Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret. (New and Noteworthy).

Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret, by Duff Wilson (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). "Who in the world would think to look for toxic waste in plant food?" writes investigative journalist Duff Wilson in the prologue of Fateful Harvest. Based on an expose series that Wilson wrote for the Seattle Times, the book is an eye-opening account of how citizens in a farming community in Washington state found out that hazardous industrial wastes are being put into fertilizers. In the small town of Quincy, Mayor Patty Martin watched some farmers' fields become unproductive, horses die after eating contaminated hay, and cases of cancer and chronic lung problems increase, galvanizing her to lead a small group of farmers in a fight with local business interests to discover the truth about what farmers were putting on their fields. They found heavy metals including lead, chromium, and cadmium in their fertilizers and, more alarmingly, discovered that this was legal. In the name of "recycling," industries were paying fertilizer companies to take their hazardous wastes, thereby avoiding the high cost of disposing of these wastes in special dangerous-waste landfills. Fertilizer companies then made the wastes into "products" and advertised the fertilizing ingredients such as phosphorus and zinc without listing the toxic ingredients.

Wilson chronicles Quincy Mayor Martin's path to awareness and to activism, as well as her confrontations with the town's moneyed interests and complacent government officials. Martin's efforts, as well as Wilson's journalism, have led to some state-level regulation of fertilizers and have increased consumer awareness of the issue. But on a national level, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency maintains that increased regulation is not necessary because there is no proof that recycled fertilizers have negative effects on health--despite the fact that studies have shown that plants absorb toxics from the soil, and that traces of cadmium in particular have been found in wheat flour and other foods. And although there is greater regulation of fertilizers in Canada and Europe than in the United States, U.N. regulations on waste-to-fertilizer exports from wealthy countries to developing countries are easily subverted. Evidently, the risk of harm from toxic fertilizer is not just a local problem for Quincy, but i s a widespread problem around the world.