I read that it (neem oil)
>is biodegradable
>and has a short half-life: up to 4 days
>in water and 44 days in soil. The
>article that I shared above said that
>Indians use deoiled neem cake and
>neem leaves as a dual action soil
>fertilizer and pest control agent,
my response:
short half-life: up to 4 days in water” should read … at least 4 days in water. This is a huge semantic difference. The use of the words “up to” above could be used by chemical companies in order to deliberately encourage people to miss read it. Certainly not saying that they would :-) Why would anybody who truly cares deeply about the organic and permaculture lifestyle minimize the toxicity of anything?
All of the above means that in water _at best_ only half of the neem can degrade in 4 days. That itself is a really long time to be killing things. (I would bet that most of the toxicity studies are done in 24 hours or less. “scientists” working for the chemical industry don’t want to wait around 4 days for results). Think about the level of carbon monoxide you could survive in 24 hours and then being there for another 3 days — cough cough. Other studies suggest a neem oil half life _ in water_ up to 10 times longer. (All scientific degradation study results are given in half lives.)
We don’t even understand the conditions that give optimal breakdown. 4 days vs 50 days- what was the difference?
The toxicity of neem oil is something on the order of … 0.5 parts per _million_ can kill fish. A half life of 50 days vs 4 means a lot of dead fish. There are also many, many, aquatic organisms that are more sensitive to environmental toxins than fish but do the chemical companies use those more sensitive organisms to test the potential toxicity if neem gets into water? And many of those very sensitive organisms are the base of aquatic food chains. Absolutely brilliant to poison them.
The neem oil company representatives (wolves in sheep’s clothing) do not advertise that it may take as long as 50 days to break down!
_And what does it break down into!_ We actually may not want the breakdown products around There’s a lot of potential bio-activity there that we are completely unaware of. When neem leaves were fed to male albino rats for 11 weeks, 100% infertility resulted. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Other issues with this single paragraph are …
1) No one that I am aware of has done an experiment specifically showing whether or not neem oil is a phototoxin. (A photo toxin is a sun-light activated toxin) Reading between the lines there is ample evidence that it is just such a toxin. Not doing any kind of experiment to show that is or isn’t, is in my book, sheer stupidity.
Therefore, I am sure that all these experiments (especially the mammalian toxicity studies) have been carefully done in the presence of sunlight as opposed to room fluorescent lighting. :-\ to make sure any photo toxic effects would be identified. Yeah right :-(
2) The neem leaves that have been used as a soil conditioner _were deoiled_! Comparing them to something containing neem oil is at best irrelevant.
3) In my email there is no title or authors to the original article your friend mentions but the articles I have been able to gather are 90% written by the chemical industry and the companies that want to sell neem oil products. There have been several symposiums. The remaining 10% of the articles are probably written by people that have connection to the industry but it’s not clear :-)
The majority of the research articles are deliberately written so that the companies can say “studies have shown”. Many of these articles are written specifically to muddy the water and to downplay the toxic effects of neem oil. The “scientists” were financially supported by the companies. With friends like that who needs…. With information like this floating around it is almost impossible for people to really be informed. It’s a wonder we’re not poisoning the earth — oh wait, we are. :-0
4) Many European countries ban neem oil and anything containing the active ingredient. I am sure compounds in Europe are banned from being imported simply because they are harmless :-)
Further down in the original email it talks about bees and the fact that neem should not be toxic to them because insects have to ingest it. (extremely puzzled emoticon) I was debating putting in something stronger. …. like WTF! Guess nobody has ever watched a bee or a praying mantis or a ladybug clean itself. Argggggg. The take home point is that neem oil _may_ be a better alternative to some of the commercial pesticides but it is certainly not candy! And it may be worse in some cases than the best of the commercial pesticides. We just don’t know. And in some cases we can’t even believe the stories being spread around the organic/permaculture communities. We need to find a source of unbiased funding to investigate pesticides. We should all be minimizing our use of biocides and paying a lot of attention to who is making the money selling it.