David Miliband, the secretary of state, was nobbled on his way out of the loo.
Professor David Coggon, chairman of a government advisory committee, was
pinned down in a hotel bar. For those responsible for government policy on
pesticides there has been no escape in recent years from Georgina Downs.
Now aged 35, she has for much of her life been exposed to a horrific cocktail
of pesticides that was regularly sprayed on farmland beside her family home
in Chichester, West Sussex. The spraying started when she was 11 and
continues to this day - seven years on from when she first decided to devote
herself full-time to making the countryside safer for the people who live in
it.
Now, at last, she has reason to hope that she has made a difference. On Friday
Downs won a ground-breaking legal case that represents probably the most
significant setback for the agricultural chemicals industry in 50 years. The
judicial review found that the government had failed to protect people,
particularly rural residents, from exposure to pesticides. This judgment -
against the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) -
represents a significant breakthrough in a crusade that has already been
compared with earlier campaigns to prove the health dangers of tobacco and
asbestos.
Some farmers believe that the ruling may even lead to pesticides being banned
– and that crop yields will fall significantly as a result (although the
Soil Association says organic farming can actually produce greater yields).
Downs has now called on the government to ban spraying immediately near homes,
schools and other public areas. The government is expected to appeal but for
the moment she is enjoying her victory - the culmination of a campaign
fought with extraordinary determination, despite appalling health problems.
She doesn’t like to talk about them, preferring to emphasise the importance of
avoiding similar poisonings in future, but she has been in hospital for
severe muscle wasting, leg pain and other chronic symptoms. Her father
hinted darkly on the court steps that her health is worse than anyone
realises; doctors say she has the brittle bones more usually found in a
woman of 90.
For years the Downs family had no idea what was ailing her. Symptoms initially
included blisters inside her mouth and throat; in 1991 her legs gave way. “I
was absolutely devastated. I didn’t know what was going wrong. My body
completely failed me,” she tells me.
Then, one day, she happened to look out of a window and noticed that the
neighbouring farmer was spraying his crops. Wondering if this might be the
cause, she asked him to give her family notice before he sprayed in future,
but he typically gave only 10 minutes’ warning. (Bee-keepers, the judge
drily noted, get 48 hours.) In any case, the sheer number of times that he
sprayed his crops ruled out much chance of getting out of the way - last
year’s salad crop alone was sprayed 30 times in six months.
So she made a complaint to the Health and Safety Executive. But although
officials admitted privately that they wouldn’t like spraying to take place
near their own homes, they were unable to prevent it because the farmer was
acting within the law. The information distributed with pesticides urges
farmworkers to wear safety equipment; but anybody else nearby is not deemed
to be at risk.
At any rate, the only measure used to consider risk to anybody else was the
spuriously scientific “bystander risk assessment”. This assumes that
bystanders are exposed only briefly to one form of pesticide, just once.
On Friday the judge agreed that the “assessment” was inadequate and failed to
take account of the hundreds of thousands of people - maybe millions - who
live near fields that are routinely sprayed.
For what it’s worth, Downs emphasises that her campaign is not against
farmers. Indeed, many of the thousands who have contacted her are farmers’
wives and children who have been exposed to the lethal chemicals.
In 2001 she realised that the only solution was to change the regulations. She
had already given up her career in musical theatre because of ill health and
returned to live with her parents after a spell in London. She gave her
project a year - “That’s how naive I was,” she says. In the games room at
her parents’ home, the green baize of the full-size snooker table is still
covered by her paperwork.
As well as pursuing her legal case, she made a film showing a family of
mannequins - including a pregnant woman and a baby - sitting in the garden
as the adjacent field was sprayed, and another in which people living near
sprayed fields described their symptoms. The list of ailments was extensive;
indeed, Mr Justice Collins acknowledged that the film provided solid
evidence to back up Downs’s case.
She methodically set out to lobby the experts and politicians who could help
to change the regulations. Over the years she has seen four ministers and
several senior advisers at Defra as well as innumerable MEPs and two
European commissioners.
“When I first started attending conferences,” she says, “I made sure I stayed
in the same hotel as many of the government advisers. Once, I managed to
speak to the then chairman of the advisory committee on pesticides,
Professor David Coggon, for two hours in a hotel bar. This led to him
inviting me to make a crucial presentation to the committee, which was
covered by the Today programme and got me my first meeting with ministers.”
Since then Coggon has done less to help; in fact, she accuses him of being one
of those who are responsible for the poisoning of people like herself.
“Professor Coggon informed me that he only saw 15 minutes of my two-hour
film, the one the judge described as solid evidence, saying it was not a
good use of his time.”
Junior ministers were generally supportive of Downs’s campaign, but getting
policy changed required the support of the environment secretary. So she
approached David Miliband, now the foreign secretary. “He turned me down
twice in writing, so I went to a conference and got him coming out of the
loo. I told him my name and said he’d refused to meet me twice and I wanted
to know why.
“At first he looked confused but the third time I asked, he said, ‘Georgina,
if there was a reason to meet you, I would have met you’ - or words to that
effect. He was very arrogant.”
She had no greater success with Hilary Benn, the current secretary of state.
Despite her status as an outsider, a farming industry journal identified Downs
recently as one of the 20 most influential people in the country. Over the
years she has been given many awards. Dame Kelly Holmes, presenting one,
described her as a British Erin Brockovich -– the self-taught American
campaigner whose legal victory over polluters was made into a film starring
Julia Roberts.
Even Downs’s family and friends must sometimes find her determination
daunting. At the bottom of her press releases she writes: “The only contact
for inquiries about this case is Georgina Downs.” Nor will she allow her
father to answer questions on her behalf. If this smacks of control
freakery, it’s easy to forgive. In her pursuit for justice she has given up
her career and social life. Her friends call her “the Pesticide Nun” because
she’s always cloistered - in summer, literally so: when the farmer is
spraying, she and her father wear full protective gear just to cross the
garden.
“But my friends have been great. They still call me and ask if I want to go
out - and I still say no,” she says. There is no boyfriend in her life -
“With all the work I’m doing, I don’t have a lot of time to look.” She did
have a long-term relationship back in 1991, but then she fell ill.
“The other person didn’t want to hang around and quite rightly because he was
only 18. I could hardly walk and the poor chap didn’t know what to do. If
you make a checklist of what a man is looking for in a woman, it isn’t
someone with chronic health problems running a big campaign against the
government.”
Naturally, though, there have been moments when she has been tempted to give
up her battle: “But then I’d look at the work that’s been involved and know
that it would be a waste of all that time and effort if I gave up now. The
other crucial thing that drives me on is knowing that I’m right. I don’t say
that in an arrogant way. The evidence is really quite clear that the
government has knowingly failed to act, has continued to shift the
goalposts, cherry-picked the science to suit the desired outcome and misled
the public.
“So I’ll continue to fight until the government starts to make the protection
of public health the number one priority, instead of protecting industry
interests.”
