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A legal battle between banana farmers and environmentalists reached
the Supreme Court on Friday with a petition to ground crop dusters
blamed for health problems and ecological damage.
The High court was asked to uphold a March 2007
ordinance banning aerial fungicide spraying on banana plantations
around Davao, a major city of 1.2 million on Mindanao, court
officials said.
The court made no immediate comment on the
petition filed by a group of Davao residents.
The group claimed that the spraying had led to
various health problems and poisoned the water table in areas
adjoining the plantations of Lapanday Agricultural Development Corp.
and other contract growers for multinationals Dole and Del Monte.
The Philippines is the largest banana exporter
in Asia. The industry is centered in Mindanao, which is free from
the seasonal typhoons that annually bring death and destruction
across the rest of the Southeast Asian islands.
Last year, the Philippine Banana Growers and
Exporters Association Inc. sought for a writ to stop the city
government enforcing the crop duster ban, but a lower court in Davao
upheld the ordinance in September 2007.
The Court of Appeals reversed the lower
court’s ruling last January, and the banana growers resumed aerial
spraying.
“The ordinance enjoys the presumption of
legality. Hence, its continued enforcement cannot and should not be
stopped by [a court] injunction,” the Supreme Court petition read.
The appellate court ruling is causing
“continued, irreversible harm to the health of the people and the
environment,” the petitioners’ lawyer Arnold de Vera alleged.
-- AFP
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