“I barely sleep four hours”: pesticides that make you lose sleep

Narayan Gaikwad is 79 years old and hails from Jambhali, a village in the state of Maharashtra, India.

For 25 years, he sprayed pesticides without gloves or a mask, until a doctor advised him to stop. While they left him with brittle, pitted nails, the pesticides also robbed him of sleep.

According to the British magazine Chemistry World , several studies explain how the application of chemical inputs prevents farmers from sleeping at night.

Just to scare us a little, let's start with some figures.

“Since 1990, pesticide use worldwide has doubled, reaching 3.7 million tonnes in 2022,” recalls Chemistry World .

And according to the International Labour Organization, “globally, 873 million people working in agriculture are exposed to health risks from pesticides and other agrochemicals.”

More and more studies around the world are revealing the very strong links between exposure to pesticides and poor quality sleep.

“Sometimes I get pesticides in my eyes and nose. And that causes me a lot of trouble, but

you end up getting used to it.”

Sudhakar Tasgave, 55, a farm worker in India, told the British monthly Chemistry World

Of course, the problem extends far beyond India's borders.

For example, last year, a study of 27,000 farmers in Thailand “found that increased and prolonged pesticide exposure was associated with a higher risk of sleep disturbances, demonstrating a dose-response relationship for 19 commonly used pesticides.”

The same observation was made in Uganda, according to a study conducted on 253 farmers.

Because some pesticides are endocrine disruptors, they often affect the sleep hormone melatonin and the stress hormone cortisol, which regulate the sleep-wake cycle, says Chudchawal Juntarawijit, lead author of the Thailand study and an expert on pesticide toxicity at Naresuan University in Thailand.

Sudhakar Tasgave is 55 years old and says he has spent more than 20 years spraying pesticides.

“No one in the village had to spray as much as I did. I used every pesticide available on the market,” he says. He even calls himself a “walking encyclopedia of inputs.”

As he is one of the only farmers who agrees to spray, we can say that he is not idle.

On average, he spends 25 days a month, seven hours a day, spraying pesticides. All without any protection, and for only around 8 euros a day.

Consequence (among others): “I barely sleep four hours a night,” he regrets.

“Some have such a strong smell that it takes me several days

to get rid of it.”

Sudhakar Tasgave, 55, a farm worker in India, told the British monthly Chemistry World

Sleep is, of course, only a very (very) small part of the problem.

In 2023, research by North American academics published in the scientific journal Pnas , of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, already spoke about it.

She suggested a correlation between the use of these chemicals in soybean fields and “child deaths from leukemia” in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado regions.

After a summer marked by fierce opposition to the Duplomb law, the French state was condemned on September 3 by the Paris administrative court of appeal for the massive contamination of ecosystems with pesticides... Enough to (definitively) lose sleep.