Reading Test 26
The Pesticide-Free Village
Paragraph 1
About 20 years ago, a handful of families migrated from the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, south-east India, into Punnukula, a community of around 900 people farming plots of between two and ten acres. The outsiders from Guntur brought new ideas and promised bigger profits. They attracted resident farmers by promising to bring in more hard cash than the mixed cropping that had been practiced for decades. The farmers decided to engage in cotton farming, which could bring high yields and be sold for cash, unlike millet and maize.
But growing cotton meant using pesticides and fertilisers — until then a mystery to the mostly illiterate farmers of the community.
Local agro-chemical dealers eagerly filled the need for information and supplies. These middlemen sold commercial seeds, fertilisers and insecticides on credit, and guaranteed purchase of the crop. They offered technical advice recommended by the companies that supplied their products. The farmers depended on the dealers. If they wanted to grow cotton, they had no choice.
A quick ‘high’ of booming yields and incomes hooked growers during the early years of cotton in the region. Outlay on insecticides was fairly low because cotton pests hadn’t moved in yet. Many farmers were so impressed with the chemicals that they started using them on their other crops as well. The immediate payoffs from chemically dependent monoculture began to obscure the fact that the black dirt fields had gone into a freefall of environmental degradation, dragged down by a chain of cause and effect.
Soon cotton-eaters, such as bollworms and aphids, plagued the fields. Repeated spraying killed off the most susceptible pests and left the strongest to reproduce and pass on their chemical resistance to their harder-ier offspring. As the bugs grew tough and more abundant, farmers applied a greater variety and quantity of poisons, something mixing ‘cocktails’ of as many as ten insecticides. At the same time, cotton was gobbling up the nutrients in the soil, leaving the growers no option but to invest in chemical fertilisers.
By the time some farmers tried to break free of their chemical dependence, insecticides had already decimated the birds, wasps, beetles, and other predators that had once provided natural control of crop pests. Without their balancing presence, pests ran riot if insecticide use was cut back. As outlays for fertilisers and insecticides escalated, the cost of producing cotton mounted. Eventually, the expense of chemical inputs outgrew the cash value of the crop, and farmers fell further and further into debt and poverty.
Their vicious cycle was only broken by the willingness of a prominent village elder to experiment with something different. He had been among the first villagers to grow cotton, and he would be the first to try it without chemicals, as set out by a programme in Non-Pesticide Management (NPM). This had been devised for Punnukula with the help of a Non-Governmental Organisation called SECURE that had become aware of the hardships caused by pesticide use.
Neem oil, extracted from the neem tree, a fast-growing, broad-leaved evergreen tree related to mahogany. Neem protects itself against insects by producing a multitude of natural substances that have evolved specifically to deter plant-eating insects. Thus, they are harmless to humans and other animals, including birds and most beneficial insects. Neem has been used for centuries in India and Burma, where it has been served for centuries to control pests.
NPM also makes use of traps made from sticks covered with castor oil into which insects get stuck and die. Crushed custard apple seeds ground into a powder, fermented buttermilk, garlic and chillies, and cow urine are used to repel insects. Farmers also improve soil fertility by adding compost and growing legumes in rotation with cotton. They also plough the soil at least once every 10 days. Neem cake — an oilseed residue — is more effective and longer lasting than chemical insecticide, and costs only a tenth as much.
Quick, short-term gains had once pushed Punnukula into chemical fertiliser-dependent agriculture. Now they found that similar immediate rewards were helping to speed change in the opposite direction: the harvest of the next 20 NPM farmers was as good as the harvest of farmers using insecticides, and they came out ahead because they weren’t buying insecticides. Instead of investing scarce cash in chemicals, they invested time and labour in NPM practices.
By the end of 2000, all the farmers in Punnukula village were using NPM rather than chemicals for cotton, and they began to use it on other crops as well. The wasp was using it. The status and economic opportunities of women improved — neem change gathered momentum as NPM became even more effective once women became a source of income for some of them, as they gathered seeds from the surrounding area to sell for NPM in other villages. The improved situation meant that families could afford to put more land under cultivation.
In 2004, the panchayat (village government) formally declared Punnukula to be a pesticide-free village. And they have big plans for the future, such as water purification. The village now serves as a model for disseminating NPM to other communities, with around 2,000 farmers visiting each year.
What began as a few farmers desperate to find a way to farm without poisons has become a movement with the potential to pull an entire region back from ecological disaster.
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New filter promises clean water for millions
A
An ingenious invention is set to bring clean water to the third world, and while the science may be cutting edge, the materials are extremely old and down-to-earth. A handful of clay, yesterday’s coffee grounds, coffee grinds or even cow manure are the ingredients that could bring clean, safe drinking water to much of the third world.
B
The simple new technology, developed by ANU materials scientist Mr. Tony Flynn, allows water filters to be made from commonly available materials and fired using cow manure as the source of heat, without the need for a kiln. The filters have been tested and shown to remove common pathogens (disease-producing organisms) including E. coli. Unlike other water filtering devices, the filters are simple and inexpensive to make. They are very simple to explain and demonstrate and can be made by anyone, anywhere,” says Mr. Flynn. “They don’t require any western technology. All you need is terracotta clay, a compliant cow and a match.”
C
The production of the filters is extremely simple. Take a handful of dry, crushed clay, mix it with a handful of organic material, such as used tea leaves, coffee grounds or rice hulls, add enough water to make a stiff biscuit-like mixture and form a cylindrical pot that has one closed end, then dry it in the sun. According to Mr. Flynn, used coffee grounds have given the best results to date.
Next, surround the pots with straw; put them in a mound of cow manure, light the straw and then top up the burning manure as required. In less than 60 minutes the filters are finished. The walls of the finished pot should be about as thick as an adult’s index finger. The properties of cow manure are vital, as the fuel can reach a temperature of 700 degrees in half an hour, and will be up to 950 degrees after another 20 to 30 minutes. The manure makes a good fuel because it is very high in organic material that burns readily and quickly; the manure has to be dry and is best used exactly as found in the field, and there is no need to break it up or process it further.
D
“A potter’s kiln is an expensive item and can take up to four or five hours to get up to 800 degrees. It needs expensive or scarce fuel, such as gas or wood to heat it, and experience to run it. With no technology, no insulation and nothing other than a pile of cow manure and a match, none of these restrictions apply,” Mr. Flynn says.
E
It is also helpful that, like terracotta clay and organic material, cow dung is widely available in the developing world. “A cow is a natural fuel factory. My understanding is that cow dung as a fuel would be pretty much the same wherever you would find it.”
The use of organic material as the fuel for domestic fires in most parts of the developing world is something that potters have known about for years, and according to the ceramics lecturer in the ANU School of Art, Mr. Flynn made full use of that. The difference is that rather than viewing the porous nature of the material as a problem — after all, not many people want a pot that won’t hold water — his filters capitalise on this property.
F
Other commercial ceramic filters do exist, but even if available, with prices starting at US$5 each, they are often outside the budgets of most people in the developing world. The filtration process is simple but effective. The basic principle is that there are passages through the filter that are wide enough for water droplets to pass through, but too narrow for pathogens. Tests with the deadly E-coli bacterium have seen the filters remove 96.4 to 99.8 percent of the pathogen — well within safe levels. Using only one filter it takes two hours to filter a litre of water.
The use of organic material, which burns away after firing, helps produce the structure in which pathogens will become trapped. It overcomes the potential problems of finer clays that may let water through and also means that cracks are soon halted. And like clay and cow dung, it is universally available.
G
The invention was born out of a World Vision project involving the Manatuto community in East Timor. The charity wanted to help set up a small industry manufacturing water filters, but initial research found the local clay to be too fine — a problem solved by the addition of organic material. While the AF problems of producing a working ceramic filter in East Timor were overcome, the solution was kiln-based and particular to that community’s materials and couldn’t be applied elsewhere.
Manure firing, with no requirement for a kiln, has made this zero-technology approach available anywhere it is needed. With all the components being widely available, Mr. Flynn says there is no reason the technology couldn’t be applied throughout the developing world, and with no plans to patent his idea, there will be no legal obstacles to it being adopted in any community that needs it. “Everyone has a right to clean water; these filters have the potential to enable anyone in the world to drink water safely,” says Mr. Flynn.
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The Cause of Linguistic Change
A
The changes that have caused the most disagreement are those in pronunciation. We have various sources of evidence for the pronunciations of earlier times, such as the spellings, the treatment of words borrowed from other languages or borrowed into them, the descriptions of contemporary grammarians and spelling-reformers, and the modern pronunciations in all the languages and dialects concerned. From the middle of the sixteenth century, there are in England writers who attempt to describe the position of the speech-organs for the production of English phonemes, and who invent what are in effect systems of phonetic symbols. These various kinds of evidence, combined with a knowledge of the mechanisms of speech-production, can often give us a very good idea of the pronunciation of an earlier age, though absolute certainty is never possible.
B
When we study the pronunciation of a language over any period of a few generations or more, we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: for example, over a certain period of time, just about all the long /a:/ vowels in a language may change into long /e:/ vowels, or all the /b/ consonants in a certain position (for example at the end of a word) may change into /p/ consonants. Such regular changes are often called sound laws. There are no universal sound laws, and though such laws often reflect universal tendencies, they simplify particular sound laws for one given language (or dialect) at one given period.
C
It is also possible that fashion plays a part in the process of change. It certainly plays a part in the speech of change: one person imitates another, and people with the most prestige are most likely to be imitated, so that a change that takes place in one social group may be imitated (more or less accurately) by speakers in another group. When a social group goes up or down in the world, its pronunciation of Russian, which had formerly been considered desirable, became, on the contrary, an undesirable kind of accent to have, so that people tried to disguise it. Some of the changes in accepted English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seem to have been those of one social group imitating the pronunciation of another style already existing, and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the social changes of the period: the increased power and wealth of the middle classes, and their steady infiltration upwards into the ranks of the landed gentry, probably carried elements of middle-class pronunciation into upper-class speech.
D
A less specific variant of the argument is that the imitation of children is imperfect. They copy their parents’ speech, but never reproduce it exactly. This is certainly true, but we are not sure that such deviations from adult speech are usually corrected in later childhood.
Perhaps it is more significant that even adults show a certain amount of random variation in their pronunciation of a given phoneme, even if the phonetic context is unchanged; and that there is sometimes systematic action in the failures of imitation: it is not very hard to imagine how two random deviations they will cancel one another out and there will be no net change in the language.
E
One such force which is often invoked is the principle of ease, or minimisation of effort. The change from fussy to fuzzy would be an example of assimilation, which is a very common kind of change. Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one. For example, the word scant was once skamt, but the /m/ has been changed to /n/ under the influence of the following /t/. Greater efficiency has thereby been achieved, because /n/ and /t/ are articulated in the same place (with the tip of the tongue against the teeth-ridge), whereas /m/ is articulated elsewhere (with the two lips). So the place of articulation of the nasal consonant has been changed to conform with that of the following plosive. A more recent example of the same kind of thing is the common pronunciation of football as footbal.
F
Assimilation is not the only way in which we change our pronunciation in order to increase efficiency. It is very common for consonants to be lost at the end of a word: in Middle English, word-final /-n/ was often lost in unstressed syllables, so that baken to bake changed from [/ba:kən/] to [/ba:k3:], and later to [/ba:k/]. Consonant-clusters are often simplified. At one time there was a /t/ in words like castle and Christmas, and an initial /k/ in words like knight and know. Sometimes a whole syllable is dropped when two successive syllables begin with the same consonant (haplology): a recent example is temporary, which in Britain is often pronounced as if it were tempry
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