Kwintsheul growing firm fined €50,000 for banned pesticide

The district court in The Hague has fined a growing firm in Kwintsheul €50,000 for using the banned pesticide dichloorvos and discharging it into surface water. The owner was given 60 hours of community service. The court ruled on Friday.

The discharge exceeded the permitted maximum 6,000 times, the Public Prosecution Service said. Dichloorvos is toxic and is considered possibly carcinogenic to humans. The water authority, the Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland, detected the contamination.

The court also ordered €16,000 to be confiscated, the amount saved by discharging illegally. It followed the prosecution's demand and found the pesticide was used deliberately.

The prosecutor told the court the pesticide was used three times. "If it happens once, you can still speak of an impulse," the prosecutor said. Using it repeatedly to make the treatment work, the prosecutor argued, shows deliberate action.

The court sees deliberate discharge of toxic substances into surface water as a serious offence, and the sentence is also meant to send a signal to other growers. The prosecutor said: "Growers who use banned substances, discharge them illegally and think they will at most pay an administrative fine: they will be next."

Water board member Stijn van Boxmeer called such discharges "very worrying" when they came to light, "especially because it is a toxic pesticide that has been banned for years".