By Gwen Anderson
The story we want to share with
you this week is filled with hope and encouragement. It has been exciting for us here at Harmony
Valley Farm over the past few weeks as we’ve dug deeper into this rich
story. There is far too much for us to
be able to sum up in one article, so we’ve shared some resources for you at the
end of the article and encourage you to dive into this story and learn more. The story is about a small township called
Mals, which is (to our knowledge) the first municipality in the world to ban
pesticides. We first leaned about Mals
when we read about it in an article in September’s issue of Acres U.S.A. The article was an interview with Philip
Ackerman-Leist, a farmer and professor of Sustainable Agriculture and Food
Systems at Green Mountain College in Vermont, who is also the author of A Precautionary Tale. Ackerman-Leist is very familiar with the area
surrounding Mals, since he lived and worked in the area as a farmer in the early
1990s. In both his book and the article
we read, he highlights the struggles Mals went through on its long and
difficult journey to become a pesticide free municipality. Their story is one of perseverance, tenacity,
convictions, and the desire to, as Farmer Richard would say, “do the right thing.”
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| Mals, photo from motherearthnews.com |
Mals (pronounced Mahltz) is a
township located in the Upper Vinschgau Valley of the Italian Alps, in a region
called South Tirol. The township is made
up of 11 villages ranging in altitudes of 3,000 to 5,500 feet. The largest of the villages lends its name to the municipality,
so the villages are collectively known as Mals.
Even though the township is in Italy, the inhabitants speak German and
retain their Austro-Hungarian heritage. The
residents of Mals have been farmers for 30-35 generations, tending their small
family farms and carrying on traditions of rotating grain crops with vegetable
crops and keeping their soil healthy.
Most of the farms are small dairy farms, owning 8-12 cows, who grow
their own vegetables and have a handful of fruit trees near their homes. The area surrounding Mals is also the driest
in the Alps, with only about 50 days of rain a year, but the water coming down
from glaciers and easy access to irrigation have made this a prime agricultural
region.
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| Ulrich Veith, Mayor of Mals Photo from thelexicon.org |
Ulrich Veith became mayor of Mals
in 2009. He was elected because of his
desire to create a sustainable municipality while keeping with the local
traditions. The township was building a
micro-hydro-system to generate green energy to power their homes, businesses,
and the new Swiss-built train that brought their long abandoned rail system
back into use. The train brought tourists
who were interested in Mals’ picturesque landscape and the town responded by
making bike trails and opening South Tirol’s first organic hotel. It was a new renaissance period for the
people of Mals.
Elsewhere in South Tirol, there
was another sort of renaissance happening.
Climate change warmed the Alps and made South Tirol a perfect place to
grow fruit, and apples were becoming the biggest money maker around. The farmers’ cooperatives were building their
brands and spreading their markets across Europe and Russia. They borrowed the efficient tree trellis
method developed by the Dutch and the small 3-4 acre orchards were rolling in
money. With money in hand and looking to
expand, the apple farmers set their sights on Mals and the valley below, where
they could snatch up land at a low price.
With the apples came the pesticides.
Apple farmers are able to legally spray up to 30 different pesticides,
each one being sprayed 12-14 times a year.
While the rest of South Tirol was using 35 pounds of pesticides per acre
per year, Mals was making a wide-spread movement to organic agriculture.
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| Gluderer family's herb farm, Castle of Herbs photo from vinschgau.net |
The valley below Mals, which had
once mirrored Mals’ picturesque medieval farm landscape, had transformed into a
sea of commercial apple orchards. Urban
Gluderer and his family, whom had started an organic herb farm down in the
valley in the 1990s, were soon surrounded by conventional apple orchards and
quickly found the pesticide drift was spreading to their land. They planted hedges to protect their herbs,
but the produce was still too tainted by pesticides to sell. After several attempts to speak with
government officials in the provincial capital failed to provide an adequate
response, the Gluderers spent a quarter of a million dollars to cover their
farm with greenhouses as a means to protect their livelihood from the chemical
trespass.
In 2009, Günther Wallnöfer, an
organic dairy farmer in Mals, watched as two commercial apple orchards went in
next to his hay fields. He didn’t feel
the legal requirement of a 3 meter (10 feet) buffer between fields was going to
protect his farm, and stories like the Gluderer’s only gave him justification
to worry. As Ackerman-Leist said in the
article, “You can’t even turn your tractor around in a 10 foot radius!” The next year, Wallnöfer had cuttings of his
hay tested for pesticides. The first
came back tainted, as did the second and third.
Wallnöfer went to see the new mayor and asked him to do something. In a community that has a wind named after
them, everyone knew that no one was safe from chemical drift. Per Ackerman-Leist, “Pesticides represented
the death knell to the renaissance that [Veith, Wallnöfer] and others had
worked so hard to bring about.” So Veith
went to the provincial and local governments for assistance. What Veith received were two test orchards,
supposedly to test pesticide drift, but also to trial new fruit varieties. The people of Mals didn’t want more orchards,
and didn’t see the need for further testing when there was already enough
evidence of the dangers pesticide drift presented. In the summer of 2012, much to the chagrin of
the township, the test orchards were built.
In the end, the test orchards brought talks about changing the buffer
law, but nothing substantial ever came from them.
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Dr. Johannes Fragner-Untherpertinger
photo from thelexicon.org
|
It was clear that the provincial
government didn’t have its sights on the same goal, so the citizens rallied;
not just the farmers and environmentalists, but small business owners, the
local medical community, and concerned parents.
The Advocacy Committee for a
Pesticide-Free Mals was born in February of 2013, and Dr. Johannes Fragner-Unterpertinger,
the local pharmacist, was elected as the spokesperson. The Advocacy Committee started talking about
a possible referendum to ban pesticides in Mals. Speakers from around the world were brought
in to educate the community of Mals on pesticides, from toxicologists (Dr.
Irene Witte) and entomologists (Dr. Hans Rudolf Herren), to an EU food safety
expert (Hermine Reich) who supported “safe pesticide use.”
In the summer of 2013, Dr.
Unterpertinger, together with fellow activist Dr. Elisabeth Viertler, a
pediatrician, wrote a Manifesto of Doctors and Pharmacists calling attention to
the health dangers that pesticides present.
It was signed by 51 members of the local medical community. Ackerman-Leist quoted the pharmacist as
saying “When I see something jeopardizing the population here, which is coming
in tiny increments, just in the same way the medicine I give out is prescribed
in tiny increments, there is no way that I see that as appropriate.” “None of these pesticides are
harmless,” Dr. Unterpertinger said. “Providing
this information over the last years has borne its fruit. The community now
understands how dangerous pesticides are. If you have a bit of a conscience,
you cannot stay silent as a doctor.”
Meetings and education were not the
only form of activism in Mals. A group
called Adam & Epfl (or Adam & Apple in English, is a play
on words for ‘Adam and Eve’ in the local dialect) held cultural events to
showcase Mals’ unique culture and support the sustainable economic development
the township was striving for. They have
also been known to use a guerrilla art tactic or two, leaving painted snakes
around the towns and apple orchards as a reminder not to be tempted by the
“promises” of the Big Apple (a term coined to describe the commercial apple
industry modeled after the term “Big Ag” in the US)
.
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| 5 members of Hollawint, from left: Pia Oswald, Dr. Elisabeth Viertler, Beatrice Raas, Martina Hellrigl, and Margit Gasser Photo from thelexicon.org |
Martina Hellrigl and Beatrice
Raas, the founders of a woman’s group called Hollawint (which means “Stop right there!”), wrote letters to the
local newspapers pleading for the mayor to protect their health after the first
submission of the referendum was declined.
Their first letter, which appeared multiple times with over 60 different
signatures, read: “The increasing use of pesticides and herbicides in the
municipality of Mals has us highly concerned for our health and especially the
health of our children. We ask our
Mayor, who is responsible for the health of our citizens, to ensure that our
environment and our health are not endangered.”
Another of their letters, sent to government officials during the
referendum vote in September of 2014, focused on the highly profitable tourist
trade: “We wish for everything that the tourist
brochures have long promised: highly valued, healthy, and diverse foods that
are grown in healthy soil and embedded in a landscape in which people, animals,
and plants all have the possibility of a healthy life. We request that you
publicly give us positive support in public and act accordingly.” During the same time Dr. Unterpertinger was
releasing his manifesto, the women of Hollawing hung over 100 recycled
bedsheets throughout Mals stenciled with slogans promoting a pesticide-free
future. Hollawint also borrowed the guerrilla
art tactic from Adam & Epfl by placing hay-stuffed pesticide suits sporting
signs explaining the dangers of pesticides in high traffic areas around the
township, and painted sunflowers to remind people to vote “Ja!” (or “Yes!”) for
the pesticide ban referendum.
Eco-tourism was also a huge
weapon the residents of Mals had in their arsenal. “Probably the biggest mistake Big Apple made
was overestimating their actual economic importance,” Ackerman-Leist
stated. “Agriculture only accounts for
6% of the South Tirolean economy, while tourism is closer to 25%.” Elsewhere in South Tirol, stories were
emerging about bicycling tourists being sprayed by pesticides while riding the
countryside. In April of 2013, a Swiss
newspaper ran an article saying pesticides were ruining South Tirol as a
vacation spot, which the region’s governor scoffed at. Germany and Austria are also a huge tourism
market for the South Tirol area. When
the Environmental Institute of Munich ran a campaign in April last year
declaring many of the areas in South Tirol too filled with pesticides to visit,
the South Tirolean government and tourism office were up in arms. The institute then sponsored a bus trip to the
villages of Mals in an effort to support their pesticide-free initiative. A German tourism magazine interviewed Mayor
Veith, which Ackerman-Leist summed up: “He essentially said, ‘We offer the
perfect opportunity for eco-tourists.
Why wouldn’t you come to Mals, where you don’t have to worry about
pesticide drift in your hotel or being sprayed when you’re out bicycling?’”
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| A Farmer's Future's logo photo from thelexicon.org |
Once Big Apple realized the
citizens of Mals were serious about their referendum and were not going to just
go away, groups were formed to fight back and put pressure on the government to
intervene in their defense. While the
first attempt to submit a referendum failed, the second gained almost 3 times
the signatures of support required in 2014.
In response, a media campaign called A Farmer’s Future was launched by
the commercial fruit industry and allies of the South Tirolean Farmers
Association. This group tried to stop
the referendum vote by requesting that the government invalidate Mals’ town
council’s decision to allow the referendum only weeks before the vote. The South Tirolean officials themselves had
already stalled the vote on the referendum once by refusing to give Mayor Veith
the voter list, saying the referendum was inadmissible. When Veith countered the officials, they found
an error on the request form and reminded the mayor that the voter list request
must be completed, correctly, 45 days before the vote, thus forcing a
reschedule.
Finally in September 2014, the
citizens of Mals were able to pass the referendum to ban pesticides with 76% of
voter’s support, but it still wasn’t enough to make it a law. Mayor Veith and the town council had laid the
groundwork for a referendum passed by the people to become law in 2012, but the
change in the municipal code did not guarantee the referendum would be turned
into law, only that it must be considered.
The ordinances imposing the referendum weren’t passed until March 2017. According to Ackerman-Leist “it took more than
a year and an election of town councilors before they actually voted to develop
the ordinances to implement the referendum.”
Part of the issue slowing the
referendum being turned into law was legal uncertainty. The town council’s vote to change the
municipality laws failed twice, in no small part due to lawsuits against the
referendum (and a number of the activists) being paid for by the South Tirol
Farmer’s Association, which supported commercial interests. In 2016, the provincial courts even declared
that the referendum was illegal because it was sponsored by the Advocacy
Committee, six months after Mayor Veith and the town council had drafted the
ordinances. “The Malsers saw that as a
technicality,” Ackerman-Leist stated.
“The ordinances for a pesticide-free Mals were not overturned.”
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| Ägidius Wellenzohn, photo from vip.coop |
Lawsuits were not the only
backlash the Mals activist saw. Mayor
Veith, a member of the region’s most prevalent political party, was under
constant political pressure. Dr.
Unterpertinger, whose family had been pharmacists in the area for hundreds of
years, received death threats and required police protection. His garden was destroyed and his family’s graves
were vandalized. Ägidius Wellenzohn,
another prominent activist, has been an organic fruit grower for 30 years. Someone entered his orchard and sprayed it
with glyphosate, not only destroying his crop for that year but also
compromising his organic status for the next several years. “Obviously, this is not something I ever
wanted,” Ackerman-Leist quoted Wellenzohn as saying, “but I also realize that this
is the price sometimes you pay for activism.
It’s still worth it to me to have been this involved.”
The town pulled together to
support Wellenzohn, just as they had been supporting each other throughout the
rest of their fight to live a life free of pesticides. “I have the right not to be poisoned. It would seem normal, but it’s something we
need to fight for, not to be poisoned,” Dr. Unterpertinger says in a video from Friends of the Earth. “They say that Bertol Brect says ‘[he] who
fights may lose, but [he] who doesn’t fight [has] already lost.’ To say ‘Oh, well, there is nothing I can do,’
is unacceptable.”
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| Mals, photo from independentsciencenews.org |
Mals is a lesson for us all on
how education and collective community persistence can win against even the seemingly
unbeatable Goliath powers of commercialism and industry. When we consider the negative impact “Big Ag”
has in our own country, it can seem impossible that “we” can ever find success
in opposing their efforts to influence government and support their cause with
the power of the almighty dollar. Mals’
success story is one that many European groups, including the Pesticide Action
Network and Friends of the Earth, are trying to spread with the hope that this
story will be emulated in other communities, much to the delight of many of the
people of Mals. “I see it almost as a
gift, what happened here,” Martina Hellrigl says in the above video. “It’s a beautiful story and we hope this
beautiful story acts like a seed. I hope
Hollawint’s seed grows in other places also.”
Resources:
Philip Ackerman-Leist’s book, A Precautionary Tale:
chelseagreen.com/product/a-precautionary-tale
Lexicon Multimedia Project:
topplinggoliath.org
Friends of the Earth Video: http://protectandresist.video/pesticide-free-town
Other
sources: https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/a-precautionary-tale-how-one-small-town-banned-pesticides/
