FMC’s Ban of Furadan In Kenya: Good Judgement or Just PR?

Something interesting happened last week. On Sunday 29 March 2009, CBS News aired a documentary on 60 Minutes showing how lions were dying in the Masai Mara ecosystem due to Furadan poisoning. Almost immediately after that the American manufacturer of the potent agricultural pesticide, FMC, issued a press release declaring that they had withdrawn it from Kenya and other African countries. They even called the WildlifeDirect chairman, Dr Richard Leakey to tell him of their action.

Furadan as it is sold in Kenya

WildlifeDirect has been running a campaign against the sale of Furadan in  Kenya through the Stop Wildlife Poisoning blog because of its rampant abuse by herders and farmers to poison wildlife. Kenyan authorities have largely ignored this campaign. FMC, and Juanco – the products importers in Kenya – have not been very responsive either.

A lion goes through the stages of paralysis after consuming a carcase laced with Furadan in Masai Mara, Kenya

Furadan is a highly effective agricultural pesticide but a very nasty poison for mammals and birds. It has been responsible for the death of large numbers of birds in the USA where its granular form is banned (it also comes in flowable or liquid form). In Kenya, it has been used to kill birds thought to be crop pests and for human food! It is also being used to kill lions, hyenas and other predators that are, or are percieved to be, preying on livestock.

The question is, did FMC ban exportation of this lethal poison because they are suddenly pious or they are just playing PR? My hypothesis is that FMC, having realized that Furadan has suddenly been identified as a poison of choice for herders, and this happened in popular American media, FMC took the obvious route: damage control. They don’t want to look bad. Why did they have to wait until the 60 Minutes for them to do something about this major problem in Africa? It is hard to believe that they did not know about the problem. If that is so, then they need to fire their entire PR team.

This is just an hypothesis and should not be read to mean that I dont support their action. If it works, then it will indeed have a phenomenal positive effect on lion population in Kenya and elsewhere.

I say if it works for this reason: when I updated my followers on Twitter on this turn of events, recycleme replied ‘what about the surrounding countries? Is it likely to get into Kenya from the countries still using it?’. I got worried.

We hope that FMC are serious about their pronouncement and they will follow it through. That they will also seal the loopholes spotted by recycleme and others.

This and that…

Last week a new guy came to work for WildlifeDirect (where I also work). He’s on internship and naturally – being young and all – he’s much more well versed with social networking stuff than I am. He mentioned stuff like Twitter and how to join groups on del.icio.us. By the way the guy’s name is Victor Ngeny.

Now its my business to let everyone know what’s going on at WildlifeDirect and so I should digg, twitt, stumbleupon and all that cool stuff, until millions of folk come to our site to read the blogs. Yeah, our site is all about blogs by folk who are busy saving wildlife and the environment. You must put it in the list of sites you have to visit before you die.

Anyway Victor mentioned twitter and it has being going around my head disturbing the status quo. So I had to check it out. I used some keywords to search the twitts and you wouldnt believe what I found (ok, there was a lot of stuff that Victor has been posting but that’s not what made my visit worthwhile. Some person (don’t know the gender) had posted that, famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, will speak at the UALR University Theatre at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 8 as part of the Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lecture Series. It’s free and open to the public. The amusing part is that Dr Leakey sits just across from where I sit at our office in Nairobi and I have no clue that he was going to UALR. That’s in Arkansas, US. Dr Leakey is Chairman of WildlifeDirect

Anyway my friend Paula (who also happens to be my boss) went off to New York where she’ll be engaged in lots of stuff promoting their book and meeting folk. I hope she brings back good stuff from NY.

Today I also met with Joe Mucheru at Google Kenya (read about the news of his appointment at White African’s blog). He is supposed to teach me how to use Google Adwords to maximise traffic to our site. WildlifeDirect.org gets a Google Grant for advertising using Adwords, and am supposed to take care of that too.

Google offices are cool. The atmosphere is so relaxed and hip you can actually live there.  Perhaps that’s the plan: for guys not to be in a hurry to leave the office so they can put in more hours on the job. They even have a snack place where you just go in pick up apples, bananas, soft drinks, muffins, sausage or whatever and much away. That was my favourite room – man I can live there! (I have friends who’d reserve a table if they had a minibar with folk like Count Pushkin, Jack Daniels and Johny Walker in the guest list)

Joe himself is one of the nicest people this side of the pond. Cool guy, unasuming, maintains eye contact and very helpful. I want to go back to Google Kenya again…for the snacks, mostly…but also for Joe to teach me the tricks that made him an icon in East Africa’s internet arena. I am told he created Wananchi Online back in ‘99.

I still dont have my business cards so I gave Joe a WildlifeDirect brochure…Hey, I should upload that brochure on our site!