active or potential mosquito breeding sites. Check your containers, your roof gutterina. Get rid of all appliances like your washing machines and your fridges and so forth. Yes, tires that can actually collect water and breed mosquitoes. So we're really trying to take home that message before we can, before we get to the point of having to use chemicals and pesticides in our environment. It is the last resort. It is the last resort, sir. So we really want to push that proactiveness. Coming to you, you've been involved in that for many years now. I've been involved in it for almost twenty years. Thank you. But pesticides as a whole over thirty-five years. Oh, thirty-five years. Hearing the delisting, how does that affect you? The delisting of malafian would not affect any area where the mosquito management program. It's just one part of an interior-wide mosquito management program. So if one were to look at the mosquito management around their homes, it's about understanding the behavior of the mosquito. And we go back to simple biology. It's life cycle, complete metamorphosis. So if we get rid of the team at your stages, we would have less adults to worry about. And fogging would only be something that would happen maybe after a week or something after a rain event where you would not have been able to get rid of all mosquito-breeding sites or water sources. That's one. You have model molecular films, products you could put on the surface of water that's not being used to prevent the mosquitoes from surviving if they were to lay their eggs in there. Or you have bacteria that can be used to put into the water. The larvae eat it and it kills them. You also have growth regulators that can use water sources to actually prevent the larvae from becoming a mosquito. So there are several options out there. But I agree with what Charlotte said. The most important thing is to understand those breeding sources and try to reduce them as much as possible. Other than mosquito control, and your company do other... Yes, we do the wide range of pests. We stress integrated pest management. The average person calls and says, I have a rat, I have cockroaches, and you know, come and spray it. And we educate people that it's not about spraying. Spraying just like the use of another fan in every other pest control management is only one aspect of integrated pest management. So you need to know why you have a problem. If you look at bed bugs, for example, which is something that's around. People talk about it. A bed bug cannot walk into your house. It's a hitchhiker. You carry it into your house. You have to go out. You have to watch where you sit. If you come back home, your clothes, where you put it, you need to pay attention to those things. And then the breeding will be placed in your home if you don't take care of them. But we do a wide range of pests. And we stress to every person. You must first inspect and understand what caused the pest problem. So we refer to us for conducive conditions. Food, shelter, water, temperature, to others extent. These are what encourage pests to visit the environment. So if I can reduce one of these conducive conditions, like in the case of mosquitoes, if I remove the water source, I reduce the incidence of the pest feeding. Do you use inorganic chemicals? We use inorganic chemicals, but we limit the use and we use them in a targeted way. So for example, you could do a crack and crevice treatment, for example, where you put the pest aside directly and where the pest is. So let's say a German cockroach or a bed bug, they are fig motartically. They like to stay in tight spaces. We use a lot of baiting systems. Even in the case of mosquitoes, we use a mosquito trap. But we use baiting systems for pests like toonites, where they, because of the way they feed and communicate, they transfer information mouth to mouth. And you can have them transfer the pest aside to a toonite. So that's the modern way of looking at pest management and not just spraying large volumes of pest aside. Because if I see a toonite mound, for example, and I spray it, it doesn't mean I killed off a queen. You're weighing that exact piece. I'd rather get the pest aside transferred to her. So if you look at pest aside from an agricultural point of view, back in the day you would apply permissive to the soil. And this pest aside would absorb stick to the soil and the pest would get impacted. So if I were to do that in the case of, let's say, toonites, I am basically limiting my application to there and hope that these termites carry the pest aside all the way back. But I have rain and I have other factors that can impact it. So if I use bait, I know for sure I can always come and monitor and look at what's happening and keep on feeding them and eventually take out that population. So right now, your highest percentage of chemicals are organic? Not all of them. We still have inorganic products. And we have certain minerals like the borates that we use. But we use the synthetic products strategically, not the wide scale. If you look at agriculture and you have a crop, you spray the entire crop. But if I have a pest problem, because we have to understand the biology, we know where they would be. So we target them in that space. So if you look at the American cockroach, for example, people say they're flying to my home. You have two of them that look almost as the same. There's the Australian cockroach, which is a vegetarian, and the American cockroach, which is not. But you'll get it more like in your septic tank, in your wet places, right? That's where your kids think where, you know, you might have a leak. So as you say to us, you have that problem we would come to inspect, to figure out exactly where it is and treat accordingly. Okay. Because the delisting chemicals and those you ban, okay? I remember some years ago, there were lots of chemicals here. I'm sure they part of the delisting. FAA was involved in trying to get them out. One of the problems is to get chemicals out of your island. After the delisting, what happens? You're not going to issue components for those pesticides. Okay. Now, presently, you have persons in possession of some of those pesticides. So what is going to happen? I'm going to phase it out. Since we're not going to issue new important components, it means whenever that what is available on island present is exhausted, it means that we'll be able to manage the stock. Yes, we had a project with the FAA where we collected absolute stocks from a number of countries in the United Kingdom. But what we have to understand is that these things do not, it's not sustainable. It only happens once in a while. So we have not had this program for about five years. And presently, we have a lot of pesticides that are accumulating in a container. We have that, you know. Because when you bring in, as I said, the board is responsible for the regulation of pesticides. So, for example, if you bring in unregistered pesticides, those pesticides are confiscated and stored in a container at the union. So definitely we need to have a system in place, not only a system for regularly listing of pesticides, but also this puzzle is very important for us as well. So there's no mechanism in place for the solid waste management authority. It's not responsible for pesticides and this puzzle. That's a loophole in the legislation. We don't have a loophole in our way, we do for our break. We are watching agriculture, the moves stay tuned, we'll be back very soon. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Rural Development is placing heavy emphasis on the concept of food security. It's our prosperity, our future. The farmer incentives program of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Rural Development is aimed at reducing the cost of production and promoting food security and accessibility. All farmers, fishers and agro processors who've registered and own a farmers registration card qualify. These incentives include the percentage reduction of excise tax and import duties for agricultural and fisheries production inputs, which are imported. These include approved agricultural products for an approved agricultural project, for example vehicles, fishing vessels, animals, animal feed, planting materials and other farm inputs. Farmers can apply by completing the application form and submitting with all relevant documents attached. For further information, contact the Deputy Director of Agricultural Services at 468-4125. Welcome back to the program, Agriculture. On the moon, of course, if you're tuning in lately, we're talking about pesticides, use of pesticides, but the list of pesticides, and of course, I have people sitting here who are well-appled enough to discuss this activity here. You mentioned F.A.U. and the list of chemicals that are not in use, but they are studied union, okay? You mentioned also that solid waste is not responsible for the disposal of this. So how are you going to get those chemicals out of there? Well, normally you have projects collecting, when you have special projects in the region, we collect those pesticides. We're hoping that there is two in some projects we may come up with. That is the use of those pesticides. Well, you hope it's a motive. No, it's not a motive. I said, originally and locally, we do not have the facilities to deal with those pesticides. If you want to destroy those pesticides, you have to export them to France and those bigger countries. That is where the facilities to incinerate and so on. So hold on, so if nothing comes around, no project comes around, those chemicals are going to be stressed. Be in a container union, yes, until such project. So in thousand years of the the rolling material and stuff like that. Well, the pesticides are stored in special containers. These pesticides that we have are at union. They are stored in special containers. So it will take some time before that happens. Okay, okay. But I know people are complaining about that, the chemicals that you know. People are around the area. Yes, we had a particular pesticide that was very volatile, that was stored in the container. But so far we have dealt with the issue and then nothing happened. Nothing happened. Okay, so you should wait for the photo to come around to address the pesticide. Mrs. Leon, apart from the control of the Maastrichto, are there any pesticides responsible to household pesticides and responsible for control? Okay, we also do control of rodents as well. So we have a rodent control aspect of our program. So the sad thing is that due to limited human resources we aren't able to do this type of rodent control in all communities. But we focus pretty much on the towns and the cities on the island. So in castries we would normally have officers in the city of castries doing rodent control. They would be doing the assessments, looking at areas where you see higher populations of rats and mice. They would be doing the same thing in view for Souffre. We would also be responding to the complaints if we get any complaints in various communities that they have issues with rodents and so forth. So we would do that. We would also attend to issues with fly infestation, rotiism. We would give the homeowner or community members advice on what should be done. And if it's something we do not have the chemicals for the treatment then we would indicate to them that they may need to use a private pest control company or something. So in other words, your education to the people in the community? Educational, yes, but we do do treatment. We do treatment as well. So we would go in, like I said, we would do the assessments, look at where we see in the higher populations. We would look at the signs of an infestation. We would look for the rub marks, the tracks. We would look for evidence of annoying in a particular area and so forth. We would look at the other factors which would contribute to the proliferation of rats and mice. So take for instance rats, mice. They need free things to survive. Food, water and shelter. And in many instances in our communities, in our cities and towns, we provide all of those things for the rats. So we would go out and we would do the education but we also cannot run away from the level of treatment and beating that we would have to do in these communities and the cities. But at one time there was this chemical bit, the one that you bring in for that called BioRats. I heard it was from Cuba. What does it teach you in that? It was not allowed in because it was still one of the active ingredients for someone else. Based on that, the board took a decision not to bring it in. As to where it is right now, I don't know. That was your answer. As he said, one of the active ingredients, yes, it was biopesticide. But one of the active ingredients in this particular pesticide was salmonella. And when we researched salmonella that was in this particular product. There was a great possibility that it mutated. So the board had no choice but to have a huge registration of that particular product. And not all the Caribbean countries as well did not register the BioRats. Okay. So what bit do you all use? Okay. So what we would use, we tend to rotate our bit. So we look at the various active ingredients in the bit because you have fast clean bit, you have slow clean bit. Fast clean bit is not something that you can use for a very long period of time. Because of course when the rodents are very smart, right, when they see that they are dying because they are eating that particular rodenticide, they will develop bit shyness. So you have to have a rotation. So we may be using contract and we may use clear water. We will look at other bits. So we may use a fast for, if we see a very high infestation, we would use a brand of bit where you have a quicker kill. So it's fast clean and then phase it out into a more slow, slow kill bit. So we would have that rotation happening at our department. Maybe some devil advocate. I remember when I was in the rat. When you were in the rat. Just to run in the thing. But I noticed the applicators are well armed. They're well clad. And what happened to the public? Okay, so the reason the applicators are well clad is because they're exposed to the chemical at a higher concentration and for a longer period of time. So they are at risk because when we fog, people tend to say, oh, they smell, they smell, they smell. What we smell more of is the solvent that we use is the diesel that we smell more of versus the malefie. Right. So in that solution you have a much higher volume of diesel in it versus the malefie. The other thing is that the fog dissipates very, very quickly. And again in our geography there's always the wind always carries it around and so forth. So it never it never stays within that area confined area for a very long period of time. So it quickly dissipates and it goes off. And again the concentration that the public is exposed to it is so low and it breaks down so quickly that it doesn't pose a risk. But of course because of just the nature of malefying we are trying our best to avoid any issues to mitigate any potential risk. So this is one of the reasons that we do look for alternatives. Although we know that we're using it the right way and we're not causing too much harm to our people. But of course malefying does affect the insects which are very important. I remember as a child we used to run chase butterflies in the savannah. If you keep on spraying malefying you're not going to have butterflies to chase. So it's going to kill the butterflies it's killing your bees and pretty soon if we keep on spraying and spraying and spraying we're not going to be able to eat because the bees, the dragonflies the butterflies, they carry the pollen and they they, they, they they're essentially responsible for that. Exactly. So because of that we're trying our best to only spray female mosquitoes in response to dengue outbreaks on our island. Okay. So what are the issues any problems you face is it to be involved in this pest management business? The biggest problem to me is people come to you most times when the problem is out of or maybe they've tried certain options and it hasn't worked and they wanted to solve it one time. And based on my background I stick to, I need to understand the problem. Because if I just apply a pesticide to the point about the rodenticides you have what's called acute poisons which is a poison that the rat must have set in amount to that. If it doesn't eat it, it can get sick but it will remember what it ate and it will not eat that for up to three months which is much worse. Yeah. You know, I mean anticoagulants and the colicaciferous which will they wouldn't know it's a poison. So these can vary based on the generation of pesticide and they can kill as many as 24 hours so you need to know that. So if somebody says I have a rodent problem it's not just coming to put bait to get rid of it because if you put the bait in the current situation the rat has a menu. It doesn't mean it's going to take your part of the menu. So sanitation becomes very important. Exclusion becomes very important. And educating people that one, we have three rodents in terms of sure. There's the roof rat what you see on trees is different from what you see on the ground often now you're up and you have the house mouse. So you need to know which one you're dealing with and how to bait for them and what you need to do to prevent them from getting into your space. So the country is different the country can vary because the rodents are neophobic and also neophobic. Neophobic means they don't trust anything new Neophilic means the alpha rat will force the other rats to do stuff for them or they will be aggressively going after the alpha thing. So you need to understand that behavior and know how to deal with it. So people need to understand that it's not just about applying a pesticide, it's understanding the environment that the pesticide and reacting accordingly by removing food, shelter and water or one of these, then applying pesticides. Well ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the end of the program. I was about to ask for a final point submission of you but I was thinking of doing things that you just have one minute left. So I really want to thank you all for being here. Mr. Registrar I hope all the chemicals will be out of submission very soon. And Ms. Leo, thank you for being here and of course this, thanks again and I wish you all success and whatever and that was why. Thank you very much. You've been watching our report on the move. Thank you for being in the program. Remember our report on our business. Be it fresh. Submission is the best. The money is TSA. Thank you again. I'm Philip Sebelius saying goodbye.