Reasons for the poor usage of chemicals on food production

Warm greetings to my steemit friends. It’s a pleasure for me to share with you from my experience on pesticide handling and usage for crop production. A lot of farmer now use but chemicals on food production and only a few care to respect the withdrawal period of these poisonous chemicals.

Agriculture is the main occupation for the Cameroonian people. The activity is dominant in the rural areas where there is still available land to exploit. Due to the on going anglophone crises, there exist the reduction in the quantity and quality food supplied to urban center thus the reason for high prices. This is because the labor force have drop and only few people do engage into the sector. The few who have uplifted up the sector are mostly the age and the less educated class. Most of the crops are market gardening amongst which is the dominance of tomato cultivation with the full use of chemicals.

Tomato is the most highly consumable vegetables which is mostly used for cooking and making salad. The cultivation is enhance so much with the use of chemicals by farmers to fight diseases like pest and fungi so as to increase production but the usage of these chemicals are poorly handled. The production needs constant monitoring and maintenance thus need for advanced technical know-how to manage it.

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Poor handling and usage of pesticides by farmers

There exist laws put in place by the pesticide committees on how to handle and use chemicals. It’s recommended that the chemicals use should be safe both to the farmer and farm workers as well as the consumers. Most of these safe chemicals are too expensive and hard to purchase and that explains why farmers use any kind of chemicals just with the aim of increasing production without putting into mind the health status of the consumers.

From my findings, most of the farmers have not attained school and do not attained organize training on how to use chemicals and majority of them are primary school leavers who can not read and write well. This low level of ignorance on the know-how of chemical management explained why chemicals are misuse thus leading to long term amount of its residues on the harvested crops.
Parameters such as pre-harvest time, chemical withdrawal period and spraying frequency are not respected. The too much used of these chemicals are as a result of favorable environment which encourages the breath of diseases that attack tomato.

With the above finding on how chemicals are handle and use on vegetable production, I strongly recommend to consumers to limit the eating of raw vegetables like salad if it has not been grown organically. Thanks for reading. Hope you grab something from it.