VietNamNet Bridge - The sun was hot, but it was still foggy in the Me Linh flower village in Hanoi. The strong smell from the flower fields came from the pesticide the farmers had just sprayed.

Empty pesticide bottles were scattered on the ground. The water in the canal was black, from which a terrible smell pervaded the air.

Nguyen Thi Hoa, a farmer in Ha Loi hamlet of Me Linh commune, quickly stopped a reporter who tried to pick up a leaf on a rose. “Don’t touch it. The trees have been sprayed with pesticide,” she explained.

Hoa said she has been growing roses for the last 10 years, which gives an income high enough to feed the whole family. 

However, she complained that roses are easily infected with disease, and usually needed to be treated with pesticide.

Hoa has to spray pesticide once every 10 days. Many different kinds of pesticides are used. The chemicals alone cost her VND300,000 for every sao of land (one sao is equal to 360 square meters).

More chemicals will be needed on the days before Tet, the insect reproduction season. “I have to spray chemicals every day during that time,” she said.

“Pesticides are sold everywhere,” she said. 

She spends about VND50-60 million on pesticides every year. Every sao of roses needs about VND10 million worth of pesticide a year.

She puts the empty bottles anywhere she can. “Some people had an itch after spraying pesticide, but they later got used to the chemicals,” Hoa said.

The woman admitted that pesticides had caused pollution. However, she said she has to continue to grow flowers to earn a living.

The florists in Me Linh flower village have experience in “cooling’ roses under the scorching sun in summer. Nguyen Dinh Quang in Ha Loi hamlet, who has been growing roses for 20 years, said that watering roses will not help in sunny days, and that it would be better to cool roses with fungicides. 

Quang’s flowers need fungicides once every several days. 

The same way of using pesticide can be seen in the other flower villages in the north, from Tay Tuu to Song Phuong in Hanoi to Van Giang in Hung Yen province.

A report of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development showed that much of Vietnam’s agricultural land has become contaminated because of the abuse of pesticides and fertilizers, and the cost to revive it could be high.

In 2005, Vietnam imported 20,000 tons of the chemicals, but the figure soared to 50,000 tons in 2014. 

There are 20,000 pesticide sales agents and 97 pesticide processing factories which produce 40,000 tons of products a year.

Nong Nghiep