A film screening organised by the Geneva Environment Network has portrayed the effects of aerial spraying of a dangerous pesticide on cashew plantations in Kerala, India.

‘Birds with large wings’, directed by Bijukumar Damodaran and produced by Anantha Krishna Pillai, provides a partially-fictional account of the effects of the highly toxic endosulfan pesticide on people and the environment.

Babies are known to have been born with defects while water, fauna and flora that turned toxic continue to affect human health today in Kerala despite the spraying having stopped twenty years ago.

In 2011, the Conference of Parties of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants recommended the phase-out of endosulfan.

Muralee Thummarukudy – who is from Kerala and is Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction at UNEP - introduced the screening, which took place on 10 November in Geneva’s International Environment House.

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